Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Food and Drink

Feasts for the common beggars

Fittingly for a novel set in the green and dirt world of a poor boy born to a poorer farmer in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) of the 1900s - more so for one with Beggar's Feast as its title and overarching metaphor - food and feasting, satirical, symbolic and otherwise, pop up early and often in Randy Boyagoda's wonderful new book.

Within the first hundred words, Boyagoda, one of the brighter lit-stars at this year's Whistler Readers & Writers Festival (October 14-16), introduces us to a young boy, known only as "the boy" until later nicknamed, humiliated, by his teacher-monk as Squirrel, an eight-year-old version of the protagonist, self-named, self-made Sam Kandy, catching a glimpse of a rare treat clutched in his father's hand to entice him to chase a crow and prove himself - a piece of jaggery, a coarse, hard brown sugar made in South Asia from palm tree sap.

But poor Squirrel doesn't get the jaggery. He fails to frighten away the crow, so the sugar-candy goes to younger brothers. Another failed attempt on this ninth birthday means that year's proffered bowl of white curd and treacle gets dumped on the ground.

By contrast, the village astrologer's husband, in a position of power leavened with the potential of hope as apparent as the lack of same in the lives of the boy and his family, scores when he comes to visit the boy's family at lunchtime, as is his habit.

The lunch is of "rice, a thumb-print of dried fish for his father's plate, dhal, limp long slices of salt-and-peppered papaya and combs of finger-long plantains." The father's plate of food goes to the visitor.

Food and how it's negotiated, desired, ignored lives large and reveals much about power, classicism and plain humanness in this boy's world conjured up in a long ago colonial Ceylon, conquered by the British East India Company, coveted by the Dutch for its cinnamon bark.

Another brilliant new novel by a Canadian author - some say our preeminent one - who also has Sri Lankan blood in his veins, configures the world of another young Ceylonese boy, this one on a 1950s voyage hinged on a metaphor of dining and position.

The cat's table of Michael Ondaatje's finely written The Cat's Table is originally a German expression for that table at the edge of the banquet hall, at the back of the dining room where society's odds and sods, the misfits and outcasts are seated, furthest from the brightest, the prettiest, the star attractions, the most socially powerful and desirable. Today we call them celebrities.

Do you dread finding your place card at the cat's table? Or are you thrilled? Or would you rather be invited to a beggar's banquet?

Beggar's Feast , on the other hand, has at its heart a metaphor at least as old as the Talmud. The idea of a beggar's feast, a beggar's banquet, is woven through myriad cultures and stories and takes on as many forms and meanings, some direct and unveiled, others satirical and risible, even mysterious.

From the Babylonian Talmud, compiled in the third to fifth centuries, we have the story of a beggar at a banquet. He comes to stand at the door of a feast a king is holding for his servants. Give me one piece of bread! the beggar demands.

When no one notices him, he pushes in and walks up to the king, saying, my lord and king! Is it too hard for you to give me one piece of bread from the banquet you've made?

We humans are intrigued by the image of a poor, hungry, beggarly soul inserting him- or herself into the centre of a feast to which they've not been invited, boldly exposing the inequities of the entire situation, as well as our own subsequent moral judgment on the merit and equities, or lack thereof, of the societal juxtapositions and the request itself.

Most social codes teach us at a very young age that it's rude to ask when it comes to food. To ask for the jaggery or chocolate bar you're desperate for at a young eight (although "the boy" does ask!). To invite oneself to the table, cat's or otherwise, or to the gala you didn't receive an invitation for, is to upset the social order forever, as Sam Kandy is determined to do.

At the same time, most social codes build in ways and means to feed and be fed that transcend the order itself, as long as certain conventions are met.

The village astrologer's husband in Beggar's Feast doesn't invite himself for lunch, but rather happens to show up at lunchtime. The young Squirrel boy, escaped from the temple to forge his way in the world, is a blank slate, a tabula rasa , for all those who help him on his way, making merit for their worldly sins and shortcomings by feeding or otherwise helping him, as they are obliged and able to do with any monk or novice who's taken the mysterious vows behind temple doors.

In more contemporary times, we've come to attach somewhat different meanings to the beggar's feast, or beggar's banquet, variously spelled as a plural or singular possessive, or without an apostrophe showing any possession at all, as in the Rolling Stones' '60s album, Beggars Banquet.

Rather than a nod to the beggar peering in at the banquet door, beggar's feasts today are more likely to be satirical events that turn the idea of exclusivity on end. A beggar's feast is an entire banquet hall of cat's tables, with food, and sometimes costumes, that mimic but don't use the time, effort and costly goods needed for a feast held by "toffee-nosed" upper classes, to use an old British throwback.

The uproarious "Beggars At The Feast" chorus in Les Miserables could well be about middle class Canadians and Americans today, and not necessarily the ones bold enough to Occupy Wall Street. "Everywhere you go, law-abiding folk doing what is decent, but they're mostly broke!..." sings Monsieur Thenardier, in his own way, a Kandy-like character in the stage adaptation of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables .

More simply, a beggar's feast or banquet can also refer to the treasures you find in the common life, even when you're a poor beggar as most of us may well be. And with a little digging, we're even revealed to be as silly as old Sam Kandy, the beggar foolish enough to return to his village to beg at his own door.

 

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who once had a beggar's bowl.