Beggar's Feast by Randy Boyagoda Read Free Book Online Page A

always won the most cheers from the other players, and also from their audience and, the time everything changed, he won a florin from someone in the crowd. Studying the sudden silver in his hot palm, he grinned as he flashed it at the others and they all knew it. They had their game. Their sessions now ended not from fatigue or failing light, but always with a dramatic flourish from Viresh followed fast by Sam circulating through the crowd in taught and recalled humility, carrying a battered bowler hat as his beggar’s bowl. But the ferry ride to North Sydney was a constant sea-spray and barricade of parasols and fathers, husbands, brothers, suitors, and sons. Their time sipping a pint in the pub was no better. They’d crowded around one open spot at the bar, each trying to get a foot on the rail, their legs raised and shaking forward in a slow, insistent rhythm, shy and smiling like damsel dancers at a village pageant. But around them the other drinkers only squinted and snickered and planned their own prizes. The boys drank bitter and fast and left.
    When lining the beggar’s hat with spare change was no longer enough for them, Fat Mohan, unanimously the worst player, was chosen for the main role in their new con. He would take a throw from Sam and begin bouncing the ball backward until he fell into the crowd itself, which, with the static intelligence of crowds, didn’t make way as he neared but held fast, trusting the notion that he wouldn’t actually break the invisible barrier between watched and watcher. But he always did, on one occasion tumbling into a round man with thick red sideburns that had grown to half-moons upon his fat cheeks. Who called out “God and his angels!” as he fell back, Fat Mohan landing on top of him crying “Magee Amma!” and rolling like a pestle on a mortar until Sam came and shoved Mohan and helped the gentleman to his feet, dusting off his coat and making sure he hadn’t dropped anything and meanwhile the other boys and spectators crowded in with apologies and concerned noises and offers to call doctors wives and constables, all of it making the mark the more embarrassed of having been so felled and so just to show there were no hard feelings before he walked away never to sight brown boys at their game again, he gave Mohan a florin. Having already given up his pocket-watch.
    Within a few weeks they each had one, and then they wanted more, they needed something else to try for, some other shiny gimcrack to let them believe that they had become conquerors in their new world, not its cowards, that their long days about the docks were days of daring, were days desired more than anything or anyone you could find on open water or down Sydney’s canyoned streets. But what? Anxious, agitated, demanding, they looked to Sam, who looked away, not because he didn’t know what they should do next, but because why was everything now they ? Sydney was his latest shadow life, and it had to yield more than shadow because he didn’t know what that might mean yet. Not with four others to think of, to worry him with their wanting. But what? He ignored the latest question and Mahinda snapped shut the bright copper halves of a shipping agent’s watch and declared it was time to go for their billfolds.
    â€œBut a billfold is not simply clipped to a vest,” warned Sam.
    â€œYou’re scared to try? Tissa would have done it,” challenged Mahinda, who wasn’t looking at him but at the other boys’ answering faces, their agreeing nods. Dung smear squirrel courage
    â€œRight,” said Sam. “You throw.” A day later, when Fat Mohan missed the ball and fell and began to pestle and cry out, Mahinda ran over and reached in to help a man in a yellow hat to his feet. Sam waited until just after he saw Mahinda’s fingers pulling away a triumphant thickness from the man’s vest before he turned Mahinda around and hit him hard