Free Beggar's Feast by Randy Boyagoda

uncontrollably, sighs-into-groaning, his body moving past his mind’s stilled sadness, hatred, at discovery. He looked away. She was slapping his shoulders to stop now, where moments before she’d been kneading, breathing deeply in and out with him. This misfortunate little brown fellow would now know why Malcolm had been so good and answering these past months to all his useless Mary-talk, why he had so nodded at Sam’s telling him, falsely it seemed, that he and his uncle were going to Wellington this first-of-the-month.
    Taking him by a tuft of hair warmed by her skin, oh by her own hair, Sam turned Malcolm’s head and yanked him off her body, brought him to his feet and chopped down at his cowardly hands struggling with hers for the sheet. Sam pushed him hard and Malcolm’s splotchy pinkness collapsed into itself as he staggered backward against his uncle’s desk, his arms and hands scissoring into a V at his privates. Sam rammed an open palm into his nose and when he raised his hands to his blooming bloody face Sam kicked him down. Malcolm fell to the floor, sucking and gurgling. Sam walked over to the desk. He found the scrolled menu card half tucked beneath the blotter and turned to leave. But he had to look again at his cot, at her face, also splotchy. She seemed to be wriggling away, or trying to get herself onto her elbows without the sheet falling. She was cursing as she moved—her cousin, her brother, her father. She leaned and spat in the wastebasket beside his cot. His bed! Suddenly she was staring at him, her eyes diamond bright with confusion and rage and shame, could it be, and thanksgiving? But the creased bed-sheet looked like ten thousand crows’ feet. He felt like a paddy field on fire. He felt charred, used up, scoured of past life and all possibility save one. Sam ran.



As promised: from high upon the verandah of the silent walauwa, and from within the dark doorways of Sudugama’s silent village huts, a strange new noise was heard coming down the Kurunegala Road. It sounded like distant bees, or ten thousand dragonflies, forty thousand wings, a vibrant hum that became a growl and then a rumble and whine as it neared the village whose people, always ready for omens, checked the time and reminded themselves of the date and squinted over the treetops to consider, in its early-morning fade, how much and malevolent was the moon left in the sky. Malaria, drought, and now this, in 1929, some boxy monster bringing with it dogs barking; birds cawing; boys clapping and calling on friends to come see; older men slack-jawed with shock, women peering from behind husband and brother shoulders, failing to hold on to their own children, who ran to join the mad parade that had gathered around him town after town since Colombo. Sam Kandy was seated in the back of the first motorcar ever to come to the village of Sudugama, a 1928 Morris Minor, black as deep water; his driver, a boy with blue eyes.
    The car turned off the main road into a dry dirt laneway cut between the paddy fields. On the left was the reedy pond, now more a brown puddle. Sam remembered how once, before the temple, when he was just another boy in the village, he had been told that this pond was filled with baby turtles, told by a boy who was soaked through and smiling as he described the crawling surface of the water. His wet finder’s feet were filmed in dust from running up the laneway. Sam never thought to ask him where his turtle was. He ran down straight away, crouched and squinted across the reed-bent water, waiting for the shimmering surface to tremor with life born to be caught. He was pitched forward by the very boy who had called him down. The leafy surrounds shook with laughter as the other boys, ranging from long dry to still damp, stood to see the latest conned. The boy who had pushed him in pulled him out with rough ceremony and said that now it was his turn to find his own boy to tell about the baby