The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel (3 page)

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Authors: Rahul Bhattacharya

BOOK: The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel
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We watched the sun go down on Mahdia. Everybody had dispersed, the large lady, the bird man, the presidential candidate and the sidekick, from whom Baby had acquired a set of party bandannas and flyers to distribute in the forest, and of the Sita Sita travellers only Baby, I and a small, nondescript man, practically faceless, continued with Amsterdam.
Darkness caught we well and proper on the nine miles of twisting, turning mud till Pamela Landing.
We rushed to the riverbank to check for the boat. It had long since left.
Amsterdam had a little shop here, supplying the dredges in the area, run by a girl people seemed to be calling Fatgirl. A thing was what it was in Guyana. As a coolieman was a coolieman, as a man with one arm was Onehand, as the elephantiasis-afflicted was Bigfoot, so a thin man was Fineman and a fat girl was Fatgirl.
Fatgirl had shining eyes and a fabulous swaying backside. She wore short red hair and a sleeveless red tee and when we caught sight of her, she was hammering a nail into a chipped board on her counter. Baby, jumping exuberant by now, broke into a grinning song.
‘Hammerin a wah de young girl want …’
She looked at him with a half smile. She resumed the hammering and jumped songs.
‘Empty barrel mek the most noise.’
‘You ent seen me barrel yet,’ Baby protested.
Fatgirl finished hammering and went inside. Baby called out behind her for some water.
‘First time I hear man ask woman for water,’ she called back.
Amsterdam came to the counter, cutting short the conversation. He offered us the night in the shed. We accepted.
The shed was a wooden frame covered with blue tarpaulin. Beneath the polin we slung up our hammocks. They were thin rollable camouflage hammocks, pierced with ease by wind and mosquito. We finished the rest of the mango and genip and ate some vanilla biscuits we’d brought from town.
At the shop, in community spirit, Fatgirl showed a movie for whoever gathered. ‘Some movie got nice slogan,’ Baby declared, and thereafter for the benefit of Fatgirl did repeated impressions of an alleged Denzel dialogue: ‘Forgiveness is between them and God – I’m here to arrange the meeting.’
I fell asleep, on the bench, then in the hammock.
I remember next when at a late and raining hour of the night Baby got up to check if our bags were getting wet. He flashed a light in my face.
‘Alright?’
‘Cold.’
‘But you pullin punts, soldier. Serious punts.’
I went back to sleep.
 
 
THERE was evangelical fervour at dayclean, to use the beautiful Guyanese for dawn. The first stirrings of morning were in the air when the sound system, a six-pack of speakers, each the size of a child, erupted with praise. Amsterdam was well into his day. He had risen at 3.30 to put diesel into the generator – we were interior enough that there was no electricity anymore. Bathed, breakfasted, in very dark glasses looking somewhat like Ray Charles he prepared for his first pick-ups. ‘You need sacrifice,’ he boomed, revved his jeep for a few minutes, and made off into the forest. Guyana need more patriot like that, Baby muttered.
We lay in our hammocks. The music ran out shortly after Amsterdam’s departure. Baby filled the silence humming a Beenie Man gospel. A wisp of a cloud floated by. To lie beside the cloud in the perfect dewy dayclean was something like bliss.
I cannot say if anything had occurred between Baby and Fatgirl at night, but she was exceptionally sweet on him. Our breakfast was complimentary, saltfish fried up with onion and garlic and tomato, along with tumblers of coffee. Guyana used to grow its own coffee – indeed, the first plantations were coffee, and in parts you could still find the bush – but the fashion now was global instant
taken with powdered milk, the final concoction white and brown clumps in warm water. He also charmed a bottle of cola from her. No small deal: things were already twice the price of town.
We walked down the slope to the bank. No boat. The morning water was cool and muddy. We waited in a wooden riverside booth. We leant back and said nothing.
A wee naked lad came by. He was Fatgirl’s son. He gifted me a cherry. I ate it. It was a wiri pepper. I ran ablaze to the river. He ran off deliriously to tell his ma.
We idled. We walked into the forest, towards the sound of a dredge. Studying three or four men hosing down enormous slopes of red mud, Baby hissed without provocation, ‘fockin slaves’.
Back by the Potaro a few others were now waiting as well. It was killingly idyllic: slow white foam adrift on drowsy water, the suggestion of the river opening out beyond, the wood booth on the slope of the bank. Every now and then the calm was broken by a miner hollering a desperate roger on Fatgirl’s radiophone.
At last a small wooden motorboat by the name of Edwin arrived.
 
 
WE went west on the South American river, a little north and a little south, but due west. On either side vegetation exploded up in all shades of green, trees at all kinds of heights, leaves in all manner of shapes, and sometimes we saw a flashing toucan or a macaw or a floating blue butterfly. We passed pontoon water dredges, tinny industrial works I could not fathom. Our halts were at places such as Two Mouth.
Throughout I maintained awed silences, beginning to attract attention.
‘He does talk English?’ a man asked Baby.
‘Reasonayble. Not good-good.’
‘What he does do?’
‘The man from India. He learn them girls kamasutra. Sexual posture-making, you hear about the thing?’
‘Dah wuh you call job, bai! What he doing here?’
‘He sent fuh learn it to gals in the bush.’
‘Wuh he name?’
‘We’s just call him Gooroo.’
As I stared at the terrain, so the man stared at me.
Two hours on we came upon an unsurpassable bit of rapids, glinting like rippled sheets of steel in the sun. We got off.
In a forest clearing, upon the counter of a marvellous Rasta bar an Amerindian lady lay on her belly, short, plump, aggressive. She wagged her legs over her bum as she spoke, and emitted constant cusses which accumulated over her head like a squall.
We settled at a table. Baby went into the bush and brought back a blob of sticky sap on a leaf. From his bag he pulled out the candidate’s flyers. He spread sap on two of them, tenderly working it with his pinky towards the edges. He pasted them together with the printed sides facing each other, and carefully ironed it with his hands. He lifted it in the air and considered his work from several angles.
I assumed he was entertaining himself while we waited for our next boat, whenever that was. It was hence a surprise when he handed me the glued sheaf.
‘Make the application here.’
‘What application?’
‘Make it like from the govament of India. Like you got to come to Kaieteur National Park for doing the study of certain specimen like plant and crappo and them kinda thing.’
‘But why!’
‘They start a rule that you need a permit if you going by overland route. Not by plane, if you take a plane you don’t need no permit. Only overland. You see how stupid the govament?’
‘But nobody asking us for a permit.’
He sucked his teeth. ‘Jus do it nah, man.’ He added proudly, ‘Look, I make it a nice thick paper so it carry the govament style. You unstan what we doing, right, pardner?’
‘Of course, man, I come from India.’
‘Good. Make it in a nice handwriting. Cas it’s a nice thick paper you got there. The handwriting got to match it.’
I formulated the thing in my head. Baby tapped his fingers with impatience. I wrote.
Your Excellency,
 
As per our understanding with the government of Guyana, the Flora and Fauna Department of the Government of India has deputed a scientific observer to study the botanical and zoological specimen in the Kaieteur National Park. Kindly extend him the necessary access for fieldwork so that our nations may learn from each other and raise their positions in the world of science.
 
Thanking you,
Purana Purush
Director, F&F Dept.
Govt. of India
I handed it to Baby. He glanced at it dismissively.
‘Well, it could be a lil more fancy. You cyan add a lil cyurls or something? Put a signature too.’
I felt like an underappreciated secretary.
‘What about the letter, you like that?’
‘Read it nuh, man.’
I read it aloud.
‘Well, is alright.’
I added curls. I signed it.
I handed back the paper for approval. Without further comment he reached into his bag and bunged a rubber stamp on it.
It was a seal. Office of the President.
‘But it says Guyana.’
‘Rest yourself, brother. Watch.’
He took a little sweat off his brow and sprinkled it on the paper. He lightly touched his finger on the stamp.
‘You cyan see now what it say. We tell the man the thing get wet up in the boat.’
Rummaging through his bag once more he produced another item from the Office of the President, this one an overly folded letterhead.
‘Put a permission pon it from de big man. For all two o we.’
I wrote.
To Whom It May Concern,
 
Kindly permit the bearer of this application and his guide entry to the Kaieteur National Park for purposes of scientific observation. There is to be no removing of any specimen.
 
That is an order,
President of Guyana
Armed with these documents Baby rose with the menace of a diplomat to locate a man named Travis. I followed him.
Travis, an Amerindian, was our next boatman, and his reaction to Baby’s documents was a perfectly angelic rejection. Them thing don’t matter, he said, without the receipt from Carl Balgobin. Travis worked for Carl Balgobin; and Carl Balgobin, somehow, had the monopoly on this particular boat-leg. We got an order from the president, Baby argued in pally tones, erroneously referring to Carl Balgobin as Bal Carlgobin. Don’t matter, said Travis, who had the advantage of being completely devoid of expression. The boat belonged to Carl Balgobin. Carl Balgobin paid his salary. Only Carl Balgobin could authorise it; rather could have authorised it. It was surprising the Office of the President did not tell us this. This line of conversation continued for a few minutes till, somewhat abruptly, the elaborate scheme seemed to degenerate into straightforward bribery.
Travis quoted an official price of 12,000 Guyanese dollars per person: he would make a receipt and give it to Carl Balgobin later. Even at two hundred Guyanese to a US dollar, this felt stiff. Baby
made no effort to negotiate. Travis added two gallons of fuel to be purchased at an outrageous price, because the boat burned eight times more fuel going upstream. Here Baby took him away to the side to talk. Passive in the heat, I returned to the bar, where the lady was still lying on the counter, but now on her back. She began to cuss down Carl Balgobin. Thereafter she cussed down the government. Transport was the job of the government, but the government had made Carl Balgobin the blasted government. She called Carl Balgobin an antiman; in fact she referred to him as she. ‘I know she skunt good-good, fockin badmind skunt. I stop wuk for she mudderskunt, an she cry now “do me this nuh, do me dah nuh.”’
Energised by the broadside I awaited the pair neath the ripening noon. They arrived soon with a deal in which the only certain result was that I did not gain in any manner. The lady cussed out the lot of us, and with the cusses still afloat in the clearing, we beat out.
Baby boasted that without the first show of letters we would have paid twice the amount. He put out his fist for a bump.
We trekked twenty minutes through middling forest to the other side of the rapids. With Travis was his wife, and a small child attached to her breast. Travis himself carried a loaded warishi, a backpack made from vines and worn around the forehead with a band. He cut such a Gurkha figure it was disorienting.
 
 
AT the monitoring station it became obvious why we needed all that fuel. Travis fetched his extended family and put them on the boat: his brother, the brother’s wife, two little girls, an infant, a dog who was slapped repeatedly and flung in like a sack of coal, and a grandfather, or possibly great-grandfather, a superb ancient man with a sagging chest behind an open shirt. He was so very old and gorgeous. He hadn’t a single tooth. He polished fishing arrows while the younger generations filled the boat. He spoke only Patamona – the Patamonas one of the nine tribes of Guyana,
carrying the sinister reputation of being ‘full of kaneima’, the spirit of death. Travis and his brother spoke almost no Patamona, wore a cross, and in every outward way had been proselytised.

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