He was one year married before he had to admit what had been breathless blank and collapsing true from their first night together: he had been so very wrong about why he had to marry as he did, where he did, the first time. In 1929 Sam had thought it was the birth-village. A boy’s idea. He had been thirty and he had gone home to triumph with a boy’s idea. Now forty-six, he had lived this past year, the whole of 1945, at the Grand Oriental. On their second night in the hotel she’d told him that so long as they remained there, they remained in honeymoon, and then she pressed her heat and cradle bone again against him lying there breathless blank and collapsed, and eyes closed murmuring Sam had agreed. And this past year he had daily worked and waited for it, had nightly sought in curtained darkness, was discovered, was each and every time gloriously defeated by what he now knew was the world’s true first best where. Which was his now, which had made the rest of what Sam Kandy had and did and went after mere adjunct to its ongoing possession.
Ivory laughed at his wonder noises afterwards, when he lay beside her like a starfish and she was propped up on her elbows, her back pressed against a dark wooden headboard shaped like a great headless bird ascending. She liked to remind him that he had been married before and had a daughter and so obviously must have had some idea, no? Her face never showing any colour no matter how thrashing things had been moments before, she would make him tell again of his one night with Alice. She never tired of it. Yes she had her Mills & Boon books but she liked the Alice story more. She liked how she could make him show her their wedding night, how Sam and the first wife had lain like boards beside each other in the honeymoon bed and how, after some time had passed, one board had turned over onto the other and waited there, then slipped off.
Never once were things the other way. Never once did Sam ask how from the very first she could do it all so well, the guiding, the commanding, the soothing. These were, among other things, taken as given. Those other things: her name, her family, her birth-village. How she came to work for the British at Peradeniya if not how she left. Why she had asked that the wedding-white canopy be removed from the bed when the boys came in to turn down the sheets that first night, why she never wanted to see the hooked-nose couples dancing in the ballroom after dinner, and why always first the chamberpot. She only liked to tell of how she had had to come to Colombo. There had been confusion at the rail platform in Kandy town, about her papers. She was supposed to have travelled to Colombo in the car reserved for office natives in His Majesty’s employ but was sent in error to a fully native car. Only then did her face flush and her brow break, propped up beside him in the bed and telling of having to sit so close to so much village life for so many hours, the open windows blowing bugs and hot country into the still air that was itself bloated from all those packets of home cooking, and from the crying babies and sleepy children asking for more sweets, the humid woodsmell of their handicrafts and their garden spices to sell in the city without need of any crooked nephew go-betweens, and also with incense, foot sweat, cooking oil and coconut oil, underneath which was the rust and blah of coughing old men. She parroted how the woman seated beside her had complained through hours of her husband’s sleeping that Ivory was so thin the first time she turned a corner in the city she would vanish without so much as a letter home, just as her own daughter had vanished, which was why she and her husband, who coughed rust at his mention, were now going to Colombo. The woman insisted on sharing her food because Ivory seemed to have brought nothing and then she leaned over and actually fed her from the bright wet mess of rice and curry opened on her lap. This Ivory had to show him, every time. Her long fingers pulsing air, she shoved and shoved a mouthful of nothing down Sam’s mouth, the motion shocking and jerky and when every time he turned his face to the side her fingers followed, reaching into his mouth like some fat dancing spider. Her cat-green eyes wide with both achieved and expected outrage, she needed him to turn away, to resist just as she had, just as anyone would, and yet the old woman had persisted in trying to feed her, which was why there had been that yellow stain on Ivory’s dress the first day she had come to the office. A clump of jak fruit curry slipped from her fingers and both had looked down and the husband leaned over and inspected and only then did the woman stop and turn away and speak not one word more the rest of the journey, as if only then did she realize that Ivory was wearing a dress no village daughter could wear, that Ivory was riding in a car never meant for her. She told him she would never forget that train. She seemed to have no memory of herself otherwise.
But she could be gluttonous for his.
When she wanted it, she would sidle down from her elbows and reach for him with her legs, play him slowly with a foot. Ask him to tell. And so was rubbed away Sam’s resolve that he would have only a forward life. For once, when asked, Sam told truly of his past. Of course never of his crow’s past and temple squirrel past and not much about Alice save bed boards and never once, not so much as a breath about George, but he told her some nights of B. and B.’s stories and of the butterfly-stall if not of B.’s mutton or the Malay girl with the raven hair. He told her Ismail’s stories and of the elephant hold to Sydney, its sweet black pungency, and of ball throwing about the harbour and of his shining silver Astrobe life high above the city. He told of Pocket Ma and of pig-trading for Hindu workmen in Singapore and of returning to do the same and more in Colombo but never of Dambulla and whenever she wanted to hear of it— either she intently did or seething did not—he told of Sudugama’s two-faced ways and of Curzon’s, about which they often laughed together, triumphantly, and he told of Mountbatten and one night showed her the cigar and she smoked it like a fat customs agent and Sam knew this was not her first. Eventually, he even told her about the Ethiopians who for the past year had been kept by Arthur in Sudugama, hidden in the village founder’s cave in the high grass hills behind the walauwa, though she refused to believe her wedding day had gone off with cannibal savages so close behind her bridal train and she liked to declare they would be at home in that bloody old house and village and Sam had agreed because touching her hip he was ready and this was noted and then she gave him whatever sweet or cold and tough fried pastry was nearest and sent him from the bed to the chamberpot and when he returned and was ready she would make him tell one more thing, of his one night with Alice, show again how they had lain like boards and there, holding his breath, Sam waited without moving until she moved, until Ivory rolled on and began another sweet hammering rush to oblivion.
He got fat. She encouraged him to sweets and rich meats when they went to breakfast and to dinner downstairs—kidneys on toast, meat kedgeree, mutton with beans; battered mutton in a brown sauce, frikkadels, piquant steak, and on Fridays fried fish in Sauce Robert, all of which she ordered for him. After meals Sam ate meringues and trifles and pastry horns filled with whipped cream and jams, platefuls of fondant creams as if he was some Circuit-working Englishman’s bored sow wife. He was certain the waiters must have joked about it in the kitchen. But where were they in the middle of the night? Herself, she only took tea, or tea with a breakfastcup of egg and milk soup in the morning; in the evening it was more soup, sometimes a plain omelette, and once a week she asked for Angels on Horseback: she would eat all twelve oysters and always need more slices of lime and she would leave the briny fried bread for him.
Midday in the city, ravenous as he had never been before, Sam began to queue at roadside stalls near the harbour, or in the backstreets of Fort, waiting in his suit for packets of rice and curry behind beedi-smoking carters and tar-black dockworkers and rail-thin village boys themselves trying to stand around like city men while, as he knew well, they were secret hopeful that this latest food-stall might sell something that tasted anything of home. Sam obviously did not join the eating rows in the shade but he could not be seen ordering a lunch boy to bring such a packet into Prince’s Building or even to his harbour office. And so he had to take his common rice and curry in open air while trying to keep it to himself, like a dog frantic at finding a pile of hot good fortune in the street. He ate crouched down and turned in, facing whatever sudden free space he could find in the midday heat of the weekday city, whether against the cracked wall of an English church or in the phantom entryway of a building half-built or half-demolished or in the fickle shade of the broken mossy seawalls and bird-marked monuments of Ceylon’s old gone conquerors.
As requested, he brought sweet fritters and fried combs and short-eats to the hotel in the afternoons. The phonograph would be playing fast blaring American music and she would take the food out of its oily vellum packets and arrange it all on a plate spirited from downstairs, dipping her finger in the fritter syrup or nibbling off the ridge of a fish patty while he closed the curtains and took off his jacket and shirt and hung them in the almirah without ever looking in. When he turned around in trouser and banyan she would present the cold shining crud and he would stand there silently in the middle of their room, eating until he could eat no more, breathing loudly with the effort, his forehead beaded with sweat, and when he was finished he went to the chamberpot and then washed his hands and face and neck and returned to her naked save an abused facecloth. And then they could begin.
She said she liked it, the new roundness of his belly. She would inspect it some nights, pat it and say she felt like a king building a private little temple on his body, her lush grounds. He tried to turn over or say otherwise; he could have taken her wrist and bent it back, snapped it off even and then slapped her smiling blaspheming mouth with her own hand for making of his own body a sacrilege she could never know. But she would keep patting, looking and waiting for him to do whatever it was he wanted to do, saying nothing but the way she looked at him, breathing fast as he began to breathe fast she was daring him to see what he could do, wanted to do, if he could do it. But then she would look down, past her stupa, and smile with victory and rolling on whisper all that remained now was to find the jewel for the spire.
Sam would have made of their room world enough, world enough would have been their bed, or whatever part of it was in use when they were joined, but every month came a bill, and even though she never left the hotel she liked the seamstress to come from Pettah every few weeks with good bolts and needle and thread. Meanwhile, Sam was using the Pettah stall again. Now, October 1945, the world was still needful but in reverse. The war against Japan had suddenly finished. Around the harbour, two months after the August bombs, he heard men, local men, still speaking of what had happened, their opinions, sympathies, pride diverging. Sam liked the British response more than all this betel talk: now was no time to worry over what had happened. Now was time to move on to what was next: offices to shut and so much to rubbish—tropic-ruined desks and paper and books, cabinets, lamps and chairs, potted meats and untouched jars of Christmas-sent jam.
Meanwhile, these same Englishmen became needful and sudden lovers of true Ceylon notions, for their wives and mothers and mantelpieces. And so, through Sam, British wants and discards met Pettah goods and wants. First, he set up an operation in the seamstress’s stall for fences and buying agents sent to Pettah by native planters and businessmen mad for northern wood and banker’s lamps, heavy desk blotters, music cabinets, Walter Scotts in indigo marbled hardback, country church prints and solemn hunting scenes to hang upon their huna-studded walls. Next, Sam sent word through Pettah and Pettah sent word everywhere: the war British were leaving and did not want to leave empty-handed. An ironworking shop near the quartermaster’s warehouse was cleared out. The lower ranks of the departing English went in for handiwork from the village: devil masks and palm-sized charms that carried pithy biographies of warding off and healing powers, brass ashtrays shaped like coiled cobra tails or held up by trumpeting elephants, cuff-link and earring dishes carried by faceless coolie stickmen or contemplative primates, weak gold chains dangling semi-precious stones for girls to win back, pillboxes made of buffalo horn for wives taking unmentionable medicines. Behind an arched doorway was an anteroom for the officer class. Crate-bottom boards displayed heavy, ornate suriyas dangling from bronze chains that had once dangled from noble necks; boar and leopard pelts awaited unchallengeable stories of their provenance; in a far corner, under sheets sat a stone lion head and cracked free moonstones and assorted segments of stone frieze brought to Colombo from the ruins of the old interior kingdoms, all ideal for English gardens.
A note came from the village once every two months, and Sam would take a taste from his operation and send it there. He never went once to Sudugama himself in the first year of his second marriage. He only sent his driver Joseph with bootloads of canned food, foreign cigarettes, and war-orphaned northern wood and shine, and also with instructions to tour around the old coughing Ralahami as he pleased for one full day before returning. All was sent in answer: to formal word of Arthur’s engagement, and then of Arthur’s marriage, and, seven months later, to word of a new baby. With that third shipment he also sent some leftover tatters from Ivory’s dressmaking, as a welcome to the walauwa’s new servant girl, Pathy. After thirty-seven years Latha had left the walauwa, laughing wildly, the very same day Arthur’s son was born. Sam also sent to the temple for Vesak and, though late, he sent for Hyacinth’s crossing and for her birthday and for the anniversary of the accident, and with every shipment to the village he remembered the Ethiopians for as long as it took to buy six new sets of banyan and sarong, which were also sent, addressed to Arthur. When Joseph returned to the city, Sam asked him how things looked. “Good, sir.” The letters sometimes said otherwise, as when Arthur wrote that his son’s birth had been blighted when Ralahamis from nearby villages, the same villages visited on George’s engagement tour, came to the walauwa demanding justice for their ruined daughters, who were now brides without grooms and mothers to bastard sons. Arthur wrote that Robert was too ill to receive anyone, more ill with the noise of each of these visits, and so Arthur had sent the fathers off with threats and cigarettes and his own metal-benders and could Sam send more cigarettes next time please. Arthur never mentioned the Ethiopians and never asked where was his promised black Morris, and Sam would have worried why the British had not yet come to him for their prisoners, it was war’s end, and why his brother-in-law was not so keenly asking for his promised reward. But Sam Kandy’s going time was better spent going elsewhere.
On the first anniversary of his second marriage, it changed. Sam blamed Latha. The morning of the anniversary he went to the office in Fort to bring something for their dinner, a fading frayed menu card whose items he had copied onto the back years ago in deep incisions. He planned to instruct the hotel to make it, all of it, for them that night. But he never went into the office that morning. Latha was there, waiting for him. Latha, at his office, standing outside the door, squinting in the smudged windowpane light of daybreak in the city, wearing a village sari and flat-as-leaf village sandals and carrying an old Cargill’s shopping bag like she had been cut from the page of one chronicle and child-pasted onto a page from its successor. Not in the walauwa not in the village but in the city in Fort in Prince’s Building in front of his door: Latha. This went against nature itself, as if a tank crocodile had just swooped down from a branch.
“Mokatha?”
“Mokatha? I should speak here for all to hear?” she scoffed back, squinting worse than the last time he had seen her, the handkerchief dabbing her mouth. She was old now, slow, her skin had darkened around her clouding eyes and wattled about her neck and the arms. He followed her chin, which was motioning toward the tall narrow office door.
“Mokatha?”
“Ah. Fine. Why should I think that your new boutique madam would have made your manners any better. You would have me discuss it here so all of Colombo can hear. Right. Your father-inlaw is to die soon.”
“Why did Arthur send you to tell me?”
“Not even your eyes blink to hear it,” Latha said, smiling thinly, as if something was just confirmed. “And Arthur did not send me. Arthur does not know I have come. Arthur is, I am sure, scared to tell.”
“To tell what?”
“You’ve grown fat now, isn’t it! What has she been feeding you?”
“To tell me what? What.”
“Arthur is scared to tell why Ralahami is to die soon. What has happened.”
“But you are not scared.”
“No.” Stooped, swaying, showing her village teeth, she eyed him back.
“So then tell and go.”
“You would have me tell standing here, like this?” She breathed out loudly and bobbled her head. Something else confirmed. “Right. Your father-in-law went for a walk in the high grass behind the walauwa.” She waited, studying him studying her. “He said he wanted to see the first place in the village, the old cave, one last time, and he asked Lalson to help him climb the hill but of course, you know, you know what Lalson said. He said he would not go to the founder’s cave and tried to tell Ralahami not to go either but how can a servant tell such a thing? So Ralahami went, Lalson followed, and when Ralahami reached the cave he saw them. He saw all four of your fellows, fell back, and knocked his head on a rock. Since then he has even stopped coughing and asking for cigarettes. He is on the bed. He is to die soon.”
“Four, you said.”
“Yes, I said the Ralahami your father-in-law is to die soon.”
“But all four, you said.”
“The whole village knows. They have known from the beginning. Other villages even know. Since you came with your new madam and left those fellows in the muspenthu hut.”
“What hut?” Sam asked in a hard voice, but hard the way a bug sounds hard underfoot.
“What hut? Ha. The only hut fit for such devils. Believe it. I know,” said Latha.
They were only two, the rest of the building empty of Royal bells and footfall this early. Latha. After so many years of mocking him by looking only to Alice when he came to the walauwa, she was now standing here and mocking him outright, in his city, in his building, outside his door. Blocking it. Mocking his old misfortunate hut too, if truly so.
“Arthur told me you have left the walauwa,” Sam said. “Why have you come here to tell me about the Ralahami?”
“Because,” but here, suddenly, Latha faltered. Something had been touched by his question and he could tell that if he kept asking the same question she would break and go, but all Sam did was look down while Latha mouthed air at his question, like a fish on sand. She had already said all that she had planned to say to him. She had come to the city after fifty-seven years in the village, thirty-seven serving its highest blood, an omen blood, a dying blood, all of which she had witnessed and so now had dying eyes herself and would serve no more. She had decided to see Sam as her last duty by the walauwa and also because then there would be at least one known face, even his, in the city, but also because she thought she would have at least some triumph after sixteen years of his devilry. To tell him that she knew, that everyone knew, other villages even, about his black-and-gold padlock men. But here, now, more: from the start of their talking Latha had so wanted him to open the door and let her sit a moment somewhere without rogues and beggars and sick men all walking the same lanes, none giving way. She would even make the tea herself, for both of them, if only he would do the very least for someone from the village, no less someone who had hand-fed his wife from birth and then hand-fed his children the same and never once asked directly for any of his city shine but was now standing before him in need like she never had been before, because she had been standing since coming to the city alone and unknown by every passing face. And all Latha wanted was tea and ten minutes to sit and sip it and then she would go back into the crowds and look for the place called Pettah. She would see what kind of new life could be had for the price of two golden earrings she had long ago decided Alice would have given her anyway.
“But Hyacinth must miss you, no?” Sam asked, looking down. Not the hammer question he had wanted to ask. It was now everything to keep this as only talking. Because suddenly, of all things in the universe, Sam wanted to go to her, to his mother’s old cousin, the walauwa’s eternal governess, the hated old woman. Who in a moment would turn or he would, and then would be gone the last known of the old blood, his blood, however forsaken, however thin, however spat upon, faded, rusted. But he would not. It had to be so, he wanted it that way, he had to: everything done to him and taken from him, everything he had taken and done demanded that it be so. And more: Sam Kandy knew from a year’s worth of prior nights that all would be forgotten by day’s end anyway, those hips, those eyes like quartz.
“Hyacinth is a young lady now,” Latha finally answered. “You will get her a husband soon. There is nothing more that I can do for her.” But there was no venom in her saying it. She was soft from the first true thing Sam Kandy had said in sixteen years, that the girl would miss her. The first kindness too, in his voice, she thought. But in vain. He’d made no move to open his door and give her only ten minutes. Truth, yes, but no cup of tea.
“You have not been to see Arthur’s son, have you,” she said.
“No.”
No tea. No mercy then. “Do you remember George when he was a small fellow? How big he was? Where is George? Where are you keeping him? Under another of your padlocks? He should see the new fellow too, no?”
“Why?” But as he said it he knew why. Sam took a step toward her but then he turned and hammered down the stairs loud enough that he could not tell, no one in the city could tell over such crashing, what Latha was claiming down after him, what words and sounds were her last before she went down into the city herself, where she would never be called by name again.