The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel (4 page)

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Authors: Rahul Bhattacharya

BOOK: The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel
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We chugged up the Potaro, up and up. The river bubbled and rushed as we went higher, and the boat trod a fine line. Navigation is the artful handling of channels: too much water and the vessel might be thrown off balance, too little and it might crunch against rock. Tall, straight delineations of plateaux came into view, draped in relentless green, broken only rarely by a deviant rock face plummeting into the water. There was the quality of a carpet to the green cover, something to be touched and caressed, but closer to the eye, on the immediate banks, it was an intricate, untameable denseness. Travis’s brother attempted to guide me through it. Up high was the canopy of the great timber trees, the famous darkwoods of greenheart and purpleheart, the redmaroon bulletwood, the mora and the wallaba, so slender for their towering lengths, and so daintily tentacled at the top. Lower came the austere spears of various palm with their various fronds; lower still, though sometimes higher, fruit trees, bright-leaved and manic, wild mango, wild sapodilla. Beneath this was the absolute deranged mess of undergrowth, buttresses, roots and vine, a wildness so thick that if a man were tossed in chances are he would not hit ground.
Miles away in a cleavage we saw a brilliant white sliver cracking open a mountain. One sensed it would come closer to sight but the river turned corners and it disappeared altogether.
It was early afternoon when we reached Tukeit Landing. The boat was moored and hidden behind trees in the bank. Wordlessly everybody disembarked and began to walk up the rainforest. As we started to climb I felt the frisson of that great white sliver, the suddenness with which it had come and gone.
It was dark and cool and wet, though not raining, and only occasional pinpricks of sunlight made it through. The path was strewn with sodden leaves and wild squelched fruit and branches slippery with moss and lichen and sometimes entire trunks sprinkled
with blue flowers and wild orchid. The ladies scampered up in slippers with babies in their arms; the older children, also in slippers, followed them with elastic grace. From the earliest they were used to this. Travis and his brother powered up with their warishis. The ancient man slouched some, but generated slow, steady and ever-churning momentum, the dog by his side. Baby walked with casual ease. I hadn’t climbed for a few years, had forgotten its sweet pain. We climbed for three hours, perhaps more, soaked in the enclosed humidity of the forest, before the gradient began flattening. Travis and his family went off into another path; I never ever saw them again.
It was evening by the time we mounted the tabletop, there more or less since the world began. Here was a bare beauty. It had appeared to have rained recently. On a drenched wood post perched a wet eagle, shrugging shards of water off its feathers. The hidden sky was now revealed in a frightening expanse, a deep bright indigo, with the suggestion of a creeping, fluorescent dusk underneath. The steaming undergrowth was gone, yielding to white, sandy soil and smoothened round stones as from a prehistoric riverbed. The forest was no more, except at the edge of the plateau. We walked towards it, and as one approached it one could already feel rather than hear the sound: a frozen roar. Treading through the trees once more past little caverns in dark rock and over a small ravine we came to the brink. Across was the most hypnotic thing I ever laid my eyes on, and probably the most authoritative. Water fell, I suppose that was all there was to it. The top was a foam of thunder, the bottom a pandemonia of reactionary spray shooting up like geysers, and in between, the utter, cathartic wall of … something like an emotion, a large feeling, both stoic and ecstatic, a triumph and, to the eyes of mortals, a humiliation, a momentary reconsideration of the world.
I sat and watched in silence. Low in the gorge lingered remnants of a dissolved rainbow. Up in the setting sky a million specks circled towards a convergence like bees to a giant hive. Thereafter they
began to dive down in swoops, the dots getting quicker, shapelier as they freefell. ‘Watch,’ said Baby. They were swifts. They made for the falls, a mass deathwish, so rapturous and so graphic that one couldn’t stop looking and one couldn’t bear to look, and at the final moment of execution they slipped miraculously behind that fantastic curtain and into unfathomable space. The symphony ran for long minutes, maybe ten or fifteen.
We went around to the head of the falls and bathed like lunatics, tempting starbai deaths ourselves.
 
 
THE settlement of Menzies Landing was a mile or two away. The white sand and smoothened old stones gave way to coarser soil and shinny tufts of grass as we walked towards it. We saw a dead labaria in the grass. Baby claimed a labaria could sting dead a horse in full gallop on all four legs. Look who dead now, I countered. He sucked his teeth.
Closer to the settlement there was straggling bush and patches of pineapple, the young rough fruit emerging unexpectedly in the amphitheatre of leaves; and classic Caribbean debris, rusted tin, shanks of wood, stray fronds of palm.
The settlement had instant Rasta vibes, for the first shack one saw was painted in primary red, yellow and green; a ‘no drugs’ sign hung on the tree outside. A short way beyond was the main cluster of houses, a scattering of withered, patched-up shacks. Some were raised, and then only a couple of feet; many were not. Most were a single room, rectangular, but some seemed to be partitioned in the centre. Most used wood-boards, but there were one or two of shingles. All except the Rasta bombshell were grey-black.
The settlement was arranged around a mango tree in a central clearing that fell on a wide path to the river. Beneath the tree a few people sat and talked. On the path itself there was a game of cricket on.
People came and went all the time from the settlement, lives
temporary as the whistling wind, so nobody reacted much to an appearance unless it was a complete stranger. The folk seemed to know Baby. Some gave him a hug or a fist-touch, some simply muttered ‘alright?’, and some did not care. They called him a manner of names, Cookup, Chase, Aubrey, and one man greeted him with ‘Baby Saw you raw you raw you raw.’ He was Labba.
‘And wah bout you friend here?’
‘The man from India.’
‘He walk a long way.’
‘Eh he. He come fuh teach Indian sexual posture to gals in the bush.’
‘Man be a Gooroo!’
‘Yeah, yeah, Labba, you know the thing.’
‘We got to carry the man to Chenapau. Gooroo, you seen buckgal pattacake? High and pink, like so’ – he cupped his hands together – ‘like a mound. Jus like a mound.’
It was the final minutes of cricket. The stumps were a rusted round barrel cover propped up by a stick. A man with green eyes bowled quick with a round-arm action. Batting was a man named Nasty (because, I was told, of his face: not that it was nasty, but nasty that he showed it to others). He wore knee-length socks on hairy red legs, and a white floppy hat with a string around the chin. His sweating eyebrows were like wet charcoal smudges. He held the bat like a walking stick. In comical, traumatically un–West Indian fashion he held back the lashes, moving to the ball and pulling out at the last instant. Maybe not altogether un–West Indian: Courtney Walsh did it so. In between deliveries he patted down stones with his bat and marked his guard with a twig.
A Rasta lay in a hammock wearing dark shades and called the play. He was Roots. Nasty evaded every last effort at his wicket almost exclusively with his stomach. ‘A whole heap of disparate disparity from Nasty there,’ Roots toasted.
I met a few more people. The green-eyed fast bowler was Siddique, proprietor of one of the two shops, the one with the
yard enclosed fastidiously with corrugated tin and barbwire. Big Leaf ran a second shop. There was the mystic Dr Red. The village elder was Mr Johnson, a compact man with Gandhi spectacles and the neatest room, his sense of order extending to the scrupulously lettered warning on the door of his pit latrine: ‘Watch for fine ants.’
We stayed by Labba in his little partitioned sodden shack. There was a tiny front room, where we slung our hammocks, an equally small back room with a table and a wooden platform for a bed, and a shed for cooking, avoided by Labba for bees.
At night I took a last dip in the Potaro, cool and brown in the morning at Pamela Landing, hot and foaming at the head of the falls in the evening, now red and viscous in twilight.
I returned to the settlement. And here we stopped awhile, Baby and I, among the shops of the Siddiques and Big Leaf, among Nasty, Dacta Red, Roots and Labba and other creatures like us, alone, amiss and awander.
IT was much later, when these days peeped and flashed like hidden stars of my life, that I could summon any focus on the folk of Menzies Landing. I had little back-knowledge and naturally no foreknowledge.
It was a coastlander’s settlement. Any Amerindians, the people of the interior, were women by marriage or passing through. The Siddiques were the only East Indians. Mr Siddique himself with his green eyes seemed to be of mixed blood, and his son had taken an Amerindian wife from Chenapau. She was a beautiful short girl with long black hair and sad eyes. She sat in doorways breastfeeding and seldom spoke. She looked twenty-four but was sixteen. Labba said it was because she was unhappy, having left the tribal village, and feeling here an outsider. If she chose to go back it would be hard. She would be made to do the dirty work. Labba had been in the bush for thirty years, and at this spot for eighteen, so I took his word for it at the time. But after a while I was sceptical of anything he said about Amerindians. He was contemptuous of how they ate big-belly animal, drank river water without letting the sediment settle, used poison-plants for fishing though it was banned. When he castigated Brazilians, in taut statements that rang
like headlines – ‘Brazilian miners invadin Guyana’, ‘Brazilian pirates lickin out Guyanese mineral’ – then too it was the Amerindians who were disdained. ‘Brazilian come and fuck buckman wife, and buckman just skin he teeth.’ Afterwards I thought to connect this with a historical animosity – Amerindians had been used to hunt down runaway African slaves. Eventually I came around to thinking that the contempt was perhaps not so particular after all. It was the uniform, universal contempt for indigenous peoples everywhere.
The folk at Menzies Landing were black, or more often red, like the mystic Dr Red, whom no less an authority than Mr Johnson considered an intellectual. In the direct Guyanese way a red person was a direct visual thing. It implied mixed blood and, obviously, a certain redness of skin. Black and Portuguese could be red. Black and Amerindian could be red. East Indian and Portuguese could be red. If the outcome was red then a ‘clear skin’ dougla might come to be called red.
Dr Red was a red man with a red beard. It crept wispily down his chin till the wisps gathered into an unexpected plait far superior to the sum of its strands. He had a good amount of putagee and plenty buck, he said. Yet his true last name, Wong, was Chinese, and he claimed ancestorship from a rich and famous European prospector. He liked to play up the European blood, yet when he told his stories, in slow hypnotic baritones that could stretch to half an hour clean, it was clear he carried the Amerindian flag.
Consider the story he told about Bones.
‘He was my friend, Bones. A blackman. One time me and Bones limin, drinking Heineken. Bones point to a buck gal and say he wan to fuck she. Now Amerindian girls, you don’t court them. You don’t hold they hands and tell them they got eyes like moon and lips like rose and them kind of thing. You take their hand and go away and fuck them. It’s a rape in a kind of way. Bones raped a lot of buck girls. When he want to rape this girl, as a buckman I tell he to fuck off. He throw me some punches. I bang my head on the table and I pass out for the night. The next
mornin I find a trouble. Bones gone at night to the girl’s home and try to rape her. He knock aside the child. The child get hurt. The girl husband Victor, he try to stop him. Bones chop him. Victor go to get some people, he come back with six people. They come with cutlass, 22-inch. They chop Bones thirty-two times. Bones get put in the hospital. I hear all this in the morning. I hear it quietly. I gather me thought. I say nothing. I say, Okay. I take my axe. I take off the blade, conceal it within my clothing. I go to the hospital. Is just like one room. I tell the nurse, Nurse, please leave us alone as he is my pardner and we have a private matter to discuss. I take out me blade and attach it and I begin to chop and thrash Bones. I lash him in all respects. I almost kill him. I go to the police and ask them to escort me. They charge me for aggravated assault with intention to injure. I get let off – cause I represent myself. I’s always be able to represent myself, never get convicted. That is because, you see, I have a spiritual belief within myself. I make remedies. My bones be hard and clean. My inner might is very clear.’
The mutilation had occurred at Kamarang, near where Guyana met Brazil and Venezuela. The western regions, Mazaruni and Cuyuni, there was more action there. More diamond and much more gold. The dredges were bigger, the settlements were bigger. There were prostitutes, murders, robberies. ‘Up here nice, up here quiet,’ Menzies folk liked to say.
It had been years since the last killings. They talked about notorious Linden ‘Blackie’ London. He was a former army man who turned into a bandit of preposterous daring and became a national figure. He came up to Kaieteur to reform. Here he killed again, plunged into the river to escape, returning thereafter to his life of banditry. A few years on Blackie died. His denouement was spectacular. It came shortly after a massive heist in Georgetown. They cornered him in a hotel room. Blackie fought on, keeping police and army at bay for, depending on who told you, anywhere between twelve and thirty hours. When the building went up in
flames he agreed to surrender. He promised to talk about a lot of things, expose the government. He emerged unarmed only to be riddled with bullets. Half of Georgetown and the coast, they said, turned up for his public funeral. His coffin was draped in the national flag.
The very last killing at the settlement was Watusi’s. For that man there was no sympathy. Dr Red described him as a serial killer. Some porknockers had owed him money. When they returned from the backdam they didn’t tell Watusi they’d come back. He went into their room with two guns and opened fire. One man survived, as he held up a plate against the bullet and fainted. Afterwards Watusi tried to kill another man, whose brother then killed Watusi. Nobody wanted to touch him. He was left under a tree. The ants ate him.
 
 
IN full bloom there could be as many as fifty people in the settlement, babies included, but at most times there were unlikely to be more than twenty. When it began the settlement was a base for balata bleeders, of whom Mr Menzies was a pioneer. But too many of those bulletwoods were felled rather than tapped; the supply dwindled; the bleeders left, and only porknockers remained. They porknocked in the forest around Kaieteur – illegally, as it happened, rebelling against the government order that prohibited all mining in the national park. It was impossible to monitor porknockers. And they carried on porknocking.
There was the simplest economy of barter and credit. Porknockers would spend weeks or months in the forest hunting for ‘mineral’ before returning to the settlement. Here they would contemplate a trip to the coast to sell the bounty and drink of wine and women, but they rarely did go. After they’d repaid the shopkeepers with diamond and gold against which they’d taken supplies, there wouldn’t be much left. They limed in the settlement till mood or necessity took them back into the forest. Despite the idea of
town, its thrills and vices that they talked up all the time, I sensed many of them didn’t actually like town. They were institutionalised by the bush, its freedoms and compulsions, the smallness of the community, the eternity of its surrounds. It was the shopkeepers who routinely went to the coast to trade.
At times I could scarcely believe a settlement like this, so little and rudimentary, existed beside the wonder that was Kaieteur. Anywhere else Kaieteur would have been a hive of tourists, the largest singledrop falls in the world, five times the height of Niagara, and so much greater than the statistic. But this was Guyana. Nobody touch she. There might be one plane a day, sometimes two, sometimes none – and a plane carried nine passengers. It would come in at about noon. A small guest-house had been built by the airstrip, but the tourists rarely stayed. They would take a guided walk for an hour or two, then fly right back.
The days started early and the time was all ours. It rained often, in thrilling bursts, rain running down shingles in ecstatic bumps, the entire settlement, the shacks, the mango tree, pixelating in sheets of water. We went walking on the plateau, usually in threes or fours, most often it was Baby and me with Labba or Roots or both. We collected smooth stones from the creek and stroked them and placed them on our foreheads while lying on the airstrip. We laughed at the little scuttling planes when they couldn’t land in the clouds.
There was a brilliant strangeness to the tepui, the word for plateaux like this with their own ecosytems nourished by the constant fine spray of the Kaieteur. The phenomenon of the tank bromeliad, for instance – the marvel was that it had every appearance of a potted plant, except that it was so garrulously outsize. The largest ones were two or three times as tall as I. The minuscule golden frog that lived within its leaves I could never spot. But I often saw the orange cock-of-the-rock. Such a funny bird! He was a startling orange neckless mohawk. He sat in the trees hamming it up to attract mates and nested in sheer rock face. The golden frog, the
cock-of-the-rock, they were endemic species, special to the small area around the falls.
It was the ranger’s son who let me in on these secrets, allowing me a look at a photocopied set of notes for a bounce of rum. He was a young, handsome lad, keen on dancing. He was planning to write and direct a movie in which he would star as Kaie who had plunged down the cliff to save his tribe, the Patamona, from the Caribs, and left the waterfall in his wake.
Everybody in the bush was a hero in a small way, and they thought of themselves as heroes in much bigger ways. They walked golden on the tabletop. They thought they could do anything, turn flimstar, fly fighter jet, fuck the greatest women, open casino in Brazil. They boasted without irony, in amusing, endearing ways. They spoke about real aspirations in humble tones. Labba said he could catch butterflies and sell them in town. He could chop the tree that obstructed a view of the falls for two grand. He could make warishis and sell them for eight grand. He could dig up a lil pond for tourist and dam it with rocks, start a pool parlour too, and then there might be a long, detailed debate on whether a pool table could be folded so as to fit in the tiny Islander planes.
We slow-watched Kaieteur for hours from various points. The mist was horizontal in the morning and vertical at night and in between times was the revelation. The shorter rainy season, anyway strong only on the coast, was meant to have finished. But this year was different, Labba said, because the white man and his policies and his gluttonies were mashing up worlclimate. Earlier you didn’t need the calendar because you had the weather. This year the light rainy season had been so long and hard that it had rained more than in even the heavy months. We were in the first days of February and it still continued. The water in the river was the highest he had seen in his eighteen years, and the falls had never been thicker than now. You felt it could wrap the globe in its immense flowing tendrils.
The swifts that lived in the mysterious place behind the falls
were reputed to come out at dawn, but I also saw them come out an hour before noon, swooping up in unison and exploding and scattering high in the bright blue sky like pinpricked tinsel. If you lay on your stomach and crept to the edge of the overhang by the head of the falls, it was the closest you could come to feeling like the swifts. Below was the gorge, a surreal lushness. Sound rose up it like steam. The rainbow was a halo around the violence of impact. The river gathered itself after the spill, sidewound away through the forest, forever changed.
We would lime on the mad overhang beside the sign that warned of the 741 ft drop. We’d gyaff, smoke herb, though I had nothing like their capacity. It was breathing to them. They took entire little branches, didn’t bother with cleaning, housed them loosely in paper and lit up.
We talked about music. I felt indebted to Roots. I’d liked him very much ever since he was calling the cricket from his hammock in his dark glasses, but I felt indebted to him. It was he who let me know that it was not Abul Bakr the big man sang about in Duppy Conqueror, but
a bull bucker
, and it was he who explained to me ‘sipple’ from the terrific cosmic opening wail of War Ina Babylon: sipple, Jamaican for slippery, like watch your step. We agreed it was a fine name for Baby and added it to his list of names. We were on the overhang and Roots sat shirtless – they all were usually shirtless or in fishnet vests, with thin muscular bodies hard as, scarred as old school desks – Roots sat shirtless, legs crossed and shoulder-length dreads blown back and ganja emerging softly from his nostrils.
He had spent some time in Jamaica and spoke highly of the vibe up there. He was down with dreadtalk. He used overstand for understand and shitstem for system. To signal agreement he said ‘ites’ and ‘seen’. He sometimes did the whole ‘I and I’ thing but more, I suspected, as performance. He considered himself a conscientious Rasta. He showed me a terrible festering gash on his finger, which, like Marley’s toe that killed him, he refused to
amputate. He ate ital. He was drawn to the idea of Repatriation. ‘Yeahman, some day. Not right away but some day, some day when the vibe is right. I going fly ome … Yeahman … fly ome.’
And high above the swifts flew. And in the benab, Dacta Red and the ranger’s son perused the Bible in order to ‘locate the solution for certain spiritual problem we run into’. Over at the settlement, Mrs Siddique, who liked it here – ‘homeside got too much them-say me-say’, a phrase that felt to me directly translated from the Hindi
tu-tu main-main
– Mrs Siddique stirred her pot of curry. And you could pick up all these vibrations. I cannot explain it. It was heightened vibing. I’m not even certain I realised at the time.

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