And they came. British and Germans, and also Australians and Japanese and Gulf people and Malays, and even a few Americans and, though rarer and rarer by the 1990s, the odd pathologically anglophile Indian. All of whom loved Sam Kandy’s Sudugama for being what, from afar, it could be, the lovely spot it must be, yes the garden of the world, the trees full of big lazy leaves to float on, the Cinghalese lobbing around in the sun in dolce far niente. Paid to be photographed doing village deeds on the hour and otherwise not doing a hand’s turn all day. Just waiting there, staring, smiling while they were considered by pale visitors carrying canvas bags and sipping bottled water and at last able to see exactly where a boy would sit in defiance of municipal orders.
And they came. Emigrants returning with their television children on summer holidays. They came and found at Sudugama the Ceylon they always dreamed of remembering from their grey northern lives: sunny and beautiful, bird mad, green and clean, clean bathrooms, actual queues, an A/C gift shop filled with brass bowls and sequined prints. Better still were the villagers themselves, their shy smiles and un-benefited teeth, their mumbled requests for foreign stamps and addresses, their smallness, even the men so slight as to make any last-picked brown boy in Cambridge or Sydney feel like a true champion to be photographed beside them. And when the emigrants went to leave, calling the driver to come and take the bags and get the water jugs for hand-washing, a final blessing: no beggars in the car park, only more little men in cheap slacks and T-shirts and Bata slippers smoking in the shade, men who never studied like they should have when all of them had been village boys, and so now could only watch as those who did study left the village again, while they remained here, weeds in this the garden of the world.
Sam let Bopea do the afternoon show after the first year and stopped doing it altogether three years later, when he turned ninety. Bopea did both shows until he died at ninety-two without ever seeing Moscow, at which point Jerry Fernando hired a tragedian from Colombo to play the Ralahami, a fellow who, a year later, persuaded Jerry to hold auditions for a Hamine. Sam never saw the woman they brought in, another Lionel Wendt player from Colombo, because by ninety-four it was enough for his hip and heels to go and come from the verandah. When he wasn’t lying on the bed or called to walk around the kitchen table clearing his throat to make the children eat, he went to the verandah. From there, because of how many abandoned huts had been flattened and trees cleared to make car lanes, Sam could see what had once been the great green clearing, how much had since been wrought upon it. Now and then he was joined in his watching by one of the Marias, other times by Rose, with whom he had been fighting as old married people fight since 1983, when they had come back from Madhu and she had told him about baptizing the baby in the van and then asked if he would be baptized, if he would come to the Church for the sake of his own soul and the ease of her nightly prayers. To which he said, year after year, that coming to her was enough, which sometimes made her smile, and sometimes made her curse, and always she prayed for him.
When even waking became a triumph, Sam wanted to talk about what was to be done. As we all do, Rose made as if he was talking madness, but by ninety-six, ninety-seven, she could tell he was already elsewhere, his face either determined steel or drooling gobs of old sweet spit, pained or surprised, proud, stern, angry, blank, smiling—and all unto himself. When he was ninety-eight she asked him where he wanted to be buried, and he said he would not be buried, that of him and his body what deserved to stay upon this earth was already here, was here fourteen times over. He said when the time came his body should be burned on a bier in the car park and then a meal given at the harbour office. What harbour office. She sent word to the village men, who began collecting the wood behind the walauwa. At ninety-nine, he said the feast could be cigarettes or even just jaggery, one hard miracle popped into every beggar boy’s mouth. Only no monks should be called. On that he insisted. Rose said you couldn’t keep monks away from a funeral any more than you could keep crows away from a beggar’s feast and Sam said yes, monks were no better than crows, always waiting to feed unless you ran them off first. Rose told him church or no church he should not die with a bitter mouth. And at one hundred, he told her he did not mind who came, who stayed to feast. Only, when they laid him upon his bier, he asked, in a now puny, not yet exhausted voice, that he burn brighter, louder than just woodsmoke. And then, one evening in July 1999, he was called to make the children eat, in vain. Sudugama was closed to the public for the day. The bier was built and packed, the caravan came and the village, both villages, went to the car park and sat behind Rose and the Marias, who sat behind the monks, who claimed the first row. Who, when the bier was lit, muddied their saffron diving for cover as Sam Kandy shot the heavens in flames full of firecrackers, bright streams and busted rainbows roaring and screaming and chasing all the birds from the still green trees.
Colombo: Ajith Goonawardene, Mrs. Sybil Francke, and the people of Boyagoda village.
Toronto: Ivor Boyagoda, June Boyagoda, Bruce Westwood, Charles Foran, T.H. Adamowski, and Nicole Winstanley.
The author also gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council and Ryerson University.
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