The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel (19 page)

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Authors: Rahul Bhattacharya

BOOK: The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel
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‘The coast up over
so
.’
When she pointed, it looked pointed. Her arm stretched out long and taut. Her palm arched and her fingers curled. The tip of her acrylic nail cut through the air like a spear.
‘What design you got on the nail?’
‘O meh mamma! There you go again with question.’
‘If you get it done you must be happy people notice.’
‘You noticin too much.’
‘I hear it’s painful.’
‘You must get it done and see.’
She giggled.
‘I’m staying by Suzette’s shop. The green room by the avocado tree.’
‘Uh huh.’
She giggled again. The giggles were unnerving and encouraging.
‘I got to go now,’ she said, returning the slippers to the rack.
It came as a rude surprise.
‘Of course. Bye.’
‘Layta.’
‘You coming to the Frontier tonight?’
‘Maybe.’
‘You must come.’
‘Why?’ she asked with deliberate blankness.
I hesitated. ‘You can show me the acrylic design in the moonlight.’
‘Well,’ she said coolly, ‘maybe I’ll see you there.’
She went off up the broad, darkening path in the finishing day, puffs of red sand rising as she walked. I watched her exquisitely balanced silhouette, slim, swaying, bouncing mane, Caribbean derriere, electrified.
 
 
WE ate tough beef and farine at dinner, waited, got dressed and waited again for the hour to grow sufficiently late – a routine which seemed to spoof the scale of this savannah outpost.
But down at the Frontier I understood. This was a Saturday night crowd. SUVs screeched up in the sand, their sound systems competing with the Frontier’s – Mavado on the Frontier’s, Evanescence from an SUV, the overlap a phantasma, a hideous dream. There was an unlikeliest hipness to the spot. There were aid workers from Britain, Brazilian youth from Bonfim, four bank employees from Georgetown, several Rupununi sons and daughters.
Moonsammy was there as well, talking hard with toxic eyes, following the batty of every girl who passed him. He’d had a productive couple of days in Lethem. He’d stood third in the lolo competition at the Chineeman shop.
‘When it small it called a peepee,’ he leant against a car and explained to a set of youthmen. ‘When it big it call a lolo. When it extra large it called a dunlop. Some man got a lazy dunlop, though.’
I looked into the crowd outside, stepped inside the premises and let my eyes casually scan the garden.
No, not yet.
I got a rum and went back out.
‘A buckman win fust, blackman win second.’
‘Buckman win blackman?’
‘Eh he. Blackman chupidness compare to buckman. Blackman
saaf
in the middle, bai. Lazy dunlop.’
Over on the other side of the sandy road de Jesus exchanged
hugs with enormous people. Their necks were thick, contained by big gold chains. Looking at de Jesus’s neck I concluded it was bigger than my head. I tried to put across the observation, but the music was too loud, and few things can make a man feel as immeasurably foolish as yelling ‘your neck is bigger than my head’ in the savannah and not even being heard.
I took a walk up and down the lane.
No.
Everywhere individuals were looking interested in each other, all kinds of individuals, with pincered eyebrows, with chipped teeth, with heavy flanks, with tattooed forearms or swollen biceps, people with the honest desire to play the game.
I tried to look like I was liming easy. Inside, I was beginning to wilt.
I got another five-year.
I chatted with the British girls. They had blunt bobs, pert noses, open eyes. Conversation was terribly deflating for an odd reason. They only spoke in pairs.
‘The fishing was bloody brilliant, wasn’t it?’
‘You’ve really got to experience this once, don’t you?’
A second person always reaffirmed these statements. Every single time. ‘Could you please not do that,’ I almost told them. ‘We could, couldn’t we?’ I heard them say back, ‘Yes, we could.’ It had a disastrous effect on me. With every reaffirmation my soul sank, and after about twenty minutes there wasn’t much of it left.
I lost appetite for all conversation. I drifted away.
The moon was high and shining, eating up the stars around it. I switched to Banks. I thought of the lad in Canal who could drink countless Banks. Under a tree I drank one to him.
Looked around. Took a few rounds of the garden.
I returned to Moonsammy, who was now reduced to holding court for a single youthman. Despite the dwindled attendance there was no slacking on his part. ‘Face and waist, cooliegal win the race,’ he recited, ‘bubby and arse, blackgal kick she rass.’
The youthman nodded.
‘Coolieman got to learn from blackman how to take care of a gal. That is why cooliegal going to blackman. He bring she a lil chinee food, get she a lil earrings, take she out fuh a lil dancin. That is when she do everything for you. Me neighba a blackman get a coolie wife. He say the lady roti like the pages of the Bible.’
I went to de Jesus. He held a Nova Schin in one hand and a Banks in another and told extravagant accounts of our Boa Vista sneak-in. It was an unrecognisable excursion which included naked women in the hotel pool and federals giving us chase through the goldwasher’s park. He tried to involve me in the telling, but my anti-participation in what I’d ordinarily have jumped into with relish was brutal.
I looked everywhere, in the bushes where people had begun to make out, at the deejay’s table, in the cars.
‘F.B.I.’ I heard Moonsammy say somewhere, ‘Flat Butt Indian. That is wah we did call them. But now you find even coolie growin big beattie.’
I left suddenly. I returned to my room beside the avocado tree by the gate, and there I lay in sweat for several hours, feeling inadequate, dull and charmless, acutely aware of my lack of confidence, of the fragility I tried always to keep hidden.
RETURNING to the room after breakfast I noticed folded paper under the door. In light swishing crayon lines of yellow and green was drawn a bird, curving beak, long trailing tail. A macaw. There were no more than a dozen strokes. It was eloquence.
Below, in neat blocks an address was provided. At the bottom, in the petite running hand of a whispered note:
Get me a fone. Jan.
I stared at it for a whole minute. And then, drained in the porous night, I treated it with deliberate nonchalance: that is, I stared at it no further.
It was a day of dry wind. Sand blew and settled on the skin. You could draw on your forearms. I spent most of the day in the hammock slung between coconut trees trying to read. I could not concentrate.
Janelle. January.
The Bedford had a car to transport to town. From time to time I went to assist in the loading and strapping, an act which accrued no discernible benefit to the process. It was a precarious affair. The vehicle, a white Seventies kind of hatchback, was as long as the tray of the truck and so permanently on the edge of catastrophe. It took till evening to secure it properly, and even then the straps required tightening every hour.
At the fuel-seller’s Moonsammy sucked a pipe and siphoned a vat into the truck. De Jesus and I took the cabin. A Wapishana youth lounged with furniture inside the strapped vehicle.
We left Lethem as we’d come, in the hour approaching sundown. Soon the light died on the Rupununi. There was a hatch above my head. I climbed up through it and sat on the roof to watch.
The whole round sun glowed red on the flat expanse, bold as a bloodprick on a finger. Swiftly the colour broke around the edges into a plum post-dusk. Within fifteen minutes the big black night fell on the earth that had burned all day with a hiss. Thereafter only blackness remained except for dotted orange flares of savannah fires.
We stopped for the night at the restaurant in Annai we’d stopped at on the way in. We ate sandwiches, sausage, drank coffee. We slung up hammocks between pillars in the open corridor.
Sleep was impossible, first because of the coffee, then the cold.
The wind howled down the savannah. I was still with my thin camouflage hammock from the Baby days, and I had no other sheet to cover with. De Jesus was housed in his heavy Amerindian hammock, so large that even a man of his size could fold over the sides to make a blanket.
I shivered. The wind kept blasting across the plain. It gathered a tunnelled intensity in the corridor. I put on a second shirt, a pair of socks, and finally shoes, but the wind pierced everything.
In the middle of the night a bus of music screeched in and expelled squealers. Venezuelans, de Jesus said. He’d been snoring till then and was not happy to be disturbed. Two couples, frolicking upon the wooden tables, created such a racket that he stunned them and the entire endless savannah by yelling in Spanish. Afterwards he told me he’d threatened to pulp them with a stool. A stool! Of all the things de Jesus liked recounting, he took most pleasure in narrating how he, a calm man, a reasonable man, was provoked to such a degree by somebody that he threatened them and scared the shit out of them.
The Venezuelan couples piped down after the threat. They lay
atop tables, giggling, being lovesome in the cold. The night blew bitter and teary.
When the cold got into my bones I went to the Bedford. I was hoping for room in the hatchback, but the Wapishana youth and the furniture had filled it up.
I climbed into the cabin. Here dangled Moonsammy. His trick was to tie the hammock around the roof, suspending himself in an arc above the seat. The chill was here too but it was windless. There was the smell of stale sweat. I slithered on to the seat, under his hammock, twisting, one leg splayed on the floor so my groin did not make contact with his sagging posterior.
I closed my eyes. I could not sleep. The proximity was killing me. Imagine how her ass would have dipped low into the hammock, how imperceptibly narrow and hot would be the space between her curve and my groin.
Janet. Janine.
I could feel her hair roll over and tickle my arms. I could see her in very tight focus, between brow and lower lip, the cleft on her nose. I sensed her heavy breath in my ear.
I fell into a fever. In cold awake sweats I dreamt it was her, and till the time the Bedford ejected me on Sheriff Street, a round twenty-four hours on the road, I lived in a delirious wet daze, not a single flicker of thought if not sexual, sensual, worth the price of admission.
WE are on the road west from Georgetown, over the pontoon bridge on the Demerara. We are skirting along the pastoral ocean, timorous goats, absolute sky, the paddy between sow and reap. We are on the mouth of the Essequibo, twenty-two miles wide, brown waves cleaving open the continental head of dull mangrove. We are crossing by boat, faces sheeted with polin against the spray, breaks at river islands big as Caribbean republics, and beyond a sawmill on the water the lazy shady stelling at Supenaam.
The Essequibo coast, thirty-five miles along rice fields and awara palm, their orange fruit glowing like lozenges in the dark fronds, until the stelling at Charity – which stelling is the stink of river commerce, of comings and goings, booze on the waterfront, sacks of fruit and drying trulli leaves – which stelling has once, in inimitable Guyanese fashion, untethered itself and sailed down the Pomeroon whole like a raft.
We are on the Pomeroon, downriver, past Nauth’s floating fuel station, past the perfect pleasure of the riverine villages, shooting out between mounds into the Atlantic. We are bumping parallel to the shore, the spray now saline, singeing the hot skin. The continent is re-entered from the slender slit that is the Moruka.
The boat wends through forest. The high trees drop off to walls of mokamoka bush, wild and arrowshaped. The mokamoka recede to savannah of bisibisi, thick, reedish, bright green there, burnt yellow elsewhere, exposed till the big water rains down to reclaim its space. Warraus, Arawaks, Christian Missions, whitewood churches, ité, clear, gleaming air. The river the only road. The untoothed aged to children pink of cheek jumping into woodskins natural as hopping on to a bicycle and skimming over glassy trails of water.
We are in a house on stilts amid profusion. In its immediate circumference seven type of palm, stray coffee bush, cocoa, fruits called Fat Pork, called Civil Orange, called Big Mummy, grapefruit devastated by swarms of Acoushi ants. Barbeque chicken and cassava bread, drunken midnight rowing, singing. In a pre-dawn mist I pay accidental obeisance. High on vodka and Fly, I make a false step and sink into swamp. I try to climb out but my slippers come off. Afraid that the mud will close over them, I go armpit deep with my hands, fetching a slipper at a time, hauling up a leg after another, batty high in the mist, face kissing swamp.
The sun rises over this blessed patch of world, mud washed off gold. The leaves are waking, the first fruits are falling. We are gone in Sparrow the boatman’s boat, laughing into dayclean, the mokamoka, the forest, the filthy unbound Atlantic.
 
 
BUT I’ve gone two rivers too far. In the daydreaming heat, the giant estuary gentle, winking with sun, I thought back to an old travel article, conceived spiritedly at Big Market Big Mamma’s. For now, I had no further to go than the Essequibo coast.
The stelling at Supenaam hustled to life with hitherto cardplaying taximen, four passengers per share-car. We zipped down the thin road, silver with glare. I was dropped off outside a shop on the public road. The car beat on.
Inside the shop a man reclined in a chair, palms resting on his belly. He had a pleasant face and a tilted mouth, altogether
approachable. Behind him hung an enormous photograph of the Kaaba, the clock beside it ticking to three.
I asked for help with the address.
‘This same place the address.’
It threw me.
‘You know Jan?’
‘The red gal?’
‘Yeah.’
‘She does come by the phone shop sometime’ – he made a hooked finger towards the adjacent door.
‘You know what time?’
He sized me up, wary.
‘Me don’t really watch that, you know.’
‘Thanks.’
‘No mention.’
I went next door to the phone shop. There was a sole woman in the room. ‘He want to suck cane and blow whistle too,’ she bellowed into the line, with such passion that I withdrew at once.
Beside the shops was a two-step wooden bleachers under a tamarind tree. I took a seat.
A static white day. Not even birds were to be seen. Run-over crappos were pasted flat on the road. Something like smoke rose from their dead skins.
Fone
. Cheaply titillating. Like a flirt’s laugh, or popped bubblegum.
I waited.
Time passed, and people. A grandmother on a stick walked by, crumpled as forgotten silk. A boy sat down, twelve or thirteen years old, a butcher he said. He shared star apples with me. He bounded into the fields. Cyclers, walkers, limers in the heat. The house across, ravaged by ocean and apathy, its bright red and yellow jhandis astonishing against the blanched day, the blanched wood. Who lived in it? Man and reputed wife? A fisherman and his mammy? Extended family – step siblings, chachis, nanis? It didn’t feel like a nuclear kind of house. This felt somehow exciting. These lives.
Guyana was revealed in the country. Not because the city was so different, but so much like it. A large rurality, a social experiment, a time warp. Everybody was from the country. Hadn’t Rabindranauth Latchman sprung from one of these villages here? It was one of the generic ones. Adventure? Perseverance? With trembling self-regard he had told of his rise – ‘blood sweatin tears.’ Rabindranauth Latchman. Just the other night I’d seen him again in his print shirt, hosting a piece of ass on his lap permitting him access with a stirring mix of power and vulnerability.
Waiting, it occurred to me that I had waited a great deal since I left India. It was so different from Indian waiting. Indian waiting was the waiting of competitiveness, of crowds. Here I’d idled. To idle now would be to fail. But what was to be done? The mechanism was delicate. To be exposed to her was one thing, to the village quite another. It would be like walking in underwear. As it was I was drawing long looks, attempts at conversation.
The sun was going canary to marigold. The pressure-cooker day was building to a release, the air heavier by the minute. In the hot shade, wet jeans pasted to the wood, the mind dwindling to nothingness, I fell fast asleep.
When I woke I couldn’t place where I was. This kind of thing had begun to happen to me. It wasn’t a failure of memory, just that it felt surreal that I should be asleep on bleachers between the rivers of Essequibo and Pomeroon, or on a concrete plinth in the Brazilian savannah, mixed up deep but in nothing. While recovering my balance I’d be assailed by a variety of Indian flashbacks. A lover that was or wasn’t. Breaking a window in the building compound. The tension in the house when I abandoned my caste thread. It would take fifteen or twenty minutes to shake this mood. Sometimes there would be a mild headache.
It was turning to dark when I awoke and it disoriented me further. The sun had lost shape. Hours had been consumed. The ideas in my head had been foiled.
Unsure of the next step, I did as usual. I walked. Along the
straight open highway unsuited for walks. To the right were the village houses, beyond them the courida and blacksage bush on the South American foreshore. To the left were the paddy fields. Above, sunset was a mauve smear over man and his preoccupations. There was mud in the air. Here and there one could hear stray voices, beating with phrases like ‘shying seeds’ and ‘pulling shrimp’. From the fields came the trombone of cows.
Godhuli
was the beautiful Hindi word for sunset: the dust raised by cows returning home.
Godhuli
, so right with dayclean.
With the slightest intimation, a rustle of leaves, a flutter of hidden birds into trees, the pressure was released. I was stunned by the intensity. Rain blew in lilac gusts over the rice fields. The palm at the margins were bending. Mud exploded onto my dustencrusted feet, into the crevices between my toes. On the nape and the forearms the new air felt like new skin. It was like waterbombs. I ran for a shed in the distance. It was a small lumberyard. I stood inside the curtain of corrugated rivulets. The zinc took a pounding, rising and falling in waves over the rafters, flapping. In utter din twilight was obliterated.
Darkness was ecstatic. Scents seeped from the earth, the bushes. The world was raw and desperate, all contrition washed off. It was ten minutes, till the wind abated and the zinc settled, that I caught the folkish Bhojpuri rhythms jangling through the rain. Sounds affect me in the most visceral way. I felt a little drunk and perverted. The mood of silver anklets, licked navels, sex in a haystack. I walked around the drenched perimeter. The sound grew closer.
Lotay la, khub lotay la
. I knew it from so many wedding limes. It was a red-hot drunken chutney. The dholaks beat relentless over cymbals and harmonium. It made you feel to dunk your head in a bucket of rum, spin in circles. It was an old Indian theme, wife and brother-in-law, rolling, soaping, bathing, and it ended in an Indian way, with wife-beating.
Three men were inside the lumberyard, surrounded by logs of timber, ghostly around a flambeaux. Their faces were full of rum.
A portable stereo, a tiffin with phulouries, the smell of mango sour. There was a fourth man; he raindanced in wide arcs, his small dark body lost against the logs.
‘Who that jumbie there?’
I introduced myself. I was an Indiaman. They fussed over me, they plied me with their alcohol. The sharp ferment of bush rum. Two shots to begin with, one for blood, one for rain.
They were the lumberyard watchie, small-scale rice farmers, a postman. They could be thirty, they could be fifty, I couldn’t tell. They’d curried iguana in the backdam. They’d traded rifle cartridges with Amerindians for the iguana. They’d traded cases of smuggled Venezuelan beers with GT people for the cartridges. The meat was white and soft, soaked in curry powder.
We talked about flims, about Dharmendra, about Veeru of
Sholay
and Veeru Sehwag of cricket. ‘Man bat like he sleeping with one eye open and give one
bap
to mosquito.’
Bush rum has a stabbing, localised high. One can press the points of intoxication. Evasions dissolved in drink and rain, I let slip it had to do with a girl.
‘Ei man, the man want to ketch a t’ing. Abi take the man backdam, buckgirl sisters start t’ing there. Pink, bai! Sweet, bai! Abi take you in tonight.’
‘Tomorrow.’
The floor was smoothened concrete. Crappos leapt on it. Earthworms crept in and back out. The dry logs absorbed the smell of rain and the vibrations of the chutney. And the chutney clanged on.
Phulorie bina chutney kaise banee?
I had thought of chutney as a music without pain, but I had begun to see I was wrong. Reggae was the music of slavery. Its impulse was resistance, confrontation, a homeland severed so absolutely, seized back by the force of imagination or ideology. Chutney was the music of indenture. Its impulse was preservation, then assimilation. There was a pain in this act of attempted preservation – a homeland part remembered and protected, part lost and lingering.
‘Ei brother, I’s make chutney good, you know. Is only one thing keeping me back.’
‘Contacts?’
‘Genetics, man. Me nah get the voice.’
They spoke of Bachchan, of Bachchan having come one time to Blairmont. After a while I couldn’t follow. The wind had risen again, playing with the zinc. Their intonations were too fast, drunk. Still the situation was effortless. I couldn’t have been in it in India. No chance. And standing at the open back of the lumberyard, the sleeper logs in proximity, looking out into the fields, was the feeling of travelling Indian Railways, the great Gangetic sweep, a country palpable, unknowable.
It was hours. When the rain tapered to a drizzle we left. We were going to Bunny’s. The night was fresh and silhouetted. Crappos were singing tenor. The wind lifted the smell of wet paddy from the fields, faintly like asafoetida. We passed the house across the bleachers.
‘Who live in there?’
‘
Churile
live in there. She ah
churile
.’
At Bunny’s the night was ending. The room was thick with alcohol and chat. Bush rum yielded to five-year. Fairy lights were wound around the safety grille, I couldn’t tell if left over from Diwali or in anticipation of Christmas. Against the dim lighting they made the mood of a finished occasion. The sound system issued old Hindi film music, of longing, of suppression, the idea of what it is to love, what it is to lose, Indian fatalism.
I looked around me: middle-aged Guyanese men in caps, T-shirts and short straightforward moustaches. They’d shied rice in the morning, brewed bush rum, sold timber, worked the post office, or who knows, done nothing or picked fights, and now they were happy and they were sad and the world was loaded with a thing you could not touch.
‘Ei, Bunny, jam the mike, we get an Indiaman heye,’ someone said, and there was singing.
Suhaani raat dhal chuki
, obscure
among Hindi film classics, forty, fifty years old, maybe more. A man called Chabilall sang. He was joined by a few others from their spots.
I watched mesmerised. To sing in a language one didn’t know, it seemed to me an act of devotion. The half-baked, heartfelt, creolised delivery, I felt it in my bones.
‘Hear wha’happen, brother,’ Chabilall said to me after. ‘Rafi you ain got to unstand words. Rafi in we blood.’

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