The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel (5 page)

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Authors: Rahul Bhattacharya

BOOK: The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel
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ON our fourth day a group of porknockers returned to the settlement. They were seven in all, rougher than rough, steppin like razor, they could chew bullets, kick down trees. They came with great big cheer and a supply of wild meat, eager to sport like sport going out of style.
All afternoon they curried labba, a kind of large rodent, its meat close to pig. And as white and then red rums were killed alongside the rodents, by the time the evening officially began, with people congregating beneath the mango tree, there was already a kind of latent madness in everybody’s eyes.
We played a session of semi-drunken cricket. End of play was signalled by a firesnake, darkly orange, slithering across the pitch. Men went for it with a stick and a prong. The Siddique ladies squealed. The reptile was beaten with the stick and hoisted on the prong, a bulge pressed against the stretched skin of its stomach. Somebody tore it with a knife: a frog fell out with a bloody splatter, fully made but for severed limbs. The snake was sacked for its skin. The crappo was dispatched with a kick under the shop. It was the rudest dinner interruption I ever saw.
People drifted into one of the two shops. The generators were switched on. An action movie was on at Big Leaf’s. I settled in Siddique’s.
It had the special feel of a small inexplicable place in South America. Rice and flour sacks were heaped in the corners. Everything was wooden, the walls, the tables, the benches, the floor, the beams, the counter, the shelves, the windows. A Hindu Dharmic Sabha calendar was nailed on the wall, beside it an Islamic calendar of the Peter’s Hall Sunnahtul Jama Masjid, and beside that charts of snakes and frogs in the region. There was a living powis in the room as well. This is an exceptionally silly kind of turkey, jet black with a white belly. She was disconcertingly large and underbalanced. She pottered about on the beams above us. She made me terribly insecure, for she discharged droppings in unreasonable quantities and moreover was liable to sudden flapping flights, often landing on someone’s foot or thigh and nobody noticed but me.
The Siddique daughter was minding the counter. Baby frequently expressed his admiration for her, ‘Wouldn’t mind some of that coolie hair pon my face,’ ‘the gal real come of age’. The music ran loud – soca, chutney, chutney-soca. The games began. Dominoes, but to accommodate me one of the tables moved to Rap, which was the card game I knew from my childhood as Knock Knock. A returned porknocker sponsored a bottle of five-year, and I sponsored one too. Somebody also came along with high wine. This was a cheap colourless spirit of sixty-nine per cent alcohol. If you peered into the bottle the vapour singed your eye. Spilled drops burnt holes in the wood like acid. We drank the five-year, but along with that, the loser in each game of Rap was to down a capful of high wine, two capfuls for a particular kind of loss. Also, there were these very fat joints floating about. The whole thing was doomed from the start.
The games proceeded apace, with people gaily threatening each other, ‘I gon drunk you skunt tonight mudderskunt’. Soon the high wine capfuls were making dents in everybody. I felt the bones in my head softening. I could not escape the feeling that strangers were lifting me by the hair and dropping me for laughs. In a faraway corner bench Dr Red leant back against the wall and stared at the
powis on the beams and said, ‘I would feed you, powis, I would feed you in a natural manner.’
The wooden room grew in din. Baby began making forays to the counter to talk to the Siddique daughter, routinely breaking into his slow gold-gleaming laugh and saying, ‘Eh heh heh, that is a very am
biguous
statement gal, eh heh heh. Very am
biguous
.’ He said this no matter what the poor girl said or didn’t say. The elder Siddiques soon caught on, and the girl was dispatched inside. If she emerged later, it was only in the company of Mrs Siddique, putting an end to Baby’s ambiguity.
Things within and without were aclatter. I thought racoons were chewing up the shack and began giggling. I exited Rap in order to exit high wine. I compensated with an extremely large five-year. I took a seat beside Dr Red. He showed me a British halfpenny from 1938. He stared at it a very long time. Thereafter he broke into an uncalculated monologue, looking mainly at the powis.
‘Right now I been celibate for about four years. When I spent two years up on the mountain top in Kurupung, when I come to the landing I kinda see that this whole … I see this AIDS, I see this different diseases, I see this people dyin, I see beautiful girls, they got the virus and I’s not a man to be so protective to be using condoms and I just say to myself this is stop for me. If I don’t get to know a girl properly inside out when I could afford not to use a condom then that’s gonna be it. I just knocked it out. Before that I’s speculate birds you know. In Kamarang I get six wives one night, and the remarkable thing is that none of them is meet eighteen. Like fourteen-eighteen. Akawaio girls. All the wannabe girls say, You give me a chile, man, Uncle Red, you my chilefadder but still you don’t love me. I say, I love you with all my heart, I love you, but I lie. So she say, You have to ask me for my fadder. So I say, No, I got to correct you because of this language barrier. She’s supposed to be saying I got to ask her father for her. So it’s more or less like a nice teaching. You got them young girls now more or less look to you like a father figure. They come an say, Uncle Red, I would like to have panty.’
About then Labba arrived in a heavy smokeshroud of Haile. And behind him, tottering, Nasty, in long white socks! I was delighted to see him and behaved, much to his surprise, in the manner of a host. We engaged in rapturous praise of the premier batsman of the West Indies and the cosmos, Sir Prince Brian Charles Lara. He recalled an innings, I recalled another, he struck one pose, I struck another, each one shamelessly demolishing the coiling-uncoiling slithering grandeur of the great man. Nasty had the voice of a man with something like sand in his throat. When he spoke excitedly you feared for him. He told of the time he was at Bourda when India toured in ’89. ‘J. Aroon Lal and Navjoe Sidoo Sing! Oh boy. Sreekant hand bust in the previous match. It was down to J. Aroon Lal and Navjoe Sidoo Sing! Walsh flick Navjoe Sidoo Sing edge and the bossman’ – he meant Sir Emperor Vivian Richards – ‘the bossman flick up he hand and pouch the catch, just like so.’ Nasty stretched high to his right with arms thrown up. ‘I was deh, right deh behind him.’ I applauded the effort, and we downed a quick one, both believing that indeed it was Nasty’s presence right behind Sir Emperor Vivi which caused the catch. We gave praise (as well as thanks) to Sir Shree Carl Hooper, a beautiful Guyanese who moved at the crease with the softest sweetest paws and the slowest sleeping winks. Perhaps we also moaned to Sir Shree Carl, long fluttering moans drowned by the music, audible to only us. Last but not the least, we struck deep respectful impenetrable Shiv Da Chandapaul eyes-on stances with twitching brows and itchy hands and flickering tongues and bottoms upped to Unity village.
The sound mixes in the room began to make me mad. The same tired sexual soca jokes, the same badman dancehall soundclashes. Two youthmen were taking it serious. They brought out their finger guns and went poom-poom and bullet-bullet to all corners. Repeatedly they strode across the room, raising hell with their digits.
I felt for escape. I began to crave musicality of the musical kind. Was deep urges. Horns! Keys! Upstrokes! A-ha! I left with Baby and we went to Roots, who was at Big Leaf’s, where the
night was mellow and intoxicated but untouched. The movie had finished; Mr Johnson had gone home; the revellers had moved to the Siddiques. We cooked up a session. I brought my iPod. Roots had old tapes – how beautiful those tapes! – that he played on his small old portable. We took the stuff to Big Leaf’s sound system where by the grace of Jah there was a lead that could hook these to the amp.
We gave immediate thanks via the Maytals and their great gospel-soaked romps, Toots and his mighty fraying voice rising from deep, deep within and around him other voices peeping out, hitting different planes, different meanings. With Toots it was never what he said but how he said it, hence the plainest euphoria. We surrendered to the Skatalites on Flowers for Albert, and David Murray himself appeared, and the new trombone man was no Don D, what do you expect, but he was pretty damn sweet, and McCook’s sax sang, and the trumpet sang, like ecstasy distilled from old desire as Langston Hughes said, solo segueing into solo, layered over all that upstroke, all that keeping of time, all that
discipline
, tremendous tight construction, enough to support an island and coming together so correctly and precisely that Baby kept calling, ‘is cooking, is cooking, let she cook, let she cook’ and then it was cooked. We inhaled and slow-nodded to Burning Spear’s heavy cutting militant incantations, the refrain springing forth from beneath that colossal opening cascade of horns and above the oldest school reverb. Roots was hard into militant reggae and he skanked in the moonshine, and we stayed in the mood a while, went to Tosh and crucial Mutabaruka, but when he started sinking into Buju I switched back to jumping fat choons.
We gave shoutouts to the great departed and those still living. We went to Dekker’s intensified falsetto –
rum-babaloo-bam-bam-bam-balooey!
– and bigged up Guyana in the person of Eddy Grant. That little genius Scratch Perry, not at all a little genius, a very monstrous genius, but a little man, Scratch Perry arrived tumbling down with straightforward botheration. Prince Buster came in shakin
long, shakin strong. U-Roy toasted, Big Youth boasted. We made a foray into vital dancehall when dancehall was dancehall, sizer than sizeway days. Dekker and his falsetto kept returning every now and then, and so did Toots, over many forms, over many years, with many different people, including Shaggy on Bam Bam!, he came over ska, over rocksteady, over reggae, but with the same fraying imperishable voice.
After two hours I was spent. Huge heights had been scaled. Babylon had kind of fallen. And now we began to cool off to Family Man’s bass licks, the vibratory truths of those timbres, to dreams of sweet rubadub inspired by Bunny in Ballroom Floor – which, when you trace it back to the mouth, to the earliest ’66 or thereabouts ska, was cut to a version of Rolling Stone – but the lonesomeness of these dreams was killing and so we stopped. We stopped right there and left.
I realised I was no longer drunk. But I was stoned crazy. I sought to revert to drunkenness. Guyanese rum was round and ribald, ached with the pure sweat of slavery.
We returned to the Siddique shop – bacchanal and how. People were wrestling arms. The two youths were gunning down different parts of the wall. The music had grown louder. Bounty Killa and Baby Cham and friends were putting out some homo-hating lady-disrespectin shit. The powis was fluttering about, terrified by the commotion and not knowing where to go. Nasty was slumped upon a sack of flour, his chin resting on his Adam’s apple, his eyes three-quarters closed, a gently spilt drink cupped in his hands.
‘Wounded soldier,’ pronounced Baby, ‘grievously wounded.’
I myself felt wounded. I took a seat again beside Dacta Red, who remained oblivious of the surrounding anarchy, though the plait in his beard was undone. He reached into various pockets of his soul and painted, over another terrific baritone monologue, a picture of his life’s thoughts and lessons, sailing through time and space, from big to small, from abstract to specific.
‘As I grew older I knew that material wealth is nothing. I like
it more or less spiritual. At one time when my girl was suppose to get her first child I had actually become a pimp, like going to those discotheques and looking after girls in terms of protection and fencin whatever booty they may be able to get their hands on so I could earn an extra dollar. That was my personality in those days in the 70s. Being a buck in Georgetown more or less pass off like a low caste, like you don’t have anywhere to face, you’re stupid. Maybe you would not be able to represent yourself or your family. Street hustle, you don’t find a buckman streethusslin. Mostly they were the blacks, the negroes, they wouldn’t like a buckman being a leader for a gang or whatever. I’s always a leader when I grow up. When we have streetfight and gangfight I’s always be at the head. Represent myself and represent others. The thing of it is that you have to know to fight well, y’know, the way it take itself, material things, you got a lot of gold chain, you got a motorbike, and these kind of things. I never liked stealing an the guys go stealing an if I don’t take part the guys go against me. Ambush me or try to set me up with the law. We have only one gang per street. We normally do streetfightin and then you have gang, I would call it pilfering, we had motorbike gangs, gangs would steal motorbike, housebreakers. I’s not someone who steal. I be someone who represent.’
As Dr Red imbibed high wine and spoke, and we both stared spent at the powis, Nasty expertly maintained his position on the flour sack. At some point, however, Labba and Baby provocatively began to call Prince BC a battyman, ‘not a batsman, he a damn battyman’. At this Nasty leapt off the flour sack. Buoyed by his resurrection, I too joined him in the defence. Labba and Baby kept attacking, Nasty and I defended steadfastly, letting nothing through. It soon emerged that Nasty and I were defending different things, Nasty from the very possibility of the prince being a battyman, I of its relevance. Never mind. The thing gathered storm and people arrived from various corners of the room to contribute.
‘They find he antiman skunt in bed one day with the bowler, wuh he name, Cummins.’

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