The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel (22 page)

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Authors: Rahul Bhattacharya

BOOK: The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel
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‘Where the father?’
‘He deh.’
‘Where?’
‘All over the place, fockin skunt.’
‘Where’s he live?’
‘More in town now.’
‘What does he do?’
‘Me en know really. Some kind of exporting business. He never tell me details. He turn big.’
‘He look after you?’
‘He give me a little house there on the coast, near to mummy. But he fist get tight, man. Anytime I ask him he give me a lil t’ing and say he done give me the house already. If I row with him, he tell me something like, “When you got hand in tiger mout, girl, you gat fuh pat the head.”’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Goldy Persaud. Well, his right name Devkumar but everybody’s call him Goldy.’
‘And the boy?’
‘Brian.’
‘And—’
‘And stop! Questions!’
It broke the tension.
‘We call him Awara,’ she said, coming over, resting her hands on my folded knees. ‘He like awara bad.’
‘You know,
awara
in Hindi means vagabond.’
‘Vagabond, cha! That is a lot of words you learn me today. My Hindi going to get better than you creolese.’
She reached for her purse, handed me two pictures.
Three months old in the first, cradled in the arms of his mother – so delicate, so teenage! – with long wispy hair, a tight pout, big brown puppy eyes looking with longing at the one who held him. Three years old in the second, in vest and sneakers, a football by his feet, the eyes no longer a child’s eyes, hair falling on the forehead in the Guyanese fringe.
‘He growing up quick. He look smart.’
‘Yeah. He the best. He love playing.’
I handed her the photographs.
‘Guess what,’ she said. ‘I still got your perfume on my neck. I like it. Is sexy.’
She slipped in beside me, crumpling on her side. I put out the light. The broken sedans rattled and hummed.
Soon her eyes were serenely closed. Her lips were still orange from the helado. Her mouth, never fully closed at sleep, afterglowed like spent coal. A mother. But I saw her now like a child as I had never before. Outside our matrimonial balcony the moon was low and yellow. I stared at it. Idly I urged it to fall further, into the round of the holly wreath on the grille, but it never sunk so low.
THE bliss of the city is when it awakens – not the dawn hours haunted by the middle-aged shedding fat or burnt out adolescents returning home, but a little after, when the cleaning machines have brushed away yesterday’s evidence and the fresh day is falling crisp as golden wafers, when reasonable people with reasonable habits are coming out of their holes to dot the world with their strange faces, their gestures, costumes, voices, until bit by bit, by living magic, the grand tapestry is made.
In the backstreets shutters went up, rattling with commerce to be transacted or frittered away. Nude silver mannequins were carried into store windows. A woman pulled a rack of dresses onto the washed pavement. The angled sun hit the concrete roads and Latin American walls, extracting their carefully calibrated flavours, making a mesh of contrasts. Empanadas sizzled deep in renewed sin. Coloured pillars of
jugo
revved in unison, fruits with names as gorgeous as their colours,
parchita, durazno, lechosa, manzana
.
An hour or two in this ambience is enough. You’ve got the nourishment you need. You’ve been doused in a particular mood, felt a particular brightness not felt before, been reassured that there are small wonders in the world, and further familiarity is liable to ruin things.
In short, it was time for terminal. Where to go? Caraca-Caraca-Caraca, we heard a tout call. Of course, Caracas!
The bus was a cold luxury operation, overseen by a militant hostess in uniform. She forbade the slightest parting of curtains with wags of the finger. The cabin was white with the air-conditioned breathing of luxury travellers, people who’d organised their sleeps to perfection.
We reclined into the cold seats. Every minute the bond between beings is on the mend or on the fray. Were we closer or further since last night? Every time I looked at her she was a little changed. Our lives were mixing, encroaching. We hardly spoke. It seemed we’d been together a long time.
The wheels moved smooth and straight beneath us. I made a crack in the curtain and pressed my eye against it. A whole country out there. Sceneries were tearing by. On the run, that was the thought that came to me – I hated it. On the run – the momentum, the weight of it. It was an adult dream and nightmare. It is a thought that came to me often in my life. Each time it left me haunted.
Running and seeking, they were sides of the same coin. I had run from a serious education, then from cricket reporting. From the expectation to ‘settle down’ I had run. And eventually I had run from India. Had I? Running or seeking? What were my duties, to whom? It stayed on me like dampness.
Beside me she was creating a pattern of holes on paper with a toothpick. She was so immersed in it. She was raging with concentration. ‘Cha,’ she exclaimed softly whenever the automobile thwarted her piercings. She must have made a hundred pricks. Was she running? Away from something or into something?
I was feeling brittle. The part of me that had marvelled at the perpetration of this affair suffered under my own unhelpful scrutiny. I had broken in a proper way the auto-restrictions of Indian life, but I was not sure if I had shrugged off its reflexive guilt.
I went to take a leak. For a while I sat motionless on the WC
in the phonebooth toilet. It was warm here. Alone, I felt stronger. From the window the day was parched and flat, blank with scope. Two mighty and distinct anthems sang in my head, Dekker’s Israelites ( …
like Bonnie and Clyde
), and Thunder Road from the Boss. Back in the seat I pulled them up on the pod, heard them over and over. They soothed me, deceived me into mild heroism. As in sport so in art, so in life – heroism, trite or tragic, to the rescue. Everything which can be glorious is worthwhile.
Thunder Road led to the first fight, the more sinister because it was required to be conducted in whispers. I told her lyrics, including the one about ain’t a beauty. It was, of course, ill-advised. She could not fathom why I’d tell her that she ain’t a beauty and is just alright. I wasn’t really saying that, I said, it was just that the song reminded me of us on the road. She countered by saying that I had specifically told her the lines in my head, which were ain’t no beauty. Don’t take it so, I said, it’s just that it comes at a crucial point of the song, gathering till this moment and busting open after, and in the live versions the crowd sang these lines and it was about the exciting thought of escaping with her and
that
was what I was focusing on. But why would I think of the song if I didn’t think she ain’t no beauty, that don’t make sense. I kept dripping fraudulent rose and syrup on the incandescent yet charred romanticism of that gigantic creation. She was running hot now. ‘Yuh skunt cyan wait two minute before breaking every night in you Miss No Beauty.’
I laughed. I took it to be a mock heckle like last evening; but really I laughed from pure gratitude, from the relief of being pulled back into an everyday thing. I laughed because I was grateful for the fact of her. Mistake. We spoke no more for hours.
Not till we changed buses at the highway terminal for a local into Caracas and over the valley did the first stunning accumulation of shanties appear on a mountain. The scale of the
barrios
, their utter verticality, colour dots toppling towards the sky, it supercharged our retro bus with anticipation. A country boy, aiming to capture
the terrific thrill of the journey on his cellphone, finding himself on the wrong side of the aisle recorded instead the meaningless red rock face. A lady pulled out her hand mirror and applied bright pink lipstick. The city was coming.
We disembarked at Avenue de Mexico and made a long inspirational walk towards a recommended budget hotel in the guidebook. There were refrigerators and printers and electric saws being sold bare on the jumping metropolitan road. The girls of Caracas were thick, to use the Guyanese. ‘Look you get all you Miss Universe here,’ she said, still smarting, ‘an you stuck with you Miss No Beauty.’ Men could be fair with dark eyes. Some looked like pimps. A city of bursting boobs and frightened shotat pigeons who fluttered through the hilly tall buildings carrying echoes of the shot with them. Epical, vivid, a city of slopes and angles, vicious little cigarettes, umbrellaed stalls of mobile payphones hanging from chains.
We hauled our bags uphill through the brilliant evening market streets. Latin horns were spilling out of shops and tascas that smelled of fish broth. Around small grassy squares Caraquenos bought grocery and newspapers. People were everywhere: to be in a city of millions again!
I had been almost offended by her semi-passivity towards the miracles of travel. But now I felt her genuine participation.
‘It got this much people in India?’ she asked, pressing my arm.
‘More. But the cities are ugly. There are wires everywhere, unpainted buildings, garbage on the streets.’
‘I can’t imagine more people. Is like this when everyone go down to the tarmac at the national stadium for concert. But here they just movin about streets like so.’
The hotel was on a sloping corner. It was a high matchbox room. The small window opened to a Bombay view: pigeons, grilles, sliding windows, shredded noise. We went downstairs straight away. We sat at a tiny sidewalk corner cafe and drank sharp café marrón from plastic thimbles, inhaling Caracas. Outside a licoreria a woman in a long dress roasted what looked like kebabs. A posse
of upstarts threw handbombs, giving off illusions of a student riot. A black maga dog attacked a battered taxi that groaned uphill. Men reeking castaway regret turned corners, putting things behind them once and for all. Down the slope and far away on hills was the glimmer of lights.
We were in synchronicity. I was so grateful for her presence, I wanted to hold her and kiss her all the time. The night was primed to unfurl before us like a silver ribbon. Even so, I could never have bargained for the forthcoming stroke of fortune.
We went out to a terrace pizzeria in Altimira. There we drank numerous Solera Lights from blue bottles so pretty you could stand them in display cases, and she cleaned the chicken wings to the white of the bone, claiming it to be the mark of a Guyanese – even the president did it so, she’d seen. Skipping down the steps a little high, walking the hip circles of Altimira, we came upon a posh jazz bar. It was dim and rich, reeking of cologne, cigar, petrodollars. A band played fusion cosmopolitan. Large oil barons danced with small aristocratic movements, spreading their thick fingers on barebacked ladies. They would return to their seats after every song, only to get right back up when the next started. Everybody in that velveteen room moved like smoke. She did too, but I knew not how to salsa. We wined down without shame. ‘Bravo,’ shouted the oil tycoons. We drank from long crushed-ice glasses Black Label and Baileys, the best thing she ever tasted she said, and in the gentleman’s she whispered to me, ‘Leh we stay here, we could learn Spanish, we could live here’.
We wandered drunkenly again, speaking marginal sense. She made assertions. ‘Goat more stupid than sheep,’ she said. Sometimes she let slip a ‘fuck, bai, cole breeze, bai’. Her cheap blunt heel stuck in a gutter grating. About then, pausing to pull it out – that is when we struck divine luck.
Its first intimation, as with many good things, was the molecular thump of bass, and tracing it we arrived at a plaza. It was a West Indian music extravaganza, planted on earth just for us.
We talked again amid people who spoke English. The freedom
of that! What exertions and isolations language had brought on. We’d been fluttering fish. The difficulty of every transaction, the handsigns, the stupidity of making as if to shiver while saying frio to a bus hostess, the exaggerated presence of one another.
We swigged rum and ate dukanu. The burlesque Caribbean was out in force making vulgar harmony. The Bahamians played the greatest music of all. They blew away jump-n-wave Trinis and slack raw Jamaicans. Full-blooded black Bahamians played rake-n-scrape; they played saws and accordion, they meshed cottonfield blues and carnival jump-up and zydeco stomps. They told everyday truths. A black man in a suit and hat and beautiful crepe skin sang,
Don’t tell on me, and I won’t tell on you.
Those were the only words. There and then he kept summing up life. They marched to the junkanoo, the terrific noise of drum and brass and whistles making exuberant madmen out of everyone, sweeping up people in its path like a tornado, a whole infantry of masqueraded music makers led and trailed by feathered, costumed Bahamian girls getting up on their toes and letting their heads drop and their pelvis round over in free perfection.
It was the vitality of the Caribbean, waiting for deflation. Jamaicans dropped their ‘h’s and put them in where there were none. Bajans wore Christian moustaches and slapped their thighs in great old laughters. They spoke of cricket at Pickwick in slurry Scousey tongues and said ‘shite’. Saint Lucians said awrie and drank sweet beer from green bottles of Piton they’d brought with them. Guyanese weren’t there. Jan, she wound and unwound her waist around mine, and not a bitter word was spoke.
 
 
CARACAS days of morning baths, wet towels and unmade beds. Burgundy negligee. Eyeliner, her brown eyes energised to ferocity. Days sunk in quicksands and intimacies. The ooze of sex and obstacles, friction and revelation. Resentments burnt up in furtive fucks. Misunderstandings plucked from the air.
Afterwards I thought the ain’t a beauty fight was crucial. It loosened our behaviour. It was the first time the frontier of brinksmanship was breached. It permitted sulks, gesticulations, the odd cussword. There were no standards thereafter. Soon our tongues moved past the early stage of clearest dictions. She could groove into something too fast for me, I could mumble. Her eyerolls infuriated me.
And the city offered so many chances for disagreement. Where to go, what to do? Walk or take the bus? Get an empanada at the cafe or hold back for a big meal afterwards? The matter of food was loaded. She was fussy about what to eat and I when.
The tension that gnawed and grew was that she always wanted and asked. The bolivars flew by. We bought brassieres, dresses, perfumes, tees and toys for the child. Her own attention to money was keen, when she talked about tomatoes at 240 dollar a pound or the speedboat fare to Parika. But she thought nothing of asking.
Anything was liable to catch her fancy. Passing a salon, she wanted highlights. This meant not only money but time, and I pointed it out. ‘But I want to look good for you.’ A sexy directness like that: and man’s pre- and post-orgasm wisdoms are very different beasts.
The treatment ran to hours. I went out for a wander and a bite. When I returned she had, on the advice of the stylist, got her hair ironed as well. Her nails had been redone, to French. Further he had encouraged her into cherry lipstick to bring out the highlights, which were blonde rather than copper. It gave her a certain Latina appeal, but the full effect – the ironing, the wet lipstick, the white nails – it was plain mollish.
My reaction to these expenditures grew progressively worse. Sometimes I withdrew or became deliberately inattentive. Disarmingly, she appeared to carry no weight. It occurred to me that it is how she saw things. She’d always expected indulgence of this sort, and I had set us up for it. Guyanese men had a term for it: ‘fat fowling.’ I could tell she had experience. She wasn’t a fowl, she was a cat.
I learnt about her life, felt it on the landscape like a memory, the line down from the cowbelt of north India. She was born in Georgetown Hospital on a night of November, early enough for Scorpio. She loved Scorpio and town. She liked liming, shopping, lived often with her wild friend Aaliyah. She did have a few boyfriends, ‘nothing you got to worry about’. Her mother, named Savitri, no less, had turned Anglican. She was a crochet and embroidery expert. They moved to Essequibo for an assignment some years ago, and ended up staying. The mother lived with the man who converted her. Jan hated him. He looked for excuses to hug her up, wanted to know where she was going, when she was coming back, and she didn’t like staying with them. She stopped working eight months ago, it was sheer exploitation. She’d been a salesgirl. Brian’s cousins were in Lethem. Goldy Persaud, his father, she hardly saw. He chased up all kinds of girls, girls she felt were just like garbage.

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