Beggar's Feast by Randy Boyagoda Page B

might want to do. Send something home. We could be of assistance.”
    Turning over the sudden idea, a year after he’d come to live in Astrobe’s house, Sam felt like he’d been walking through a forest watching for songbirds and fallen in a gem pit. “There is family in Ceylon,” he began carefully, oh vengeful memory, oh conspiring tongue, “but they do not live near Colombo harbour, in fact they live far from there and I am not sure how something from here would reach them. But I am grateful, yes.” Each word was a testing step. There could be a hole within the hole.
    â€œHave you a name for where they do live?”
    â€œYes. Yes, there is a village name, yes.”
    â€œThat, and your father’s good name, should be enough.”
    â€œYes, I see.” He would not tell Astrobe what he had told B. in the greedy gloom of his Pettah stall: that his father wasn’t a good enough man for a good name. The week before, one noontime at the office, Astrobe had received a visitor—the bookkeeper from a rival shipping agent, who said he wanted to work for Astrobe because his boss was no good and he knew the company was about to fold. Astrobe had Sam show him to the door and then told Sam to avoid boomerang dealers like that. “You don’t tell a man you’ve burned down the house you lived in and then ask if you can come live in his.”
    And so Sam wouldn’t say a word against his father to Mary’s. But he was also, in fact, tempted by the justice and glory of Astrobe’s suggestion that he send something to his family, to the village. By the vision of his father opening a crate full of things from a son and a world so far beyond him; things not even the grand walauwa people themselves could have even in the best of paddy and pepper years; things that in an overgrown green emptiness like Sudugama would be worthy of veneration, of shrines, of caparisoned elephants in drummed procession and named first-born sons and declarations of war between houses. Things that, Sam now knew, were to be understood as but trinkets in the great world itself. But as much as Sam wanted this victory, he did not want its cost. Contact. Taint. But he wanted his father, his family, all of Sudugama to know where and what he was now, and he did not. He did not!
    â€œIt was just a thought, no matter. Mrs. Astrobe always orders Mary new dresses for Christmas and I’m sure Mary wouldn’t mind some of her old ones going to Ceylon this year instead of the mission up at La Perouse. You must have sisters. Maybe a sweetheart? Sam?”
    But he wasn’t listening anymore. And he wasn’t worrying either, about his family, about cost or triumph, contact or taint. He should have been listening. He should have been worrying. But Sam was only waiting for Astrobe to stop talking so they could close the office for the day and go to Mary.
    An hour later, her face flashed, then drained of all colour, then flushed red when her father knocked and walked into her bedroom in a single motion, his monkey close behind him. As usual, Cousin Malcolm was in the room already, his face Mary’s mirror. He was standing beside her chest of drawers. His elbow looked nailed down.
    â€œFather, why even have doors?”
    â€œShall we just remove yours then?” Father and daughter smiled at each other, sourly. Sam was smiling too, a wild idiot grin. Shown a mirror, he might have shattered it for shame.
    â€œI see you have company with you, Uncle James.” Malcolm nodded at Sam.
    â€œWhat I was about to say to Mary!” said Astrobe, louder than was necessary, still smiling sour, but now staring at his nephew, who looked down and said nothing else.
    â€œHello,” Mary said to Sam.
    â€œYes,” said Sam to Mary.
    â€œYes?” asked Mary.
    â€œYes. Hello,” said Sam.
    After Astrobe explained that this year’s mission crate would be going to Ceylon, she shrugged and