The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel (2 page)

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Authors: Rahul Bhattacharya

BOOK: The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel
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‘So what that have to do with rice?’
And so it went, restless early days in Kitty, ripe with heat and rain and Guyanese sound and Guyanese light in which the world seemed saturated or bleached, either way exposed.
I WAS frankly unimpressed when I saw that blasted scamp again. I should say I was not wholly unprepared for it. I had described our meeting to Uncle Lance and friends, attaching to it a strange spiritual dimension. Now Guyanese are born sceptics. Their foreparents were either forced or tricked into coming here, and thereafter white man, black man and brown man had each scamped the hell out of them. To take things at face value was considered the most basic weakness.
So they laughed when I told them about the suffering murderer and the terrible burden he carried in the vagrant streets. More so when I showed them the plastic pebble.
‘Man who could scamp with melted toothbrush, bai, that man gafo be professional.’
‘True professional.’
One or two people gave me a hard scolding. These were people who left their wallets home and walked with exact change to the market. To the bank they went in pairs. If they saw a pretty girl thumbing down a car they stepped on the gas.
Yet there was some delight taken in my man, since scampery was so rampant that the ones who shone amid the competition were
reverenced. Of course I had been a packoo – packoo, the monkfish, superbly ugly, so ugly that it must also be stupid though it was very sweet to eat – I had been a packoo but I was also privileged to have been had by a scampion.
I was about the city trying to extend my stay in Guyana. When I had come to Guyana first there had been a good basis. I was a cricket reporter. The first Test against West Indies was in Georgetown. I was twenty-two, and naive beyond my years. The visit had been for a week, a week of bewilderment and curiosity, moods and images, names and rhythms, contours of a mystery world one could perceive but not grasp.
Now I’d come on the longest return-ticket available, of a year, and without valid reason. At the airport the suspicious Sherry had stamped me in for a month, leaving me a ladder of paperwork to climb. I didn’t mind it. To reinvent one’s living, to escape the deadness of the life one was accustomed to, was to be hungry for the world one saw. Every face, every bureaucrat, every office held in it a code to be cracked.
I followed due process. I wrote to the Ministry of Home Affairs expressing cultural and topographical interest which would take a year to satiate. They asked me to prove my medical credentials. I went to the hospital, supplied stool, underwent a chest examination, took the doctor’s certificate to the Port Health Office.
This vividly colonial-sounding entity stood bang on the Demerara, by Stabroek Market, or big market as it was known. Big church and big market: in a short town of white and rust, big church and big market were supreme, the cathedral looming white, wooden and airy as a large dollhouse, and big market, a heat-shimmered expanse of red and silver-grey, built half on land, half on river. Its four steel gables were like industrial tents, crowned by a clock tower that made a mockery of my little Kitty’s. Guyana converged and diverged from here via bombish minibuses. The streets sold everything. The sense of movement, the mood of hot shifting trades, the hustle in the air, Rick Ross declaring it from the music carts: it was the closest GT came to the ambition-cloud that is a city.
One could give up on the world with ease at the Port Health Office. The brown river drifted by your feet like molasses, the air thick with river. The wooden torpor, it seeped through every sweating plank. The ceiling was high and beamed. On the first floor there was construction on – not true, it was not active in any way, but something had been taken apart with a view to perhaps one day rebuild. I walked through the wooden skeletal frames of the thing being contemplated. In a room a man sat with his legs up on a chair, one Mr Rose. In one corner an ancient knobby boombox, a machine from its original days. In another corner a flat groaning freezer of similar vintage the size of a single bed.
Across the port health officer I took a seat without being asked and pondered things with indecent laze. There was a blackout. The table fan clunked to a halt. Mr Rose spread a kerchief on his dome, undid two buttons of his shirt jac. We sweated gently in the warm river breeze, doing nothing with the air of people who had congregated there for that precise purpose. At last, when I was least expecting it, Mr Rose said he was tripping. What was he tripping on, I asked. He said he was dripping. He added that if he was tripping he wouldn’t know if he was dripping, and thereafter leapt forward to render signatures with a burst of vigour that one sensed would require hours of recovery.
I went back down and had beef stew and rice in a cinnamon-coloured shop. It was the Ocean View Snackette, wrong on every count. It didn’t view the ocean and it was actually a roaring cookshop. It had pink walls, burgundy panelling and mesh windows. People were dripping here too. They were slaying Ivanoff vodka with coconut water and telling jokes. A man burst into the room with an awfully promising line – ‘Seven men get a divorce last night’ – but was drowned out by a commotion surrounding a knocked-over bottle. A row broke out. Somebody threatened to send somebody to hospital, ‘but me ain’t sure if they would accept an ugliness like you.’ There was supreme disinterest from the ladies running the shop. Every now and then they sent out large chunks of ice in a sad pink plastic bowl. Flies settled on their dresses, their cheeks.
It was another hot wasting day downtown for the wasted. And coming out of the snackette after the inadequate stew, turning a corner, I saw Baby. We both realised this was a moment. His mouth gleamed with a gold tooth-cap and he was wearing a red beret, striking for how new it was in contrast to the rest of him.
‘What you doing here?’ I asked. ‘I not give you fare to go back?’
I gone and I come back too, soldier, he said. There was more hardtime waiting for him. His ole man had been shot by the Venezuelan coastguard on the Orinoco. He was only smuggling in three-four case of Polar beer. Venezuelans real wicked that way. Till now they want half of Guyana, did I know that? So now he came back to ketch a lil wuk to send the family.
With every passing moment I was more distracted by the tooth. It was an inverted heart.
‘You put a heart on your tooth?’ I asked at last.
‘That ain’t heart. That a batty.’
‘It’s an upside down heart.’
‘Is a big, round beattie. She sitting pon the iron. Heh heh. Watch close, soldier.’
There were more pressing matters at hand. I told him he had taken advantage of me. I said I took pity on him because of his filthy crime which it seems he did not in fact commit. I thought of recovering my money from him, but he looked so smug I left and walked away.
To my surprise he followed me, trying to correct the misunderstanding. He followed me to Raff’s on King’s Street, where I was to buy the racquet which electrocuted mosquitoes, a useful tool to stun humans with as well. All the while he kept telling me that he had murdered his pardner in the Cuyuni and I must not doubt it. He chopped him nine times, went to prison. He was relentless.
As it was mildly entertaining I let him carry on. He suggested we go down to the court to meet Magistrate Van Cooten. Magistrate Van Cooten would tell me the truth. Fine, I said.
We set off towards the court, as though Magistrate Van Cooten was waiting there just for us, poised with gavel in an empty courtroom to redeliver the judgement whereupon I may hug Baby for truly being a killer.
Naturally, Magistrate Van Cooten was not there. Surprisingly, I was offended.
I walked off in a funk into Regent Street. Amid honking minibuses and the commerce Regent Street had its own order. At the bottom the two photo shops and the two gas stations, followed by a row of Indian-national variety shops, all really the same shop run by different Sindhis, a single room which sold toilet seats, vases, prams, music systems, gotten on ships from some staggeringly large warehouse in Panama. In between the site of a new mall, which was to feature Guyana’s first ever escalator, and further up Bourda Market, first the unappetising covered market, hung with caps and long T-shirts and meat, and outside it, bursting with divine freshness, crinkled passionfruit, orange pumpkin, bold green pakchoi and tremendous herb, the scents of lovely life. Past it, in the Brazilian salao Brazzo strippers got their nails done or hair reblonded. Atop them in a hotel two red Brazilian men under an umbrella drank coffee, one sensed, with a touch of regret. The men were always there, sometimes different ones. They were an installation. Then the automobile spare-parts shops, and the street getting quieter past them, the two old trenches appearing, and the spacious wooden ministries, and opposite them Bourda cricket ground where they played terrifically ambient run-down flooded matches which could last a fortnight, a month, half a year, and nobody would be able to tell the time.
By the time we reached the cricket ground, or maybe because of it, my mood was restored.
There was a coconut vendor on the bend. I stopped to drink a cold one. Baby was still with me. The thing about Baby was that he never looked happy or vexed or sorry or anything like that. He appeared complacent and a tad downpress.
As though there had been no gap between our first encounter and now, he started telling me about the conditions in the prisons. He spent seventy-one months in the Mazaruni, which was much nicer than Georgetown prison. In Mazaruni they could breathe some natural air, grow a little bhaji, pull some cassava, do a little good wuk. He did see some bad months. He got into a fight over a cigarette – a single cigarette – with a policer and was put in solitary confinement for a month. But even so it was alright, he learnt a lot about he ownself.
Camp Street prison was hard. Nasty conditions, rough people, long-water stew. It was the long-water stew which caused trouble once. Convicts flung their watery bowls of salt and potato against the wall and bust a hole in the roof in protest.
‘You know, a hungry mob is an angry mob.’
Roots! Of course I recognised it. I said, ‘Them Belly Full (But We Hungry).’
For the first time in our dealings I noted a flicker of surprise in Baby.
He gave me a touch and we spoke about roots reggae with exploding excitement. He sang a couple of tunes with a cracked voice and enormous meaning. Take any tune, I began saying, delving into thoughts since I couldn’t much sing, take a big tune – take the big man and the biggest tune. Like how he said let them pass their dirty remarks. Dirty remarks! Regular wise ones would not have put it so. What a simple and great writer. Roots was full of simple and great writers. Check Pete Tosh, check a line like I hear your words, but I don’t see no works. Music of truth, bai, Baby said, music of truth. Ska is the root, the rest is all roots, I proposed, modifying from the great Willie Dixon of Mississippi, who correctly laid down that the blues is the roots and the rest is the fruits. Yeah, yeah, soldier, he said, music of truth, adding incongruously, check me out anytime.
Before parting I asked him if he regretted his actions. He said, ‘No, brother, if you can’t face what you done, you can’t a better man make.’
It was a day or two later, drifting along Camp Street, that I came upon the high tin and barb of Georgetown prison.
Across it was an officers’ club. There I fell into a conversation with a man by the gate. I mentioned a recently paroled life-sentence convict. No such person, he insisted. I provided details of the murder in the Cuyuni.
‘I would know, man,’ he said impatiently. ‘I run the place.’
‘Where will I find Magistrate Van Cooten? He’s supposed to have handled the case.’
‘Magistrate Van Cooten? He bin dead twenty years.’
The next time I saw Baby skunt, we decided to go porknocking.
THE operators of no. 72 Sita Sita had recklessly inverted minibus protocol. The driver was scrawny; the conductor was meaty. Possibly it was a father grooming his boy. That was very well for the family, but not a single passenger was about to be foregone to adjust for the excess volume in the back. A big lady with an accusing voice was not pleased with the strategy. The scrawny driver, who had foolishly given away the game by sitting at the wheel before time, escaped again to the pavement.
Everything moved slow in these dripping Georgetown mornings, and a Mahdia bus took long to fill up. It occurred to Baby that I had no hammock, and we ran down to the road by the library where a man sold them. Then it was another hour of waiting.
One watched things through sweat in the eyes: blots of loose checked shirts, fades of slanted caps, dark lipstick in soft focus. Small-time hustlers hustled,
huss-lin huss-lin
in the air, a soundtrack to the trade of aphrodisiacs, sex oils.
‘It must have nuff birds in India,’ a youthman said to me.
Before I could respond another youthman intervened.
‘Puerto Rico, bai, dah is where I would like to go.’
The first youth sucked his teeth. ‘Wa’m to you, buddeh? It
have a ratio of
nine
bird to one banna in certain district of Venezuela.’
Thus, without my participation, the topic was closed.
Gradually the van was populated. A dreadlocks came with empty cages to bring back birds from the interior. For bird-racing.
‘They don’t fly away?’ I asked.
‘Nah, man, they in they cage.’
‘How do they race in a cage?’
He emitted a series of high-pitched cheeps.
‘Is a race of whistles.’
A presidential candidate arrived. Nobody gave an ass. In India garlands would have beheaded the man. As it was he had an eminently garlandable face, a bald, round head with successful, bespectacled eyes. He wore a waist pouch and a knapsack like a happy scout. He was a serious leader, defecting from an established party to begin a mixed-race one. Though elections were not expected till the second half of the year, he was going to the interior to spread the word. He settled easily into the cramped bus with the electorate. A sidekick, a jolly walrusy man, made running streams of rude jokes about the incumbent president.
Final hustles took place. ‘Gal, put the child pon you leg nuh?’ ‘How much child I could put pon me leg, I ga one ahready.’ ‘You gon pay for the second child?’ ‘Like you ain’t ever was a child’ – till a crisp old black man with a startling British accent elocutioned, ‘Are you waiting for two hundred more people?’ It was the accent which did it; and with hoarse cries of ‘leh we go, leh we go, leh we go’ from the meaty conductor, Sita Sita burst out of the blocks.
Dancehall on the stereo, no sweetness, empty hard riddims thudding in the bones, sleaze, mood of the streets, fake rudeness, men talking their vulgar minds. But now came a lady, Macka Diamond in a champion collaboration with Blacker. It was splendid comic deejaying, a mock squeal, a serious lament, sex and gender. She made complaints and Blacker counselled her.
Bun him!
Bun
him: cheat back on him. Baby decoded the stuff for me. My affection for new dancehall was limited, but the good ’uns were the good ’uns.
We pounded out of the decaying perimeter of GT and past the clustering villages whose sequence of names from Agricola to Land of Canaan would come to trip off my tongue. We made a great number of stops. At any point someone was liable to yell, ‘Mash the brake!’ or ‘Jam it to the side!’ Someone wanted to pick up a roti and fishpie from M&M’s by the harbour bridge, someone to drop off a PVC pipe by his aunty in Friendship, and at Garden of Eden people chipped in to buy a case of grenades – the small XM five-year rums.
The grenades began to detonate quick. Already vistas were opening up. The Demerara peeped in, peeped out. By the road women in floppy hats sold pine and pawpaw. Grandfathers cycled in the sun. And look how those fascinating houses went by, high and stilted and tearing, with their bruck-up families inside the yard, the childfather made off somewhere and the young mammy with her belly big again. We passed mandirs tiered like pagodas, and the sickly new cricket stadium the government of Indian nationals was constructing. Car shells grew out of the mud, shot through with razorgrass. We whizzed by a dozen dead kokers – sluice gates, fallen sentries. Run-over dogs were ground into the asphalt. We turned perpendicular at Soesdyke where the sign said ‘Brazil’: infinite promise.
Mounting exhilaration on the highway, thin, miraged, built on white sand – the illusion that it might begin to wobble (we were also on grenades). Enormous sandpits appeared by the sides, big enough to swallow whole villages, and then it was low and rising bush, saturated by creeks of cool black water veining off the Demerara. The driver lit a ciggy, took calls on his phone, shifted gears and manipulated the wheel all at once, invincibility writ large upon his face, drawing appreciation. ‘Skills, bai, skills, dah is skills!’ His possible father beamed. ‘Full de clock, bai, full de clock.’ Upon Baby’s encouragement, the candidate’s sidekick cussed out batty-boy politicians and delighted the bus.
The town of Linden arrived, its air sprinkled fine with bauxite dust. But bauxite was in shambles, and Linden a sullen reflection. Baby sympathised with the situation. ‘Guyana having hardtime. Worlprice of bauxite low, worlprice of sugar low, worlprice of timber low. Is only diamond and gold which could do the job.’
A short way beyond Linden, after the asphalt turned briefly to loose gravel, then to stark red laterite, we were in the interior – that moody Guyanese abstraction. The interior is not fixed by topography. It could be savannah, swamp, jungle, plateau. It could begin anywhere. You just know, just as we knew now by the freshening scent of forest that rose in great walls around us.
There were deep, wide pools of water in the mud, and Sita Sita coursed through or swerved past them, cutting wicked shapes in the trail. ‘Skills, bai, skills!’ Things glistened outside. The clouds came out. The wind smelled of herb, of growth.
At 58 Miles we stopped for a very late lunch at a sudden shack with an extensive menu, deer curry included. The late start, the stops on the way, and now the slackness over lunch raised the vital Guyanese fear among some passengers that ‘darkness gon ketch we’. The candidate and his sidekick went to the latrine to ‘shed a tear’, that is, urinate, but it was suspected that they had gone to ‘post a letter’, that is, defecate. The large accusing lady, sombre in between, bellowed, ‘How them going to stop racial when they cyan stop theyself?’
And so when the vehicle was stopped again for inspection at Mabura, it did not go down well at all.
Something about Sita Sita did not appear entirely innocent. The soldiers declared that every man and his bag would be searched. The van was emptied. The candidate went into the checkpost to have a word with the seniors.
It began raining energetically, the kind of afternoon rainforest shower one read about in school. People ran to a shelter. The soldiers waited for the cloud to spend itself – but with every passing minute they felt the pressure of darkness ketching we. Somewhere
deep down they knew that with their guns and their boots they were no match for the lady now heckling them with ‘yuh got goadie’, that is, swollen testes. Eventually two young ranks fled into the rain and clambered on to the roof to rifle through the bags.
An older soldier eyed the passengers, considering me suspiciously.
‘He speak English?’ he asked, not addressing me, curiously, but Baby.
‘Reasonayble. Not good-good.’
‘What age he got?’
‘The man say he be twenty-six. Me not sure he meet that much though.’
‘What he does do?’
‘The man from India. Govamen send the man to study botanical specimen, y’know, butterfly and thing.’
‘Hm.’
‘The man say they en got butterfly an crappo an thing in India nice like heye.’
Crapaud: the French too had been here.
The ranks climbed down from the roof.
The cloudburst finished.
We were off again. We turned sharp west, no longer on the trail to Brazil – another dream, another time. We climbed, and curved along drenched curves, and on one particular curve the conductor let me know that this here was the longest curve in the country, just as he had told me of the longest pontoon bridge in the world on the Demerara.
We were down to the last of the grenades.
People took hungry gulps and, led by Baby, made raucous claims that bounced in the bus and the forest beyond.
‘ … Nah talk skunt, bai. If Da Vinci code true for true, how come other religion en take advantage of the findings to increase they following? …’
‘ … Don’t tell
me
about Selassie I, bigbai, you wan know about Selassie I,
me
tell
you
bout Selassie I …’
‘ … I tell you, banna, the more you make woman work for they rights, the more vicious they going to become …’
The forest deepened and lengthened. There were beautiful flooded scenes at Mango Landing, river and bush and forest tugging at each other. The top of a shack poked out of the water like a dead hand. And here our run was finished. Sita Sita ejected us peremptorily, turned, and squelched away whence she had come.
Passengers took off their shoes and waded through the weeds and bush in the opaque brown water to the motorboat and made the crossing in batches.
Two jeeps waited on the other side. We took the one which bore the sticker: ‘The Lord sends no bird without a branch.’ Amsterdam was its proprietor. He had got the sticker custom-made in Florida. He was a tough man who believed in sacrifice, prayer and the holy purity of the bush. There was a hole through the consciousness of the nation today. He took the wheel and sped off as if to rectify the situation.
It was after-rain cool and faintly misty. Somewhere beyond the trees and the faint mist the sun fell towards horizontal. The air tingled with wet scents. We were moving closer to the essence of things. Places were called Tiger Creek and Eagle Hill.
A man tapped me.
‘Guyana the most beautiful country in the world.’
I nodded in agreement.
‘The interior, it got a lot of history behine it. For example, it have a place called monkey mountain in the Pakaraimas. It got a lot of rocks, plenty plenty small rocks, shape like monkey. They claim it was a mountain with a lot of monkey. And the monkey turn to rock. So it got a lot of history behine it.
‘You cyan see Guyana in one life, you know,’ he continued. ‘You
could
see all of it – but not in one life. Too beautiful and too big fuh see in one life.’
As one feared, there was an interjection.
‘How much country you seen, buddeh?’
‘Don’t tell me stupidness, bai. You jus
know
, right. Some islands and islets in Essequibo, right, they as big as England.’
‘Guyana as big as England.’
‘Well, as big as UK, you ever hear of UK?’
‘I hear they as big like Barbados.’
‘Bai, me batty bigger than Barbados.’
‘And you fine.’
When they said fine in Guyana, they meant thin.
‘Gimme a touch, banna. Bajan does be driving BMW an thing but they stupid bad. You hear the one about Everard an Everton?
‘So Everard tell Everton about Neil Armstrong. Everton ask, Who, the same Armstrongs from St. Andrew’s parish? No, boy, say Everard, the Armstrong fella who climb the moon. So next time they go climb the sun, Everton ask. Boy, Everton, is too hot up there. Hear what Everton say: so why they cyan go at night?’
‘That’s Bajan.’
At Mahdia an old black man with black hair and a grey moustache approached the jeep – it was the grey moustache rather than the black hair that looked artificial. ‘Ya’al must know me.’ No, everyone said, with unexpected enthusiasm. ‘But ya’al must seen me pon the TV!’ No, everyone repeated, emphatically again. ‘Ya’al suppose to recognise me from the TV. Me daughter qualify for Miss Guyana last year.’ He gyaffed with Amsterdam for a while. But his hurt was palpable. He did not so much as look at us again.
Mahdia had the feel of the cusp of things, frontier to the interiormost interior. Girls wore Brazilian yellow and some had copper hair and copper skin. Some were Brazilian by nationality, some by aspiration, some daughters of miners, some their mistresses, which term included mistresses, wives and reputed wives. The main street was pure red mud, and from it rose a cenotaph, short, white and pointed, as if it had perforated its way out of the earth rather than been stuck into it. Baby said it was the centre point of Guyana.
‘And when the Lord make the world and he take out all he gift and shower them down, the gift of mineral fall down heye, right pon that spot. All round you got El Dorado.’
He went off somewhere and returned with a branch of genip and two mangoes, and he showed me how to squeeze and suck out the mango from a single slit in the skin.

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