Beggar's Feast by Randy Boyagoda

swift and natural with gesture they were loath to give it up, especially when the other way involved the indignities of learning to share a language: the slow long mouths, the patient restatements, the endless reductions from sentence to phrase, from the name for something to the separate sounds that made the name—an ugly primate mimicry.
    Astrobe turned on a desk lamp and the starry city disappeared. He stood next to a portrait hanging behind his desk, his back flat against the wall. It was broadsheet-sized and set in a thick frame that was itself a carved busyness of laurel leaves and fruit-studded vines and each sharp corner a crowded garden of blooming flowers and all of it gilded. Looking at Sam with a smile, Astrobe made a face that monkeyed the stern one beside him. He could be this way when it was only the two of them in the office—brothers making faces under father’s nose. Sam smiled. He had already decided he would not wonder why Astrobe wanted to be like this with him, this acting like twin mallis though age money and skin said otherwise. He would not wonder because this past year nothing, nothing of his old squirrel life, had happened to make him kick out and run. But he also decided that when he was the one with a young man smiling to serve at his side—and, after a year of watching James Astrobe run a shipping business out of Sydney harbour, Sam knew that somehow, somewhere, he would make this his work as well—he wouldn’t ever be so free and friendly and monkeying, wouldn’t ever let such a person as he was now feel the pride of place and secret power that he had come to have with Astrobe. Sam liked him, but it was in the way, in the village, you liked an older boy willing to race you along the banks of the paddy fields and at the same time knew to your bones that he was beneath you for doing it.
    He stepped closer to study the portrait, his heavy shoes making a rackety footfall against the wooden floors. The face looked about the same age as Astrobe’s and was, like his, white as coconut pulp. And the man was also wearing a yellow hat. The resemblance seemed to end there. The hair in the painting was lighter, a reddish orange like the colour of shaved cinnamon trees, regenerate lives. And everything in the face itself looked stouter, rounder, the eyes, nose, the full lips, which were pursed, as if their owner were trying not to laugh at something the painter just said.
    â€œThis,” Astrobe said, stepping forward, his hand reaching back in a gesture of a formal introduction, “is the late Martin Astrobe, my great-grandfather, as he was painted a hundred-odd years ago, by his wife, when he was a rising gentleman in Rose Hill. Looks like a proper Englishman, don’t he?”
    Sam said nothing. He stared at the round eyes staring back at his, daggers daring him to disagree.
    â€œBut can you guess his secret?” Astrobe asked.
    â€œI cannot say,” said Sam, which he thought the greater justice.
    â€œBut do you want to know?” asked Astrobe.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œNot even why the men in my family have always worn yellow hats?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWell then, there’s nothing left but for you to meet the rest of us,” said Astrobe, a little defeated.
    They descended, this time Sam first, the windowpanes warbling behind them. He had wanted to say there was no need to meet anyone. He had already decided he would not stay here a second night, sleeping beneath that portrait’s secret gaze, sleeping above what particular secrets of sadness and rage and wrongs were this family’s. Which weren’t his, weren’t anything he wanted to be touched by. For more than symmetry’s sake, Sam Kandy would take a man as he asked the world to take him.

    He heard the piano before he entered. And when he went in, something tore open he did not know had been there, something that had been waiting all these years to be torn open. She was