Beggar's Feast Read Online Free PDF

into the top layers to hide their failing savour. He had intervened, explained, and the merchant chased the cardamom cheat off. Afterwards, this Ismail told Sam he had centuries of trading in his blood but only decades of selling spice. He took Sam on and let him sleep in the back of the shop instead of the dog he used to keep there. Every night, Sam breathed a pungent smell of burlap and dog’s body, piss and spice. He woke only ready to leave the stall and breathe in the first-of-the-day, the seablown air of the city before it combusted into business.
    â€œDo you really have to go and see right now? You know they load elephants onto ships every week at the harbour. See how you’re squinting! It’s almost noontime sun. There’s a sack of peppercorns that needs drying.”
    â€œThey’re taking a tusker on board this time.”
    â€œWhat, just one?”
    Sam knew Ismail would try to keep him around with something like that, just as he knew to curl his tongue and shake out his clothes every time he left the spice shop. Sam never told anyone what he did in the time between keeping a butterfly hall and minding spices, only that he remained in Pettah, sixteen and seventeen and eighteen, and in Pettah back then you could always find something to eat so long as you had teeth for bones and a taste for marrow. His new boss was first-person proud of his family’s centuries in Ceylon. A few years before he met Sam, Ismail had been beaten to blood and mush by a crowd of Sinhalese men who were running riot against the plague of Coast Moors that had lately come onto the island. Between the blows, Ismail had told the men he hated these new moneychanger Moors as much as they did, that his family had been here as long as any of theirs, longer even, but this last point had made it worse.
    But by 1918, the latest Ismail was ten centuries of first-person story, hearsay, memory, and legend. When Sam said two Chinamen had been hanged by the stolen silks they were peddling in Pettah, Ismail spoke of the very first man of his family, a silk merchant who’d escaped Canton in 878 after a new rebel king ordered his subjects to show their loyalty by slaughtering the city’s foreigners. That first Ismail had played dead along the way to the harbour, lying in piles of Jews and Christians and Persians. By nightfall, he reached a ship that sailed him to Ceylon, his skin, hair, and clothes soaked with the spent lives of the cosmopolitan dead. When Sam told of a drunken gem trader from Ratnapura who was said to have demanded an entire floor of the Grand Oriental Hotel, hammering on the gilded registry book with a dirty ruby the size of a barbet’s belly, Ismail shrugged. “I watched the last king of Kandy weep at his billiards table, shooting ivory balls made from his finest tusker.” Another time, Sam described how all of York Street had stopped after three English daughters pulled the tortoiseshell clips from their hair. Ismail snorted. “I have seen twin sisters hang bats from their braids.” Sam snorted back. He was from the village. He’d seen his share of bats and long braids. Ismail didn’t like that. Sam soon learned to compete only so much with the man who pays you.
    â€œJust lay out the peppercorns and then you can go see your tuskers loaded onto a ship,” Ismail allowed, finally. “How many was it again?”
    â€œOne.”
    â€œAh, right. You know the Portuguese paraded elephants through Jaffna harbour.”
    â€œOnce in Kandy they—”
    â€œHead down and spread pepper, Sam, and listen. Then tell me if you still want to see them take your one tusker onto a ship.” Sam hauled a burlap sack past the shop’s back awning into the nearly noontime sun. He put newspaper sheets onto their drying table, a flat square of shimmery metal they’d mounted onto the cracked base of a pedestal sink some Mount Lavinia Burgher had rubbished.
    â€œTheir