Beggar's Feast Read Online Free PDF Page B

empty ships would come to Jaffna down from Coromandel,” Ismail began, standing in the shade behind Sam as he worked. “We would watch from Point Pedro. The converts among us tried to teach the faith. They said the Portuguese never sank because they sailed the world by the cross. Three masts approaching meant salvation for all, devils and angels alike. What madness. A week later, the ships would leave for Malabar and then on to Portugal, the masts half-fallen from the heavy holds. Christ and his two thieves listing. Now the time I am remembering, I was keeping a shop in Jaffna, near the harbour, and the Portuguese wanted to celebrate a new rebel king, Braganza. From Lisbon the order came for an elephant parade. The ships were to take as many as they could. I closed the shop and went to watch. The last to leave already had tea and spices and king coconut, and it also had to take a mother, a baby, and one, two, three tuskers. Did you hear me, Sam? Three. The Portuguese dismissed the mahouts for warning that this was too many, and also for saying that the baby should be with its mother. And so the mahouts walked off the ship into the crowd, making predictions like aunties at an ill-starred wedding.
    â€œThe three tuskers and the mother were driven into the hold. The baby was kept on the deck. The ship needed a blessing before it raised anchor, so one of their priests came forward. Even from the shore you could hear the elephants below deck muttering and snuffling through the low slow priestspeech. Finished his prayer, the priest began to throw his water. The sailors knelt and crossed themselves, and then he turned and threw water at the shore and some of us knelt and most of us ducked. Then he began to shake smoke in all directions. Some fool decided the heathen baby should get it before going to the new king. The baby pulled back, more sailors joined to push, and the baby cried out. The priest kept shaking the smoke and she cried again and then, Sam, then the mother answered. Believe it. There was yelling below deck and then a man howling and then the first tusker came up, followed by the others. These poor fellows weren’t charging. They were making way. The mother came last, trumpeting and shaking her ears and swinging her trunk along the ship’s planks. Everyone ran from the baby and a gun went off but these were now Braganza’s elephants so the shooting could only be overhead. The priest tried to run down the gangplank but fell into the water, his chain and ball of smoke too.
    â€œAs for the rest of them, those who weren’t thrown or trampled crossed themselves and jumped. The ship began to sink, the elephants playing hell along the busted deck. Afterwards, the landside Portuguese called for all pearl divers to come forward, and everyone else went home to tell what had happened and to burn their own incense and hold their own babies. Bodies washed up for days: sailors, elephants, the priest, all covered in seagreens and tealeaves. At night, poor men and thieves came to hack ivory and search for gold and shoes. Someone found a mahout’s hook and I traded a bridal sari’s worth of silk for it.”
    Sam still remembered the especially fine elephant hook he’d seen the year before he’d run away from the temple: clean silver, forged with a filigreed handle and a lotus flower hilt, intended only for the ear of the caparisoned tusker who carried the Buddha’s tooth in the great relic procession around Kandy town. “You still have it?” he asked, looking up from the pepper.
    â€œSon to son it was passed down,” Ismail explained, “until the family split after a 1700s Ismail took a second woman and the first wife demanded it be kept for her son. I have never seen it directly. I came down, first born, but from the second line.” Ismail’s words fell to bits. The mean exposures of memory. But there wasn’t much time. These days they didn’t board a