And so came the age of cement, of Christians, of Christians and their hired vans and Leyland trucks and guitars and miraculous medals that, over the years, would be discovered on the common ground of Sudugama like the parted shells of fine silver nuts. And from the first day Sam Kandy brought the De Moraes family to the village there also came the age of children, children in the walauwa and in the lanes, children challenging the village boys to footraces before the village boys could even tell they had been challenged. In turn, the boys of Sudugama challenged the invaders to a cricket match. The visitors won the toss, calling miraculous Mary over miraculous Joseph, and then ran back to one of their ten thousand vans and returned carrying actual cricket bats and tins of tennis balls whose every wondrous opening was an occasion for awed silence, for every boy to wonder if this was what the world itself had sounded like when it went from nothing to the stars; what it would sound like when to nothing it someday returned. Soon the green-black branches surrounding the rude village oval shook with blasted sixers and bounding fours and the gardens of Sudugama became studded with strange fruit. The batsmen were too gallant or was it impatient for the balls to be retrieved and why should they be retrieved when standing in the shade were younger cousins and little brothers dying, absolutely dying, to throw in a replacement to the scowling bowler. The visitors ran up an impossible figure for plank bats to answer, for anyone, even Don Bradman, to match. But these weren’t walauwa children. These weren’t old Sam Kandy children. When their inning was up, the visitors let the Sudugama boys use their bats, and so came an age of eternal friendship, all in the first hour of the first day.

He came home with a Negombo bride in July 1966; he came, it seemed, with all of Negombo itself. A few of the village men stopped wondering where Bopea was when they recognized one of the drivers in the caravan as among those who had come some months before, asking about Sam. Those who were questioned then had been surprised at how suddenly numb were their tongues, how heavy their lips. Were they protecting Sam because say what you will, he was at least more village than the men asking after him? Afterwards, in that evening’s toddy circle, which was again hosted by Lalson on the walauwa verandah because no one had lived for days in the big house except the servants, it was agreed that Sam Kandy was being held somewhere while his story was checked out. Bopea must have been held too, apparently, poor proud fellow in his yellow hat. By the end of that evening’s toddy, the majority held that Sam Kandy must have owed someone significant and owed him significantly and at long last, after so many years of his city life, five years after his city life had ended, his collection time had come. A minority, well, really only one fellow, a tabla player, insisted that Sam was being considered for a minister’s post, less because he truly believed it than because he was, like his father before him, a stubborn drunk. But that night no one thought, no one could even conceive, that someone had sent questioners to ask about old Sam Kandy because he, the sender, had a daughter.

Months later, when Sam climbed out of his Hillman and went to the other side and opened the door, smiling the whole time, the women watching already knew what he’d gone and done before the men within their hearing knew there was anything more remarkable here than the dozen Gipsy trucks queued behind Sam’s Hillman. The village women wondered with limed innocence if poor Hyacinth had shrunk in her absence years, and only then did the men look away from the Gipsys and their bulging canopied flatbeds to see the young woman on Sam’s arm. Only then did they search their memories and fail to find anything of Hyacinth Kandy’s face in this young woman’s, and so one or two declared with superior and stupid innocence that this was not Hyacinth and were woman-told with honeyed innocence that of course it had to be Hyacinth, because who else would a sixty-six-year-old widower be squiring toward his house, save his very own daughter? When, eventually, finally, their men understood what Sam had gone and done, again, the village women then noted how this latest Madam Kandy was walking toward the walauwa. She was moving with more care than her city shoes warranted, with the kind of care a woman only takes once: when it’s her first. Her first what? one man asked but he wasn’t answered. The question itself, that late in the hour’s revelations, was considered beneath any woman’s notice.

The caravan left a few days later but not before a visit to the temple. While the rest of them waited in their vans, playing Jim Reeves songs and fencing with fruit sellers, one of Rose’s brothers went in to speak with the chief monk. Sipping clammy tea, he was made to wait in a damp-smelling Buddhist hallway lined with Buddhist things: monks, namely, but also darkwood cabinets full of slapdash plenty, books and brass plate, brass statues, brass lamps topped with brass-cast roosters and temple flowers; palm fans that looked older and more dried out than the oldest Palm Sunday crosses hanging behind the holy faces in his mother’s house; pied pennants, ola leaf scrolls tipping into each other like sleepy drunks and ruined columns, left as if their consultation was interrupted one hundred years ago and never returned to by the monks who were themselves captured in the formal portraits propped up behind it all. Eventually, the chief monk came and sat in a schoolmaster’s chair across from Rose’s brother who, reaching up from a child’s chair, presented him with an appointment calendar and a desk diary and a sheaf of plastic book covers before beginning to explain why his family had come to Sudugama.

“You are here because others won’t come, no?” the chief monk interrupted, keeping the calendar and diary on the ledge of the cabinet beside him, where Rose’s brother thought they would remain unto dust. The chief monk handed the book covers over to a younger monk, who handed them on to another, and then another, until eventually they came to the youngest fellows in the temple, the Samaneras, who took them behind the temple buildings and conclusively determined that the book covers could float, flip, and be made to flap like birds if not wheel like bats, and in the end failed to convince as airplanes.

“Sorry? I am here because I was hoping—”

“You don’t need to tell me why you are here, or what you are hoping for,” the chief monk declared. “I know. I know he is hoping I will forget how many years he has lived across the main road and motored past this temple and never once stepped foot or sent until now. Now he sends some office goods.”

“No. I am not here for Sam Kandy. I am here for Rose Kandy.”

“Mokatha? What is Rose Kandy?”

“She is my sister. And as I was trying to tell, she now lives across the main road, with him. She has married him. Yes, I know”— Rose’s brother smiled at the monk’s shocked face and the monk did not scowl away the sympathy because even if he hadn’t seen her in the seventy years since he’d taken to robes, he had a sister too. “We have only come here to help her settle,” Rose’s brother continued, “and I see that there are things that are needed for the walauwa and the village too and my father—”

“Your father’s name is?”

“Xavier Joseph De Moraes, of Negombo.”

“Negombo.”

“Yes. Negombo, where he is the owner of the Lourdes Cement Company.”

“Negombo. De Moraes. Lourdes. Your family has come here, to the Udarata, to Sudugama, to the temple.”

“Yes, my sister has.”

“And no one has told me and no one has asked me,” the chief monk observed loudly, and his attendant monks shook their heads vigorously, hoping that for sharing his outrage they would not be asked afterwards why none hadn’t already informed him of the old devil’s latest devilry, instead of his having to hear it from a Negombo cement man, a Christian. “But you also said cement?”

“I did.”

“And?”

“And there are things in the walauwa and the village that need repair. The walauwa’s steps, the water tank, and also gutters to be poured for the lanes and sluices behind all the huts. My family will do all of this. But there is no telephone in the walauwa and I am told that—”

“Not just in the village and the walauwa is cement needed.”

“Sorry?”

The monk made a disappointed face. Rose’s brother right away knew his father would be making the same face were he here and watching him fail to understand that of course cement would be needed here too. Here first.

“Right right. I was about to say the same. And so shall I trunk-dial to Negombo?”

Standing on the verandah a few days later, Sam heard a cement truck coming down the main road toward the village—like some giant working his pestle into a mortar full of road ordnance. Sam went to the stone railing and yes the villagers were coming into the lane, leaving their dawn lives of cooking and tea and puja to see what it was this time: first looking up to see if the noise had split the moon and then looking down the lane toward the main road, wondering what was left in the world that he had not yet brought to the village: what there was that could be louder even than a caravan of De Moraeses. He smiled. Since he had married this third time, Sam Kandy had been smiling, smiling terrifically, idiotically, shamefully; smiling at last like a malli by the roadside. Because what else was there to do, this late, save smile and smile back, talk a little about the day before or the day to come, tell how he was feeling and ask her the same. One thing else there was: to tell. To tell Rose of how many inside lives and outside lives, of how many joins had been tried and broken, tried and broken. And if he did tell, tell all of it, then what would be left, after she left? One thing else: to tell the cement truck, a fleet of Lourdes cement trucks, to still come to the village and drive up past the crossroads and past the walauwa and past the old founder’s cave and there queue, position the chutes, open the drum-hatches and only stop when the village, all and all and all of it including the old man in the old pinstripe suit lying in one of its old huts, was covered and gone. And then at last he would be a triumph to beat all others, because even smoke fades away. But if the trucks came and poured cement over all of it, then Sam Kandy would forever be the slab Ralahami of an endless flat world, the eternal stone headman of a hard grey sea.

So why tell anything instead of smiling along, agreeing along like a sweet greyed malli who’d been given this unearned newness of life, this newness that she was giving him, that he had given her even at sixty-six, this newness she wanted to give him and the walauwa and the village, none of him or them deserving. And yet she gave. But she was giving them too? From the verandah, Sam watched the cement truck turn off the main road, turn away from him, the walauwa, the village so undeserving. The cement truck turned into the temple grounds, toward the temple less than undeserving. Sam went into the walauwa, calling for Alice to come quickly he said Rose come quickly, Rose come quickly.

“The cement truck has turned into the temple.”

“Yes. It’s going there first, and then coming here.”

“No it’s not.”

“Yes, it already is.”

“Mokatha?”

“What?”

“Yes, exactly, what?”

“Seven months married and this is when it happens?”

“This is when what happens?”

“This is when your face more than smiles?” When his voice, his staring eyes, she thought, turn so hard. Seven months married and now, Rose could imagine her mother telling her, now, when he’s got you in the village and we, your people, are a day’s drive away. Now, darling, he stops smiling. Right now, Rose thought, they’d be taking breakfast in Madhu. They’d be gathered under a white pavilion tent set up in front of the old fine church, and her mother would be asking an unknown little boy to tell her the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, a boy who’d only slipped into the tent already mad with children in hopes of slipping out with a fish bun and maybe one of their badminton racquets.

“Why is the cement truck going to the temple?” Sam demanded.

“Because the temple needs cement.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because my brother had to go to the temple to call Daddy to send a truck—”

“And the chief monk—”

“Yes, he has asked for a little work to be done.”

“Ha. A little work. Ha. Right. You are a Christian. You don’t know. He probably wants a beggar’s bowl poured for himself, one that would fit the whole courtyard.”

“And how, husband, do you know that?”

“Believe it, I know.”

“Daddy has greater reasons than you to send a truck anywhere in this country except to the temple, and yet he allows it. And do you know why he allows it?”

“How can you think your father has greater reasons than your husband?”

“How can I know otherwise? Can you tell me otherwise? Or shall we keep living as we have been, as if you were born on our wedding day? I have never asked, Sam. Most of my relations think I am a fool for never asking. Tell me, am I?”

“You are my wife.”

“And I will be your wife even if you tell me I am a fool for being your wife. That is holy vows. That is love, this.” She patted her swelling belly.

Sam said nothing.

“Will you tell me another day? When the cement truck has come and gone from the temple and the village and the walauwa?”

“By the time the chief monk is finished with the cement truck,” Sam said, his face cloudy, his hand reaching out for her, touching that swelling newness of life that called him to stop his vengeful symmetries, to stop saying what he still had to say, “this child is going to be old enough to do what his father is too old to do now.”

“Which is what?” Rose asked, feeling for once foolish for deciding to pretend all these months that you can marry a sixty-six-year-old man and make like he’s historyless, like he’s only a smiling sweet adjunct to your own hope for a purpose beyond forever daily answering your father’s questions and minding your sisters’ children, a purpose that would take you away from the useless last plot of land in the family compound to upcountry grandness—echoing, dripping, dusty old gone grandness awaiting its restoration. Its redemption?

“I was twice married before you.”

“And you are telling me this only now?” She was not surprised. She wished she was. A jungle paper had been slipped through the bars of her bedroom window a few days after she had come to the village, a mad scrawled boast, or was it a warning? Don’t think you’re the first lady of this house. You’re only the one he’s let live the longest. She had folded the note into an envelope marked Should Anything Happen, which she put in an envelope addressed to her family in Negombo and hid in the back of her almirah for a day, then removed, reread, tore, and burned in that morning’s cooking fire. She had married him. He was living now because she had married him.

“I was never asked before.”

“Then tell.”

“My first wife’s almirah is in the bedroom. My second wife’s music cabinet is in the front room.”

“No, tell me more than that.”

“Right. I am twice widowed.”

“Twice. How?”

“They died.”

“Two, you say. How?”

“Car accident.”

“Both?”

“No, the other drowned.”

“How long ago?”

“Lives ago.”

“No. We each are only one life. How long ago?”

“The first, in 1939. The second, in 1948.”

“That’s all?”

“No. There are children.”

“Living?”

“Yes. A son and a daughter.”

“How old? Here in the village?”

“No. They are not in the village. They are about your age, I think.”

“You think? Where are they?”

He looked at her. He looked away. She nodded.

Two more Kandys trying to be historyless. Would she be too, one day? Would she have to, want to? “Why are you telling me these things now?”

“You will hear these things and other things before the baby comes. That’s the village.”

“What other things?”

“No. No.” Sam rubbed his forehead. He swallowed. He swung his heel back and forth upon the morning-cool floor. He looked everywhere but at her until, after how many birds and squirrels and dogs had informed each other and the rest of the world of their day’s ambitions, Sam Kandy confessed. “I don’t want to be widowed again.”

Their first child was born in September 1966: a girl baptized Rose-Maria and called Rosemarie. The second, third, and fourth were girls too: Vivienne-Maria, Charmaine-Maria, and Elizabeth-Maria, called Vivimarie, Charmarie, and Lizzy-girl. The fifth girl was named Blossom-Maria and called Blossmarie and was also born without curse or great motherblood lost in a walauwa bedroom, but she was not baptized in Negombo, as were her sisters. She was born in April 1971, a few months after Sam and Rose built the first set of new bedrooms onto the big house, and hours before a group of boys with village skin and university mouths marched into Sudugama chanting against the enemy government and the enemy British before chanting against the old enemy walauwa high above them, which, the fellows lectured the villagers, had been carried for years on their toiling backs, had been floating for years upon their blood and sweat. The university boys caught no village sun on the rusted blades that rose and fell with their chanting and lecturing. They made it no farther than the crossroads, where they were turned away by village men, the oldest among them wondering if Dambulla had come their way this time, the youngest unmoved by the marchers’ invitations demands pleas jeers threats jeers pleas demands invitations to cross the lane and join them. Theirs was the kind of thing best joined in a smoky canteen or crowded common room, not steps away from the hut where you were born, not steps away from the men you were born to stand beside and now asked to stand against. And so all of the villagers chased them off, wielding their own rusted blades and mammoty sticks. Retreating, one of the university boys demanded to know why the village was protecting the walauwa that could never protect them the way they deserved. He was answered by a palm-sized shard of cement whirring past his ear and hitting one of his fellows in the back, who turned and showed a gun. The villagers dropped their blades and sticks and many more hand-sized pieces of cement broken off from the many blocks that had been twice-yearly supplied to every villager in Sudugama since Rose-Madam had come. Only now what? The fellow holding the gun had never held a gun in front of others before; it had been given to him by his former chem lab partner, who had joined a group of JVP boys in sacking a police station near campus the day before. The whole world knew what came next fell to this fellow to decide, but he didn’t even know how many bullets the gun held, how many it now had. Certainly fewer than there were men standing in front of him. There were other villages on this road. They went.

When the villagers returned to the crossroads, old Sam Kandy was waiting there, his arms full of daughters. They told him it was nothing, it didn’t matter, it was nothing. What is a gun? They asked him if the new baby had come yet. He smiled. They smiled and shook their heads again, at old Sam Kandy’s year-after-year feat of elaboration, of such giving and getting, which impressed them more than any chrome or other such long-since-rust-taken-loveshine he’d brought to the village in the years before. Sam knew they were flattering him into forgetting his question. He swelled with the knowledge of it, what they never before had done for him or any other man who had walked down from the walauwa and asked the matter among them, what years of assured water and good growing and a great deal of smoothing, levelling cement and laughter, child’s laughter heard in the walauwa itself, had done; what Rose had done, kept doing, for all of them. Giving without counting, without demanding, without considering first what was leaf- and star-cast by each their birth-hour heavens.

By 1971 he had been married to her for five years and they had five children and he’d held each in their swaddling clothes and so felt the warmth of life’s bawling newness in his trenched hands, fresh blood in Sam Kandy’s hands. He would hold each and look over at Rose who was already looking at him, at them, tired but smiling at her handsome old un-lonely husband. Sam and Rose smiling at what they had given and been given, wondering if they were yet too old to hold more such abiding, to give and so gain another true warrant. In time again they would try. And so, down at the crossroads, Sam smiled at the villagers’ question, which they asked to protect him from knowing more than a seventy-two-year father of five needed to worry about. He adjusted the squirming girls in his arms and told them that yes Rose-Madam had had another girl, and she was named Blossom-Maria. “Blossmarie!” said one of her older sisters.

Later, Rose was told more than Sam and so refused to leave the village until that July, when her family made its annual one-week stop in Sudugama on its way to Madhu Church for the Assumption Feast. She decided to have the baby baptized at Madhu and this time Sam came as well, and he also came when they baptized the twin sixth and seventh girls at Madhu, which was when they were living no longer in Ceylon but in Sri Lanka, because one morning in 1972 Ceylon was decreed banished from the island, only to be found alive and thriving in London and Dubai, Scarborough and Brampton, where it became the watchword of conjuring emigrants ignored by their television children; and then came Rose and Sam’s eighth and nine and tenth girls, and then the eleventh—which was when the first Maria was given in marriage to a good Bharatha boy and settled in Negombo, near the De Moraes family compound; and with Arthur in London long forgotten and Alice’s long-ago letter granting deed to long-gone George long gone in the belly of insects that themselves had long returned to dust in the long-closed office of a long-dead lawyer in Kandy town, the first-married daughter and her husband were also given a parcel of walauwa land for a holiday house; the same was done for the second and the third and the fourth—after which these first and second married Marias had their first and second children and meanwhile came Rose and Sam’s twelfth and they were written up in the Sunday Times and Sunday Observer and Rose was photographed pregnant and holding a grandchild and then came their thirteenth, all of whom were also baptized at Madhu, but not their fourteenth and last, Xavier Joseph Maria, who was called Zamarie and named in memory of her grandfather, who died a month before she was born, “peacefully, in his sleep, a holy death,” as went the notices that ran in all the English dailies while the Catholic Messenger reported that the meal given in his name was the grandest in living memory, which Rose read about and saw pictures of because Bopea finally came home, after Xavier died, and brought Rose the clippings. She had been too pregnant to sob beside his casket and so Sam went and came with some of the older girls and then their fourteenth was born, in July 1983.

The timing seemed right—they would have gone to Madhu and had an Assumption Day baptism—but the Kandys stayed in Sudugama until almost the mid-August feast day itself, listening for the latest news of the trouble in Colombo, hearing from village talk that the trouble had come to the upcountry too. There were none in Sudugama, and while of course you talked for years against upcountry Tamils when you were in toddy circles and standing around the carpenter’s shed and walking back from the fields, against their field blackness which was also Indian blackness, and against their old treacherous, poisoning queens who, as the schoolmaster and the temple had been teaching since 1956, had so weakened the last four kings of the Udarata that the British came and took the island with ease from already-defeated men. There was likewise talk against their blue devil temples, their Shiva love, above all of late against their demanding ballots, schools, first-class positions for their people, and not demanding in Sinhala or even English medium but in their shipbottom Tamil. These were not our people. Still, there were also days you talked against your wife’s relations, but that didn’t mean if someone gave you a can of petrol and a knife and asked you to join in you would. If twenty asked you to join, and none of you knew any of you, it might be different. But this wasn’t the city.

When the trouble finally seemed over, Rose said they should still go to Madhu, even if her family in Negombo refused. And so the Kandys set out for the shrine in two hired vans. They moved fast, far too fast along the Vavuniya-Mannar Road, no need this time for roadside stops beside other vehicles likewise defeated by the pilgrim traffic ahead of them. According to their ages, the girls complained they hadn’t had any road sweets or road toys, lagoon baths or smiles from any roadside Romeos. Their caravan was stopped only when they were very near Madhu, by two army jeeps parked in a chevron across the main road. A soldier came to the window and told the lead driver who turned and told Sam that there was trouble ahead, on the far side of Cheddikulam. Word was sent to Rose, riding in the second van, and word was sent back: Our Lady was waiting. Sam told the driver who told the soldiers who shook their heads until these mad fools actually gave them money and then, still shaking their heads but now counting the bills, the soldiers let them pass.

After driving through a ghosted Cheddikulam, the lead van came across two Tamil boys on push-bikes lolling back and forth across the main road as if it were long since theirs. As the lead van neared, honking, more boys began walking out of the bushes, un-slinging dead men’s guns and raising mother’s knives and jogging at them, waving them down, now running. The vans turned sharply and while they sped back toward the other checkpoint Rose baptized Zamarie from the vial of holy water she kept in her purse and then gave the screaming wet child more Cow & Gate formula to stop her crying and told the rest to stop their own screaming and crying and pray rosaries instead. Meanwhile, in the other van, Sam watched the boys coming at them, boys like none that he had ever known in his own hard-running days. They weren’t queued in a shipping agent’s office waiting to go out into the world and take what they could of it. They were already taking from the world, and all the world they wanted was here and now, was this line of road, this common patch of wind-tossed green. And if they could not keep it, then no one else would. Sam knew more: he knew he was too old to run anymore, but going home from Madhu in the safe, crowded van, he did not mind. At eighty-four, Sam Kandy had run enough, had taken and spent and broken and been given far more than enough to know what kind of races were run and won in vain. It was late, he was weary, yet he knew.