Free Beggar's Feast by Randy Boyagoda Page A

turtles. Sam understood and played the game and played it well. He had been so happy not to be the last boy found, happier still that the boy he ran and called down was Bopea, whom he had once fought and lost to on the great green clearing.
    The Morris was moving very slowly now, the surface of lane that led through the village undulant like the bony backs of the men and beasts born to walk it. At Sam’s word the car paused at the barren junction that marked the centre of the village. He glanced to the right, toward the now gaping astrologer’s hut. He glanced to the left, down the lane past the carpenter’s stall, at what, until so very lately, had been his family’s own place. And now, twenty years later, always, he looked forward, upward, to the great twin boulders that marked the entranceway to the walauwa itself. Boulders that, in years past, had always barred the way forward, upward, for men like his father and his father and his father too, the men of his family back unto the very first of his line who emerged from untold, unknown history, who appeared on the scene from unnamed and long forgotten geography one morning to spend the rest of his days and his son’s and his son’s forever more working the mud lands of men born to better horoscopes. Until now and himself, Sam thought, wondered, promised; no, vowed. He had stopped the car so he could ask himself one last time if what was next was in fact what was wanted. And it was, it had to be, it was what everything before this day compelled him now to seek, impelled him, at last un-fathered, to make his own.

    â€œWhat are you? A politics? A temperance bugger?” the old man had asked him, days before, when he had stepped into the hut. He’d come by train and then cart, dressed in a simple clerk’s outfit, unannounced, unknown, to see what was left of a forgotten family he was certain and outraged and grateful had forgotten him.
    â€œYou don’t know me?” Sam asked. Yes, he did, he wanted it that way, wanted no ceremony as he returned to the low little room lit only by bottle lamp and any early moonlight and starshine washing in through the side window beneath which he had lain as a little boy. Those jurying stars. While his father studied him, Sam looked around and found nothing of the Christmas crate he had sent from Sydney, four years earlier. He breathed deeply the odour of ages, finding again nothing of himself in it save the earthly sweet smell of ripe plantains, combs as profuse as they and they alone always were, piled on the table. The rest was old dirt and oil, burnt rice, rinds, pot arrack; old man smells.
    â€œI don’t owe you any money, I know that! Ask anyone if I owe anyone.”
    â€œAre you alone here?” Sam asked. His mother must have died. Soo sa he had tried to protect her from muddy snakes when he was a boy and she was pregnant too long and they had gone walking on the great green clearing. Soo sa she had taken him to the astrologer and let his father take him to chase the crow and then to the temple. Soo sa
    â€œMokatha ? ” his father shot back, less with puzzlement than worry.
    â€œYou really don’t know who I am?” Appachchi he hadn’t said; the word had curled and disappeared upon his tongue like a singed leaf.
    â€œJustgowillyou” the old man muttered, bagging up his sarong between his legs as he always did. Only now the legs looked thin as cigarettes. Only now the sarong was from an old bed-sheet, bought years earlier by Mrs. James Astrobe at David Jones in Sydney and long since faded and betel- and tea-stained beyond all recognition. “I owe nothing in this village. Just ask any fellow if I owe him still! I have nothing for you.”
    â€œUncle,” Sam said, swallowing the rest of it. He would use the first of his two plans, the greener one, to get his father out of Sudugama before he arrived a few days later in the motorcar. “I am here on