The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel (26 page)

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Authors: Rahul Bhattacharya

BOOK: The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel
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SHE looked like a fairy in the morning. A feather had blown in from the ventilator and fallen on her brow. She slept on, innocent, and unbeknownst to her I pecked her lightly on the forehead.
By noon we were gone. We left with Andre, the leather-gloved son of Admiral Rambarran. I took the front of the jeep. It was a crush at the back. There were elder, greying Mildred and her three grandchildren. There was another child with her large Indian mother.
The two ladies were in conversation. Grandma Mildred was speaking of her daughter’s death. ‘In her prime.’ When she got the call she thought it was a prank. Then her daughter’s husband called. ‘That’s when I knew. I knew.’ She’d moved to Venezuela and been raising the grandchildren since. Long-time it used to be so hard to cross over, she reminisced. You could wait up to three months before someone undertook the trip.
It was a hot day. The air was thick with the stifled sounds of heating, struggling children and their minders. We left the conurbation of Puerto Ordaz. We were in tropical country. We were slowly leaving Venezuela behind, Venezuela properly settled over centuries, given a chance, and we were going towards the rudimentary construct of Guyana.
I turned to steal a glance at her. She was lost in the clutter. She was staring out the window. She was flushed and sweating. Her hair was tied. The danglers on her ears were like onion rings.
As the journey grew, the rush of autobiography matured to comfortable silence. Before long the children were knocked out in the heat. One of them, a mulatto boy with brown curls, had climbed into her lap. He must have been the same age as Brian.
‘The bai gettin lawless!’ she had squealed after speaking to him from Ciudad Bolivar. ‘He learning words to Dutty Wine! I tell mummy to clean out he mouth with Foam.’ He had been playing football, fishing with his cousins, hardly sleeping.
She herself was falling asleep against the metal. It would have been hot on her temple.
It must have been in Caracas that I had thought of the final days. Caracas, or Coro, roughly then. Last year. The thought came to me at ordinary moments, in the boredom of weak conversation, in the lethargy of nudity, playing with her spots. I thought of it and postponed the thought. I could not sense it. Nothing which is made is without wound.
But what was the problem? There was no problem, that is what I was trying to tell myself. These ought to be hours of triumph. Despite troubles the trip was fab. The girl was sexy. We were bold and true.
We were going through landscapes. High tropical, palm, plantain, clumps of jackfruit and their clumps of dark leaves. Then we were on the hills. From the hills we were lowering into green savannah – Venezuelan landscapes receding to a far point in the forest, never to be tramped again. I tried to yield to the liberty of the road, its idea of everlasting impermanence; to music, What a Botheration and Tenement Yard, floating in the jokey lightness of their despair. Life was attitude to circumstance, no more no less. The plains were flashing by with emptiness and occasional baseball. Soon it would be the border. Soon thereafter India. It must have changed. I had. I could approach it differently. I went to U-Roy. No more sighing, I told myself.
It was evening before we reached the dust and cheap bars of Tumeremo. We stopped here a while. The ladies and children stayed in the vehicle. She went to check out some stalls. In the failing light I sat in the doorway of a bar and tried to read. Dusk thinned. We hit the road again. We met a highway where trailers roared past us. ‘High-high vehicle,’ Andre called them. The highway would have taken us to the glorious moment where Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana trisected on the tepui of Roraima. Instead we turned off into a mud trail. It was rank dark now. At once the sensations of the interior came flooding back to me – scent of herb, give of mud, intuition of water, feeble stream of moonlight swallowed by great tangles of vegetation. And it was an interior shack that we suddenly turned into, in a little clearing by the trail, surrounded by high trees, the smell of rotting soursop.
By the looks of it Admiral Rambo and his jeep had arrived a good while back. In a tin yard people were arranged around a bare table under a bulb pulled from the jeep battery, dangled over a beam. They were all men, Indian. Beside them was an enormous ice case, stuffed silly with both Guyanese beer and Venezuelan cerveza. Chutney on the car stereo: I Ain’t Touch De Dulahin (But She Belly Start To Swell).
She tried to busy herself with the women and children, washing up, relieving themselves in the bush, settling down in the other arm of the tin yard, but her separation was as clear as mine from the men.
‘He’s here.’
‘Okay.’
Those were the only words we’d spoken all day.
I talked with a man of trimmed moustache like a line of ants. He, like me, didn’t participate in the games. ‘I ain’t a cardsman, I’m a draughtsman,’ he said often, as though I might be judging him. ‘Is good to mark time.’ He played it quite a lot at work. Security work. Decades ago he’d started out at Blairmont Estate as a chain-boy (in crop season) and a punt-tarrer (in the off season).
The islands paid ten times the wages. He left Guyana. In the islands he was a victim of discrimination. He backtracked into Venezuela, and in Puerto Ordaz he was working in security. I guessed he was a watchie. He was pleased to be returning home for holidays. ‘Is the greatest country in the world. When me die, it got to be in Guyana.’ And live? ‘Nah, man, not live, die.’
I sought lightness in Admiral Rambo. He was sweating effortlessly, sparking a serious bushcook. He had those wonderful bushman skills, of peeling potatoes in unbroken peels without ever looking at them, of chopping directly over the pot, perpetually nourishing it. It was a red peas and beef cookup he was concocting, with a bit of dhal too – a beef khichdi, in other words. Beef khichdi, what a tremendous corruption! How you like that, eh, Pandit, I said to Uncle Lance in my mind. It had been so long since I saw him. I yearned for his reassuring presence at this moment. The nearest substitute was Admiral Rambo, and I stood by him and his bouffant, chopping herb for him.
The cookup was brilliant. The mothers arrived and filled plates for their children. She took a light helping. She didn’t meet my eye as she served herself. She ate alone, sitting on a bench under a tree at the edge of the clearing. I could see her in the dark, fastidiously sifting wrenk from rice with her plastic spoon.
I became acutely conscious of what everybody must think of us. Our alienation felt absurd. In games of the heart, rectifying absurdity feels like the most heinous capitulation. We had thrown ourselves into sustained, wilful hurtsmanship. I wished I could rise above the situation, in one way or another. I was falling between stools. I was still stung. I was more than stung. I thought she was grossly wrong, mean, to portray things as she did. On the other hand I had nothing to offer but an attempt at passing the last hours happy. I couldn’t tell what plane she was on. With some people you know – or else you don’t. The trouble is with those with whom one treads the in-between spaces. Every fact can be assumption, every assumption fact.
‘Eat, bai, Sharook, I en’t charge by the plate, you know,’ Admiral Rambo kept urging me. ‘Throw a nex one to Sharook,’ he kept instructing the man beside the icebox. I performed my learnt Guyanese trick of leaking streams from the bottle as I walked about.
It was getting late. The women and children had settled inside one of the concrete cabin rooms: Jan as well. So decisively she went in, didn’t come out again.
The watchie fell asleep on a chair. The men arranged a wreath of thyme stalks around his head. They dangled wiri peppers from his ears.
Admiral Rambo too called it a night. He’d put up a whole blooming tent inside the other room. It just about fit. In this shelter within a shelter, he and Junior crept in one behind the other to rest their weary bones.
The remaining men continued playing, sometimes arguing, routinely slapping the mosquitoes on their chubby arms.
On the wooden framework of the tin yard I slung up one of the hammocks Admiral Rambo had passed around.
Soon the music died. The bulb went out. And then there was only the high pitch of the forest. I lay awake a while. The chill was seeping into me. I thought of the last time it was like this, when the cold wind had howled down the savannah, when I had sought refuge beneath dangling Moonsammy, consumed to a fever.
 
 
THE awakening was vicious. Admiral Rambo pried open a single eye and shone a torch in it with a belly laugh. We drove through a wet, fog-drenched forest dream and reached San Martin shy of dayclean.
I only awoke from the shock of hearing Mildred, the textbook grandma, emit the words ‘Oh shit.’ It was the first sighting of the river. She’d never seen the water so low. Here we were, driving on the red mud where there was meant to be river. I remembered just how disorienting had been the appearance of the submerged stelling at Menzies Landing that strange morning.
I saw more lovely sights from those days gone. I saw a pair of yellow longboots drying inverted on a pair of sticks. I saw beside them two plastic barrels covered with mesh. I saw a dripping palm, a long dark jackfruit tree. It was the Cuyuni, where the man said he had chopped his pardner nine times.
It was a long wait on the riverbank. People got off, stretched, brushed teeth. I slept again in the jeep.
When I awoke again, there were a surprising number of travellers. They were liming by a small shop that had opened. Some were dragging their bags through the mud towards the river. They had the bright excitement of the returnee. The act of dragging or hauling bags through mud contributed to the brightness. It was the familiarity of the bruck-up, an allegiance. I know, I felt it too.
Looking around at the crowd I was rudely interrupted by the sight of her chatting amiably with a man. He was a well put-together chap, an Indian. There was something burnt and shameless about his face. His hair was shaved down. He wore a crisp bush-shirt and light pleated trousers. On his face he wore the mark, running around like a strap from ear to ear. On his wrist hung the bracelet of Guyanese gold that West Indian cricketers sometimes wore. They were smiling and chatting, now walking and chatting, and he was carrying her bag, looking for all the world that it was them together on vacation.
I wished there was a girl equivalent of the man I could walk with, slower and closer than they, laugh sweeter than they.
I looked for Admiral Rambo. He was in hectic negotiations with the boatman. He came out on top, securing for his passengers the first ride across the river. I got on. She didn’t come.
We motored with clunking sounds through inert clouds. The river was calm and brown. The trees were long and solemn. There were many small islands, perhaps newly made by the low water. The boats weaved in and out of channels. Grandma Mildred giggled as the light spray leapt up at the sides of the boat. She held the polin to the side of her laughing, weathered face. The mulatto grandchild kept yanking it down, delighting her.
Ten minutes and we were on the other side: Guyana; Guyanese mud; short trail through forest; citizens struggling with bags; a clearing; Eteringbang police station.
 
 
THERE was makeshiftness in the air, remote Guyanese makeshiftness, and the station itself was a freshly painted wooden home, like a proud wife’s dwelling, bright white and powder blue, standing upon white concrete pillars. On the signboard pitched into the ground somebody had failed to account for the length of the name. Realisation had struck halfway in: the bang after Etering was less than a whimper. On the stump in vertical letters came Welcome, oddly inviting for a police station.
People gathered with their bags around the station. I had underestimated it: this was also the airport.
In the bottomhouse Admiral Rambo arranged a ramshackle seat behind a ramshackle desk. This was the check-in counter. A second agent, a squirrelly man named Simon, began to tear bits of paper from a pad, scribbling numbers on them. He passed them around to passengers, encouraging them into a queue. Admiral Rambo then called out a number at a time, holding both his hands in the air as he did so, as though receiving applause. The called number stepped up to the peculiar Guyanese challenge of balancing herself on bathroom scales with all her bags while clearly spelling out her full name by the alphabet. Those with lengthy names were at an obvious disadvantage. Poor Chandrawattie Bisoondyal!
Progress was blundering. People were resigned. Somebody suggested that passengers and their bags be weighed separately, but Admiral Rambo cussed it down saying it was sheer stupidness to do in two turn what you can do in one.
Simon the squirrelly agent began to come under severe pressure from the station chief. Things were running behind schedule. There was a big group today. Five planes were due to come in. There was plenty to be done. Accordingly, every few minutes a thundering
‘Simon’ rang out from above, and off he would go scurrying and scurry back faster, cussing under his breath.
I didn’t join the queue. I sat on a rock beside the station. Some way away, people were liming under a large mango tree, as people would at Menzies Landing. An Amerindian lady had set up a stall. The waiting room.

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