Beggar's Feast Read Online Free PDF Page A

affairs—a shared cup for pot arrack and palms passing beedis and betel. People had a way of arranging themselves when a stranger lingered at heard laughter. Or they would stare back dumb, glare past, glare until he passed. Sam also tried to join a few streetlight sessions of rajay with boys who looked more his age, even retrieving the rattan ball once, in vain. And so he became but another wanderer in the nighttime city, his act of head down deliberate paces abandoned once he accepted that no one else was even watching, let alone believing, that he among all of them had somewhere to go. But he refused to stand around like the others, wearing mournful twilit faces, leaning against dirty walls, waiting either for something, anything to happen, or for sleep to lower them to their haunches, bottom, back. These were drowsy despairing people he’d never be like, people made lazy at life by pickling themselves in pity. He’d seen them before—in the village, fathers given no sons by their wives, only dowries; in the temple, monks sore with bad heels, creased and cracked and lined up the morning of the long last walking day of a relic procession. But Sam kept moving, thinking about where he could take his butterflies, or where he could go and leave them and their owner. Sometimes he thought about what he couldn’t be blamed for doing, a man alone in a buzzard’s city like this. Eventually, he decided these nightly walks were in search of a good blade.
    The last night he returned to the stall, Sam heard no B. and no woman. Instead, he found an overturned chair with a butterfly perched on a spindle. In the lamplight its wings were a pattern of copper and yellow bands. Past the chair, gathered on the ground, were two black clumps. Rats? He leaned to look, ready to bring his heel down. One was a palm-sized heap of wavy man locks, the other a coil of longer, more delicate strands. Around the hair, the dry dirt floor was a scored record of sudden movement, jagged finger gashes and swirled scuff marks. Whoever it was, whether an angry husband and his brothers or someone B. owed or someone who owed B., had dragged both of them toward the butterflies. He found two more clumps of hair in the ruined hall. Looking up in vain for more butterflies, and turning around in the little space, he suddenly curled his toes. The ground was mucked. It hadn’t rained that night. The dead smell of old earth mixed with the iron tang of blood. He held his finger to the light. The tip was covered in a smudge of ground turned reddish brown, and he knew it was from raging life not rain. Only then did he think to turn and make sure he was alone. The double-folded green mesh curtain was gone. Whoever it was, Sam thought, had wrapped B. and the woman in the curtain and taken them away, living or dead. He searched for B.’s stash of money, his money. Instead he caught the last butterfly, righted the chair, and sat down. He decided they must have thrown B.’s body into the harbour. He hoped that B. would someday find his snowfall beyond the blue sea. He hoped that B. would sink and hook onto the anchor of an English ship and be dragged around the island forever. Yawning, Sam looked around the stall a final time before he walked into the bruised blue light of morning in the city, and disappeared.

    He curled his tongue and shook out his clothes and asked again.
    â€œCan I go to the harbour and see? I will come back straight away.”
    â€œAnother boy will ask for your job the moment you leave,” Ismail warned.
    â€œYou’ll keep it for me.”
    â€œHa! Why should I?”
    â€œWho else knows all the village tricks they use on you?” Sam asked. One day, three years after he left B.’s stall, he had passed by the back of a spice shop just as someone was trying to sell the merchant a sack of useless cardamom. The seeds were already out of their pods; the seller must have rubbed a little fresh-ground cardamom