After following the convoy from the airport, so many fenders and bumpers scratched, so many headlights and taillights shattered, Sam and Bopea were brought to a Negombo church square already teeming with more of the same people. The driver of the van that Bopea had hit came to them with bottles of Lion beer. Sam declined. Bopea took both and, suddenly full of festal courage, followed his new friend into the crowd. Standing alone, Sam listened to welcome-home speeches from members of the business community and from the president of the Negombo Bharatha Association, and to a series of solemn, absolutely shouted recitations of Shakespeare by uniformed schoolboys. All for a man who looked about Sam’s age, but with broader shoulders and softer eyes and a straighter back, dressed in a much newer suit, white, and he wore it with a white shirt and brown-and-white shoes. He told the crowd he was glad to be home and thanked God and our blessed Saviour and all his dear friends for watching over his family while he was away. To great applause he said that patience always pays, and then he climbed into the cab of the Jesus-painted cement truck and turned on the mixer and every boy tried to join him and soon all you could see was the gold of his watch, his heavy wristlet, his rings, as he waved to the crowd that waved back until the night’s first crackers were lit and then everyone clapped and covered their ears, shaking their heads at how loud and how many were set off, how many! Three years away, the company all but dead while he was gone, a fleet of hired vans to have repaired, and see how much money De Moraes still could burn!

To Sam it was sterile smoke, empty noise. He pitied the fine suit crushed inside the truck cab. But later, in the family compound, the man seemed not to care as it crumpled still more from all the hugging and waving and clapping and singing along. Sam watched and listened and tried to understand what kind of world this was, what kind of Saturn-upon-Mercury could so command its mad joy. Eventually De Moraes removed his coat and tie and collar, and then, to applause and like-minded gestures, his shirt and shoes. Sam thought at first he was behaving low, like a hired driver at the end of day, or like a man would when alone in his bedroom just before sleep. But then Sam watched De Moraes move through the compound in his banyan and bare feet, so many always gathered around him as he called out to others and drank and was fed by endless old women’s hands, joined one dance and led another, the steps coming to him as if he’d just walked in from the Brown’s Beach Hotel. There was no space between him and them, none given and none demanded. Here was a man elaborated into a crowd elaborated into a man. Sam watched all of it from a side-garden, standing beside a barren bird pedestal, smoking and turning down how many invitations to join meals, Jim Reeves songs, rosaries, thanksgiving novenas, carom, crackers, darts, epic retellings of the extraordinary pile-up on the airport road, new meals, the same songs.

Sam’s children didn’t even send him triumphant crates from wherever, from whoever, they now were. And when he went walking through his village these past five years, he was given wide but glowering margins by men and women who hadn’t seen a movie or a fortnightly doctor in five years, whose children were still without a government schoolmaster and whose paddy sweat wasn’t paying for a new village water tank but apparently for airplane tickets to London, and all of which was Sam’s doing even if they could tell he too had been lately lowered. No more did he go and come from the city with bootfuls of loveshine, no more new wives or vehicles; he didn’t even know anyone to get a phone number for the walauwa while across the main road at the temple the chief monk could trunk-dial all the way to Colombo. The most Sam could imagine now was his own bier, that it burn higher, longer, grander than any before it. All his sixty-five years of steel and pride, fever and speed, would make a grand plumage of rich black smoke that would be seen across the island before all of it fell upon the village green, conferring upon that blackbird field its right recompense. What triumph that was to dream of, and Sam finally did dream when night became the blue before morning and he was too tired to keep watching Xavier De Moraes keep going and so he left the dark-lit side-garden, not knowing he had been watched the whole time. Sam lay until morning on a cot in a spare bedroom somewhere deep in the compound, where, eventually, drunken Bopea was brought and dropped and stretched out against a wall like a warehouse beggar, snoring but still holding a bread-ring in his hand. There Sam waited through the rest of the night in a broken sleep broken by the roaring life outside his window, by still more firecrackers, and yes by envy for all of it made into the vain consoling firedream of his own someday great burning. And when Sam went outside the next day there he was, already awake, in fresh and pressed clothes, clean shaved and sipping tea in the side-garden. There he was, watching birds light upon a stand that, barren the night before, was now full and brilliant with gathering green and yellow and a fine blue-feathered fellow as well. De Moraes was standing beside a girl who must have been about Hyacinth’s age, only she was holding her father’s arm, and she was looking at her father, and she was smiling.

Xavier saw him approaching from the lane between the two houses in front of his own, a stranger in scuffed shoes and a fine suit not black anymore so much as black sheen, under which was a white shirt whose collar was wilted and splayed. He pitied the fellow his wearing it, the needful pride you could tell he took in still wearing it, in the years and years of proven expectation that others would give way to the cut of the cloth itself. But his eyes weren’t so challenging anymore, his step not so hard. He was favouring one hip, more from the habit of pain it seemed than from pain itself. His hair was smoothed back by hand, his face salted with old man’s stubble. A tired old bird. During the party, one of De Moraes’s drivers had befriended his driver and asked him a question about his boss for every drink and ring of breudher cake he wanted (the fellow ate like he’d never had butter on bread before). By the time the driver was carried to a room, it was clear his man wasn’t a minister or a minister’s man or a rival cement company’s agent or a debt collector; he wasn’t the phantom father of a phantom daughter demanding money for a phantom baby phantom-fathered by one of De Moraes’s sons. Other than shaking his head to all such queries, all the drunken driver would say of his Mahatteya was that he was called Sam Kandy. He said the name like that should have been story enough. De Moraes had never heard of him, but even to watch his approach, he could tell whatever threat this threadbare man could have posed had long since passed.

“Good morning!” he called out.

“Good morning,” Sam said.

“I hope you enjoyed our party last night. I am told your driver certainly did, no?”

“Yes, he is my driver. Right. Thank you. About my vehicles—”

“Fine vehicles they are. I saw both this morning in the car park when I was coming from Mass. But not so fine just now, no? Rose darling, do you know what this gentleman managed to do yesterday? I am told he managed to bust one of our hired vans and two of his own vehicles on the airport road. One man, three vehicles, all busted. Remarkable, no?”

She nodded at her father. She did not look at Sam. What kind of unmarried daughter looks at a stranger before her father? Having already looked at Sam the night before, having watched him smoke in her father’s garden.

“What’s more remarkable, Rose darling, is that I think he’s come to ask me to pay for it.”

Sam said nothing.

“But you see he is a gentleman! He won’t speak until proper introductions have been made, isn’t it? Right. I am Xavier Joseph De Moraes.”

“I am Sam Kandy.”

“Yes, I know that.”

“How do you know?” There was formal suspicion in his voice, but more curiosity and also, barely, pride.

“Your driver. Where are you from, Mr. Kandy?”

“That’s right. He is my driver. And I am Sam Kandy.”

“Yes. Are you from Colombo?”

“He is my driver. And I am Sam Kandy. And both my vehicles, my old red Morris and my new Hillman, are damaged because your vehicles stopped on the airport road.”

“What you mean to say is that you hit your own vehicle and your driver hit one of our vans. Do you expect me to pay for all of it?”

“What would a headman and a gentleman do?”

“Yes, a headman and a gentleman would offer to pay for what he has done. Do you agree, Mr. Kandy?”

Sam looked away, thinking now of home. Home! Because at least upcountry sun was merciful at first, burning away the morning mist upon the fields and then throbbing through the trees before it came for you at the break of day. Here there were trees too, but they were palms, bushy-topped nepotists with their shade. Squinting in bright morning, Sam could find no great ramparts of skyward green surrounding this town, this compound, this wide house, this blooming side-garden, these people standing in full sun asking him questions to catch him yes, but catch him how and could he catch them first could he even, still, catch? Sam said nothing.

“Do you agree, Mr. Kandy?” the man asked again. “Because you see, I was in the front van and when we stopped, my van hit nothing.”

“But they are all your vans. All of this is yours, no?”

“No, Mr. Kandy.” De Moraes smiled. “All of this is hers, is theirs.” His hand extended toward the many-roomed house behind him before sweeping to show the other houses surrounding them, all many-roomed. “And I am hers too. I am theirs too.” Sam could tell the man had said such things before. Yes, but there was more in his voice than the obvious ploy this was. There was also pride and relief, certainty, certainty of place. “And that is why,” De Moraes continued, “I shall ask my daughter to decide. Rose darling, who should pay?”

Her father had asked her that question at eight and nine, at ten, twenty, twenty-five, and now, at thirty. He had never kept an office anywhere but in the family compound and sometimes, when men would come to see him, strangers dressed either much better or much worse than he was, Xavier would call one of the children to stand beside him and meet this nice gentleman. Then he would tell the man that all was theirs, that he was theirs too, before asking the child, Darling, who should pay? The first few times, Rose and her brothers and sisters and cousins would race to his side when he called. But as the prize became more widely known and won—it was either a single sweet or the latest found peacock feather, and only after the purgatory of standing around while adults spoke and then answering a question from Daddy while the stranger never once looked at you—the older boys would not come from their cricket when their father called, nor would the younger boys abandon their chance to retrieve boundary balls and then heave their whole lives into the ball’s flight back to the bowler. And when they realized there were no boys to race, the girls would not leave their games of netball and French cricket, either. And so eventually it was only Rose. She always went, not only because leaving netball and French cricket were no great trials for her, not only because going spared her sisters bottom slaps and her brothers thunderclaps and later because they were auditioning wedding bands and picking bouquets and fabric for going-away dresses and later holding crying babies and busy threatening their own children to eat or sleep: Yes to all of that, but Rose went most because she could not stand her Daddy calling and no one coming, his waiting in vain, and she loved to hear him tell that all belonged to her, that he did. And so, by twenty and well past twenty, her father had long since called for her and her alone. And while her sisters were called about boys, Rose was called and asked the question she’d been answering her whole remembered life. He should pay, Daddy.

Only this time Rose was not so certain, so ready. Joyful yes that her father had come home, but she was thirty. This morning, with her father at last come home and taking his tea in the birdsinging side-garden with the world again right and full, only now did Rose know that she needed more than a father. Her sisters’ houses, her cousins’, even her mother’s squirrel cages: they teemed with life. And she had been sleeping on the same cot since she was ten. She had slept there also the night before, after watching this sudden new stranger smoking in the side-garden, shaking his old handsome head according to whatever principle also governed his wearing a worn-down suit her father would have long ago given to the cook’s husband. Standing there like that. The poor fool.

“I shall give my answer tomorrow,” Rose said.

“Tomorrow?” her father gasped.

“I cannot go and come from my village in one day,” Sam warned.

“Then you shall stay,” said Rose.

On the fourteenth morning, Sam was already waiting for them in the side-garden. Xavier could tell what his oldest girl was doing, what she wanted. At least, by that morning, he was willing to admit to himself, if not to anyone else, what had been evident to the whole watching world on the prior mornings Sam had come, walking faster each time and by now in scuffed shoes that were daily spit-shined, an old suit daily stone-pressed, his hair combed into a crest and his creased face shaved clean of its salt. And each time Rose told him to stay until tomorrow and the next morning he would walk even faster, faster, faster, until the fourteenth dawn when Sam was already there among the birds lighting upon their pedestal, smiling at Rose who was smiling at him as she had never before smiled at anyone, not even, no, not even at her father when he called and she always came. But how many girls this fellow had smiled at, Xavier could not tell. How many rich men’s daughters? And yet, Xavier could tell he was not smiling with extortionate plotting but with nervousness and bliss and idiocy, with the joy of a girl smiling at him, and in this alone was the fellow like a young suitor, a proper suitor, a hopeful groom for Xavier De Moraes’s eldest daughter.

After lunch on that fourteenth day, father and daughter left the compound. Rose’s mother had been on the other side of the house, feeding her dandos, the only ones in the world whose chatter did not stop when she came near these last thirteen morning-noonand-nights. Now, at last, on the fourteenth day, Vivimarie thought, as she followed the beehive of her husband’s Austin driving out of the compound, he was doing something. Ask him to support action against Mrs. Bandaranaike, the trucks are running. Tell him to fly away when the action fails, the bags are packed. But it was two weeks before he’d do something for his daughter’s good name, his wife’s, his own! But because she was speaking neither to her husband nor to her eldest daughter at the time, Vivimarie De Moraes did not know that Xavier drove with Rose to the Grand Street Church in Negombo. At that midday hour the church was mostly praying widows and napping madmen. Kneeling together, father and daughter prayed opposing prayers and lit opposing candles until Xavier was noticed by a priest walking past their pew. Others soon came. Soon there was a crowd congratulating him on his blessed return and apologizing for Father Marcelline’s not blessing the truck, which they would have been honoured to have blest if only asked, and meanwhile, just as she would when she was a girl and her father was caught to such talking, Rose followed the churchbirds wheeling between the great white rafters above them. She prayed that her father’s heart would not harden, and she prayed about Sam Kandy, for Sam Kandy, that she was right about Sam Kandy: that he was what he seemed to be from the first she had seen him, standing alone in the side-garden that night her father had come home: that he was not even God’s lonely man: that he was no one’s: that he had been no one’s for so long he would stay day after day only to hear her say stay another day. Rose had never known a man to step taller, faster, finer because she, not she and her father not she and her sisters but she, Rose, was standing there waiting for him. She was herself too old to wait any longer.

“Rose darling, there are so many suitable boys—” Xavier began, after they left the church and passed through the beggar’s gauntlet to the car.

“No, Daddy, there are not so many boys waiting to marry a thirty-year-old girl.”

“You come from a good family, a known family, Rose darling. I will make inquiries—”

“Now you want to make inquiries? Why, so you can find me a fat Bharatha widower with a good name and a house full of small fellows, who has seen me with my sisters’ children in the church square and been told by the parish widows what a good daughter I am and so wants the same for his children, the same for him?”

“When you were younger, you never once asked that we make inquiries about any boy. Your sisters did. You never asked.” He sighed. “Darling, also, you were never asked about, darling. I am sorry. I am sorry. But you never said anything and so many years have passed and all this time we have thought—”

“What, Daddy, that I would be happy for the rest of my life to get a sweet from you when I say the other fellow should pay?”

“Aiyo Rose, I have only come home.” He stopped the car beside a fruit stand whose seller, an old woman in ragged purple, smiled scattershot teeth in vain.

“This is not the time and this is certainly not the man! I have only come home!”

“I am very happy you have come home, Daddy, but you are not the man either.”

“This is murdering your poor mother!”

“But when I give her more grandchildren?”

“You think you can have children with this fellow! You want to make me a grandfather with someone else’s grandfather! This is madness! He is my age! How can my sweetest smartest girl suddenly be so stupid? What do we know about this fellow? What if he is already married, if he has children older even than you? He is my age! We cannot know what he wants from you, from us, from me. I have more than just rivals in this country now, don’t forget.”

“And you think some enemy has sent an old man to take away your only unmarried daughter? What kind of rivals are these? But you can find out about him, no?”

“Yes. Well, I don’t know. Who’s to say?”

“Will you try?”

“No, Rose, I won’t. I am your father. You are my daughter. This is my family. No.”

“And yet you will try all for country, you will try all for church, for concrete, for everyone else in the compound. You will not try once, for me?”

“But what have I told you, for so many years, darling? I am yours! Everything here is yours! And you want to give all of it to an old man in an old suit who crashes good cars and won’t pay? How in the name of God and our blessèd Saviour, after seeing this fellow for five minutes these last fourteen mornings, can you think you are ready to see him every morning noon and night for the rest of your life?”

“I am.”

“When just on the other side of a parapet wall down this road, you have everyone? There is nothing sadder than an unknown man, Rose. Believe it, I know. But the whole world is there for us, for you, and it always will be. We cannot know if this fellow will get in his car and go the moment I fix his fender, or if he will go in five years, with all your wedding gold, if he lives that long.”

“Do you think he’s a rogue, Daddy?”

“I don’t know what he is. What I know, Rose darling, is that now, again, you have all of us. Why would you take him over all of us? How could you?” her father asked, his voice at last failing.

“Yes, I have all of you,” Rose answered carefully. Knowing that if ever she was to be more than a daughter now would not be the time to cry in her father’s arms. “And you have me. You have all always had me, and I have always had you, and I have been happy that way. I am happy that way.”

“Then why are we even talking such madness? Send the fellow off tomorrow morning. I will even pay for his cars. And then we can look into this properly for you. Patience pays.”

“No, Daddy. I have paid too much patience while all of you have learned what more there is. And I don’t, I, I never have, and very soon I never will.”

“But aiyo why does it have to be with this fellow?”

“Will you make the inquiries if I tell you?”

“Yes.”

“You give me your word you will send someone to find out about him?”

“You have your father’s word. Now tell me why it has to be this fellow.”

“I shall tell you tomorrow.”

After they returned to the compound, Xavier called trusted men to the car park. Minutes later, Vivimarie learned the instructions: get the fellow’s driver drunk again, get the name of the man’s village, go and make all necessary inquiries. That her husband was even considering this made Vivimarie fall martyr. Attended by aunts, sisters, parish allies, she didn’t leave her bedroom for three days, where she meanwhile stormed heaven to know what she’d done to have a daughter treat her so, let alone a husband come home after so many years and marry off their eldest girl to an old man whose only known people were a drunk driver and two busted motorcars. A few mornings later, the inquirers returned and reported that no one in the man’s village would speak, whether for or against him, that they would only point to the walauwa where he lived alone: no wife, no children in there. The next morning, the old fellow was invited to the verandah for tea. He was allowed to sit across from Rose in her best dress for twenty minutes while Xavier sat beside her, trying not to tear his newspaper in half, and just as she had done with all the other suitors for their other daughters, Vivimarie watched from the dining room with a pearl rosary wrapped through her fingers that was, this time, apparently, useless. And so when Rose and Sam sat together that morning, the rest of the shocked near world knew a courtship had begun. If not why, if not how, if not, really, even with whom.

Two nights later, men came for Sam. They were certain this was extortion. They came most of them drunk, carrying broomsticks and cricket bats, bottles, belts, crackers, and messy torches made of old banyans and kitchen rags soaked in kerosene and wrapped around lengths of suriya wood. They called him out, loud and threatful and tearful, lyrical like Hindi movie heroes. Rose heard from her window and ran past her mother standing in the threshold of her own room to ask her father to stop them. Xavier stayed on the bed, also listening. Rose said if he did not go, the blood would be on her hands, her hands. Her mother came into the room and, as her first words to either husband or daughter in two weeks, she told Xavier to stop them. When he was certain of what his wife was actually saying, what she was assenting to, Xavier dressed and went. Rose asked her mother why. Her mother told Rose that Rose had a stupid heart and a stupid father for listening to her stupid heart but no daughter of hers would have blood on her hands. God did not make daughters to have blood on their hands. Then, in a different tone, Vivimarie said, “God did not make wives to have blood on their hands either.”

While mother and daughter were speaking, Xavier ordered the useless torches doused before the whole compound burned down. Then he went in to see Sam, who was sitting on his cot. Bopea was standing at the far end of the room. Both were smoking. Robert saw Sam’s suit laid out on a chair beside his bed, the shoes underneath, ready for another morning.

“Mahatteya, please,” Bopea pleaded with Xavier, “I am only the driver. My son is studying abroad. Aiyo please, I am only here until the vehicle is repaired.”

“You don’t deserve my daughter, Kandy.”

“I don’t deserve anything that’s come to me in this life.”

“No, not anything. I don’t know what you deserve and don’t deserve because I don’t know you. You aren’t known. You don’t deserve my daughter.”

“No. No, I don’t.”

“Then tell me one reason I should stop them from thrashing you.”

“I can’t.”

“Truth? You can think of no reason? None? What kind of man are you? Every morning you are asked to stay another morning and you won’t even ask me to stop them for her sake?”

“I need to ask you for that, for her sake?”

“NO!” Xavier yelled, a good father trying to be a good father and defeated and trying, trying to make of this defeat a triumph. Never mind the mob was his own flesh and blood and he would be standing at its head save the blood that then would be on her hands, her hands. But what father ever thought any fellow deserved his daughter? And at least this one was old enough to admit the same. God help her. He left the room and told the crowd to go. The next day, Vivimarie told Rose that she would convert the old fellow and that the children would, of course, be raised in the Church. She also told Rose how many of her squirrels had been drowned in Negombo lagoon that morning, in bags tied around collars of Lourdes cement. Rose asked her to repeat the number of squirrels her mother expected her now to match. Vivimarie smiled and wished her daughter good luck and Godspeed, then called for her dressmaker.

No crowd gathered again in the compound until three days before the wedding. For the engagement dance, the great drum was brought out and heated and a dozen women were called from the parish and given cloth and jacket to play it until the crackers were lit. Xavier took Sam round to meet all of them who weeks before had wanted to hammer him but now offered baroque toasts and congratulations, sweet words about Rose, manly questions about the upcountry land he was said to hold off the Kurunegala Road and about his cars, lately repaired. In the end, De Moraes had paid. No one called it a dowry, at least not in his hearing. He said he paid because he wouldn’t have his eldest daughter driven to her wedding in a brand-new vehicle—the Leyland cement truck was outfitted with a fine rounded Burgomaster chair for the bride, its mixer garlanded and repainted bridal white—only to be driven home in a wreck. There was no wedding Mass. Not even Rose’s mother could persuade him, or was it plead with him feed him pray with him pray over him pray about him catechize him threaten him threaten to pray more feed more plead more catechize more, to convert. But the family had insisted on something more than fifteen minutes in front of the Negombo Registrar of Births and Marriages, and Rose told Sam that even if he would not convert he could at least kneel beside her for the vows. And he did, Sam Kandy knelt, with wan Bopea looking on from the groom’s pew, the lone pew reserved for the groom’s side because Bopea was the only person who attended the wedding from Sam’s people.

The rest of St. Anthony’s was full of De Moraeses, save the back pews where sat the parish widows who attended every good family’s wedding, only this time not only to see how decked in gold was the bride, or to cry during the presentation of the bouquet to the Virgin, or to cry during the Ave Maria. Of course they did all of this at Rose’s wedding too, glad the eldest girl, a very good girl, her father’s girl, was at last getting married, if not as she should have married even if she was short and thirty: to a known Bharatha boy from a known good family, a boy with blood and a name that went back across the salt-and-pearl water to Rig Veda times, whence first their people had come to Ceylon. But no, Rose De Moraes married no Bharatha and no boy. And so this time the womenfolk of the parish sat in the back pews for the wedding mostly to see if the story coming out of the De Moraes compound in the days before the wedding was true: that Xavier De Moraes had left his smarts abroad during his exile and Vivimarie De Moraes had drowned her tongue with her giant squirrels, because otherwise how to explain Rose’s groom, how old he was, how unpeopled, how un-baptized, how universally unknown save the name he gave, the cars he crashed, his driver, his suit, his rumoured village. But now Sam Kandy was known again in the world, was known beyond his own conceiving, was a smiling grey groom standing on the church steps beside his triple-decker new wife, and she was smiling too.