The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel (17 page)

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Authors: Rahul Bhattacharya

BOOK: The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel
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The first type were ‘Western Union people. Them does live pon
remittance like leech. You hear that biggest industry in Guyana sugar. I say no! Is Western Union!’
The second type were ‘visa queue people. Them just come from cuttin a round of the embassy or they going fuh cut a round. Is in their eyes, Pandit, focus pon the eyes!’
He held each in equal contempt. He could never be a Western Union man, a blasted parasite. As for the second, he thought of himself as a modern man, and ‘the Caribbean man is a madern man, right, a mix of culture’. And so this was the reason that he’d never leave here, never cut a round of the embassy: he did not want to leave modernness to go to backwardness.
Often he would point out someone and start a story about them.
‘That man there, he got the longest dong in Guyana.’
‘How you can be sure, Pandit?’
‘Every single lady of the night refuse the man. The moment he pull down he pant, they frighten.’
Another time he identified a chickenfucker.
‘Chickenfucker?’
‘Eh he.’
Once he regaled me with stories of a man who had more girl problems than anyone. He lived in the Kitty house that I’d lived in. He liked country gals because he could feel like a bossman around them. One such girl he reduced to tears once by asking for a blowjob. ‘Is wah job me got to do now? Wash job meh done finish, cook job meh done finish, clean job meh done finish, wha’is this blow job?’ Another girlfriend would bite him and beat him and threaten to take her own life. Often Uncle Lance was awoken at night to shouts of ‘ketch she, Lancy, ketch she,’ as the girl took position at the window.
It was possible, of course, that Uncle Lance was spinning yarns. But when we saw Kevin pass again an hour later, he confirmed the stories. He supplied one from the previous evening. A girlfriend found a condom in his bed. ‘Hear what I tell she. I tell she I was tryin it on. Oh boy.’
Like Kevin, people frequently came upstairs for a bounce, sometimes with friends and cousins, taking a call from somebody, inviting them over too. As a result our limes grew manifold; and it triggered in me at sudden moments the strange but satisfying sensation that I was now living here.
As Guyanese of all ages and genders cooked and enjoyed it, the open kitchen raged with activity. A number of pots were sparked at once, here a corn soup with dumpling, there a fish stew with okra. The range had an oven, and a trout might bake in it, heaped with eschalot and thyme and fresh juice from La Penitence, the starburst of five finger or the sour of passionfruit. A chicken might go in massaged with jerk and washed with pristine coconut milk. Sticks of cassava might be roasted on the flame and smothered with butter, people, foremost among them Lance Banarsee, fighting over the ‘bun-bun’, the charred bits. The wind blew through all the open half-doors but the flames never outed.
Afternoons ran on to evenings and nights, cackling and narrating, arriving and departing, old stalwarts, sporty lads, vibrant university girls and all in between, finishing eventually in a great drunken fornicating winedown somewhere – or else at Big Market Big Mamma’s. She was a colossal loving lady, Big Market Big Mamma, shining black in a loose T-shirt, a head wrap and a long flowing skirt, a face that wanted to feed the world and make it a happier place. She was Mama Creole. All the movements of the new world met in her. Chowmein from the Chinese; metemgee from the Africans; pepperpot from the Amerindians; roti and curry from the Indians; baked chicken from the Europeans; the menu dripping off her tongue like honey when you asked, ‘Wah you gat fuh me tonight, Big Mamma?’
Sometimes there were trips to somebody’s cousin’s friend’s plot of land by the black-water creeks off the highway, trips that killed me with nostalgia even while I lived them, driving aback a pickup, silvery rain pelting bare backs, leaves dancing on the mud trail, branches snapping back onto faces, puddles like lakes forded in the
sinking vehicle, bushcook and red rum and drenched cricket, jamoon splattered purple upon the wet soil – the remarkable freedom of a forgotten and irrelevant place on earth.
But Uncle Lance himself retreated. Said he’d been up those highways too many times.
WHEN the lull came around again I turned to de Jesus. I had met him at one of the limes. He was a Brazilian and a Guyanese, and like most such people he had bright red skin, green-brown cat eyes and enormous red calves shaped like frozen whole chicken. He came from a family of old money and influence, though he himself, incongruous to his physical giantitude, was but a thin limb of the tree. Yet it was a branch still connected, and de Jesus had people everywhere, on the coast, on the border, both the Guyanese side and the Brazilian side, as well as in several cities of that immense country. His business was to transport goods between Georgetown and the border. It was a long, rough journey, but de Jesus’s Bedford went up and down every month and de Jesus himself on it every now and then.
‘Any time you want to walk shout me,’ he had told me, and when I shouted him he was leaving the following evening. This implied certain logistical challenges. For one, I would have to travel without a visa. I therefore became determined to obtain the other mandatory document, a yellow-fever certificate.
I went down to the ministry of health to get one. There I learnt that the certificate was issued ten days after the shot. I asked the nurse if she would back-date it.
‘You going to make problem for me?’
‘No.’
She blinked slowly.
‘You does go to church?’
‘No, not really.’
‘What kind of church you doesn’t go to?’
‘Any, I guess. Why?’
‘I just like to ask.’
She pulled a face of suppressed frustration, of what is the world coming to, wrote a bribed date on the certificate, and injected me.
I gave her a raise and left.
Soon after, I was struck by a doubt. Who knew what she had injected me with? What did she care? Perhaps she was out to punish, to set right. Idly I entertained the possibility that I might collapse on the embankment and pass away. I might roll into the trench, and some days later be located by a stench. Years on I might make it to the Murder and Mystery section of the Sunday paper, where unsolved crimes were reprised over a thousand chilling words.
It was hot. Everywhere were listless people and everything felt wretchedly hot and uninteresting. It was the third week of November. Where had the last two months gone? Limes, trips, reading and writing, elaborate cooking. The year was about to clasp shut, an unforeseen situation.
As I walked in the heat, I was taken back to the hot walks in the early days. Everything, in fact, the ministry, the paperwork, was reminiscent of the early days. I considered going down to the street by the big market where Baby hung out. I discarded the thought. What would be the point?
I walked instead till German’s at the top of New Market Street and there I ate raisin rice with bora pork.
Afterwards, when I returned home, having walked foolishly once more, and switched on the standing fan and lay down in the safety of my mosquito net, I felt choked by circles – that I had gone in
circles, was still going in circles, and this was not supposed to be part of the plan.
 
 
WE left after dark. The Bedford was a magnificent clunking lump of metal with 15,000 pounds in its tray, primarily vats of petrol. De Jesus looked large, red and freshly bathed. Topless Anand Moonsammy, sporting a green beret, drove the truck. ‘How yuh do, Panjabi?’ he said to me by way of curious greeting. He had mammoth Steve Buscemi eyes that did well to stay on his face.
‘Is sheer Panjabi building the cricket stadium, you know. I meet them one time. They open up they head wrap and long out they hair and listen to they jump-up music.’
‘Bhangra?’
‘Eh he. Sheer Panjabi. Me a Madras, though.’
And for a while thereafter he told me about being a Madras, how they were going strong with worship of Kali, how blackpeople and them were close-close for they themselves were black and had kinky hair and ate beef and pork. We discussed the genesis of Moonsammy, probably derived from Munuswamy, and talked of Sonny Moonsammy, a tremendously dashing batsman I’d heard about from many an old-timer on the Corentyne. And from there we spoke of cricket, and thereafter numerous other topics, such as the Bedford, and automobiles in general – until I wrecked his mood by mentioning Uncle Lance’s theory of running cars on bush rum.
‘You hear that, Jesus,’ he snapped, ‘you see why Guyanese get reputation for chupidness? Is because some people
determined
to be chupid. Bush rum
evaporate
too quickly. A chupid man tell this man that it use for fuel. If me nah know that bush rum evaporate too quickly, me would tell a next man. Just so all Guyanese come out looking chupid.’
As Moonsammy spoke no more, sucking his teeth hard and shifting gears with a previously absent harshness, it was de Jesus all the way till Linden.
And de Jesus told tales of the supernatural. There was a man everyone knew had Kaneima. De Jesus once saw him go to a pond where nobody had ever caught a single fish and return with a string of lukanani. Another time the same man went into some bushes and came back as an anteater. Whenever I laughed during these stories, de Jesus pointed out my absurdity – ‘the man laughing!’ – to Moonsammy, who stared furiously ahead with his basketball pupils. De Jesus kept em coming. Of Ole Higue – that is, aged supernatural ladies who shed their skin and become balls of fire – he narrated the incident when a ball of fire accompanied the truck for thirty miles one night. Another time a girl in the family told people she’d seen Ole Higue outside the window and guess what – the next day her thigh was covered with blue marks. At Linden he told of the time when, outside this same stall where we were now stopped for a snack, he’d come face to face with a very black man, a very ugly man. Rain had fallen hard; de Jesus had made for the shed but the man had disappeared, no trace of him, and there was nowhere he could have gone. The man was a jumbie.
Soon after we hit the laterite trail de Jesus began snoring. I stared at the headlit mud, the red so bright in the lights, the trail so cratered, but not wet as it was the last time. I thought more of that time, of Baby and the birdman and the candidate, who’d put up a respectable show in elections after all, and splinters of spoken words and lived scenes carouselled by; and the feeling of being on a carousel, the circularity, it returned to me as we rumbled down the chilly, herby forest. We hurtled past the intersection where we had once turned towards Mahdia, where soldiers had been told I’d come for butterfly, where there had once been such a burst of rain. We pressed down towards the sensation of Brazil.
 
 
THE first blots of morning were in the night sky when we arrived at Kurupukari on the Essequibo. De Jesus looked beatific with
fulfilled slumber, Moonsammy looked deranged from his eyepopping concentration.
We waited on the wood benches of a shack. The trees were frilled with wisps of grey cloud that melted softly, discernibly into dayclean. Behind the shack, three Amerindians roasted a tatou – armadillo. A tiny tawny kitten fought off three rowdy dogs and held her own. A monkey in a cage watched with interest, letting out sharp cries. We drank tumblers of milkpowdery coffee.
At six o’clock the pontoon opened for business. The Bedford clanged slowly on to the iron, joined by a ruined red sedan, a 4×4 and a dozen pedestrians. The pontoon motored off, drifting across the river. The water was an olive green, a shade I had not seen in Guyanese water before. There was a great and hungry tranquillity in the air. Though people chatted, and the 4×4 blasted Natural Black’s Nice It Nice, the river swallowed everything.
Over on the other side the red sedan, peopled by two youngsters and a girl with a tattooed dagger plunging towards her anus, failed to get going. As de Jesus was a good man we hitched it to the labouring Bedford. We ploughed through the high forest till the ranger’s cabin at the head of the reserve. People did things to spark the vehicle but it was dead as scrap. While they played with it, I read the boards on the ranger’s lodge, telling of the four main timbers of the reserve, the greenheart, wallaba, mora and kabakali. I fell asleep.
 
 
IT was only the first sighting of the savannah, hours later, that aroused me to the special ecstasy of a journey. So fucking sudden! There we were in the trapped heat of the conserved rainforest and its trapped bird twitters, Moonsammy mate-calling the greenheart bird, de Jesus sleeping at high volume, when sheer as cliff the forest finished and there was savannah. It was the Rupununi and I don’t know what that meant but it said everything.
We paused at the forest’s abrupt edge. The mud trail snaked
through naked grassland in a dry, killing run. Things were hot, flat and infinite. The only undulations were ant hills or sandpaper trees. In the distance noncommittal shapes of mountains fluctuated in a haze. Otherwise the lines of sky and earth spread towards perpetuity.
We chugged through the dryness, though there were occasional swampy bits. In the mind’s eye there were buzzards and rancheros. The sky was a brilliant blue, the air was yellow. The trail was red, the savannah was straw-brown rather than green, and the first sight of any other colour came hours later at an unexpected restaurant in Annai, where on the back of a parked pick-up a fresh head of cow glistened in a pool of fluorescent crimson.
Beside it the hillock, meant to be dotted with flowers, was bare. I suggested to de Jesus we run up it, but on account of the flowers’ absence as much as the heat, the proposal was rejected. Instead he lay down and honked hard in a benab while Moonsammy went into the village to bone a lil wife he’d made there.
It was twenty hours on the road when we pulled into Lethem. Lethem was pure sand paths and people cycling about. Moonsammy was pleased: in the old days, whose treachery grew with every narration, it could take five days in the wet season. You had to fell trees and make bridges. We were in another continent – for it was now the continent proper and the coast was a frill that floated in confusion. The houses were flat and brick. We went to one such, de Jesus’s people, with a large yard of flambouyant trees currently out of flower, laden avocado trees, tangerine bushes beneath which were such surprises as minute turtles and a bottle of Johnnie Walker. The bottle had a few pegs left. We squeezed tangerine into it and sipped it while Clarence and Suzette, who lived in this fine yard and ran a fine little shop in the front, talked of Lethem. People of Lethem were people of the Rupununi, a mix of Amerindians, Portuguese and white settlers. Being people of the Rupununi was the only thing that meant anything to them, and Guyana and Brazil were simply ideas on either side. There were plans for the town. A library was being constructed; the first bank had just opened. Crime
had arrived, three break-ins in the last two months, and though this was mentioned with regret, it hinted at progress.
Sundown and the tingle of Brazil were getting closer. Clarence dropped us to the speedboat on the bank of the Takutu, a slim brown river one could swim across had one the leisure.
The sun was dying … and we going Brazil!
We cruised along the river for five minutes before the crossing was made, by a massive bridge that Brazil was constructing.
We stepped off … into Brazil!
I saw the lemon yellow painted on a low, round flagstone.
Brasil.
We drank Nova Schin, Brazilian beer, watery after Banks, but sold by a Brazilian woman under a Brazilian mango tree, and it felt pretty swell.
De Jesus pointed to the Policia Federal station up the slope. It was a formidable edifice of white concrete and glass. Guyana had not even a watchie and a shack. Guyanese were allowed to stamp in at the checkpost, but my passport was Indian. Hence, my only option was to pass for a Brazilian. But things were tight at the checkpost. There had been an incident a few days ago. The head of a water company had been abducted; afterwards his body was found in a culvert. They suspected that the killers had escaped into Guyana.
Knocking back a second tin, de Jesus considered the vehicles making the crossing. There was a minivan, filled with fake Nikes and the like. Sometimes they were busted but mostly they were allowed in because Georgetown was so much closer than any of Brazil’s ports. The other vehicle, a jeep, was Ricardo’s. De Jesus knew the federals but not as well as Ricardo. The plan was to get into Ricardo’s car, I in the back, and they wouldn’t think to ask for documentation.
At the checkpost the conversation was long and in Portuguese and made me a trifle insecure. It was dark when we pulled out of the station, on to: beautifully paved tarmac! Manicured bush in the median! Streetlights!
We glided twenty minutes to the village of Bonfim. I was dropped off at a yellow posada on the outskirts. De Jesus said he’d come back for me.
My room was a 12x12 furnace with a chair, a standing fan and nothing else. The bed was a mattress mounted on a concrete plinth, slowly releasing the heat of the day. The toilet paper was thin and fell apart at touch.
I sat in the doorway looking into the open prairie night. A woman in a Brasil vest and big orange hair appeared from down the corridor and said something I didn’t understand. I wanted to make love to her at once. However, a bald man drove in and they began speaking and thereafter the bald man left. Then two youths came in and they all drove off together laughing.

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