The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel (8 page)

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Authors: Rahul Bhattacharya

BOOK: The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel
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Nobody said anything.
Baby turned away.
Foulis straightened himself.
I pulled the cutlass out of the earth and held it feebly by my side.
After a minute or so Baby turned to face Foulis.
‘We gah find what we could find.’
We returned to the shack in a silence that for the first time in the forest felt like an absence rather than a presence.
 
 
WE combed the floor carefully. Two of Baby’s stones were recovered; two of the smallest. The rest were beneath the shack.
It was getting to evening, and though bright at the moment, darkness would arrive swiftly. There was perhaps an hour of good light left.
They tried to bash out the floorboards to climb down. The beams below creaked and sagged so precariously that it was feared
the entire construction might collapse. That would not only destroy the shack, but also ruin any chances of recovering the stones. The idea was abandoned. Instead they decided to work the filth below like gravel sometimes is in mines.
They sliced off the tops of plastic bottles to give them wide mouths. They crawled below the house. It wasn’t easy to get under: it was raised off the earth by a foot and a half, if that. Beneath was pure squelch: rot, clumps of weed, bits of wood, nails, tadpoles, kakabelly fish. There were spiders and scorpions. They hoped there would be no vipers and took the meagre precaution of flashing a torch.
They crept in flat on their stomachs, barely squeezing through, trying to keep their mouth and nose and eyes out of the sick filth. I received the plastic bottles from them, emptied them into a bucket, wet muck with soil and pebbles, vegetation and darting living things, and passed the bottles back to them. The relay continued till the bucket was filled.
They crawled out. The bucket was emptied out on a sieve in batches, and Baby jigged it in the vat of rain water. Momentarily the filth would be awash with hope, which flushed out as the water drained away. There was simply too much of all kinds of filth. It is futilities that most obsess man. The entire process was repeated again: the crawl, the filling of the bottles, the relay, the sieving. At the third bucket, with the light dying, Foulis spotted a viper at the edge of the shack.
It was finished.
The exercise was exhausting for its uselessness; but exhaustion did not bring its exhausted relief. Quite the opposite. The tension had been mounting rather than dissipating. Everybody wanted to be away, by themselves, or with different people. I felt my presence was resented; from Baby there was a distance that verged on hostility. And I myself saw him in a very different light.
Brusquely, briefly, they discussed the possibility of starting over in the morning. It was a stupid idea. The likelihood of retrieving a dozen pinheads from the debris was negligible. Our supplies were
finished. Forget any of that. A man had almost murdered another. No, this was done.
A resolution was needed. Without looking him in the eye, Foulis handed Baby five or six stones from his box, saying, firmly, cautiously, ‘Leff here tomorrow.’ I thought it was a well-judged gesture, I could not tell whether from guilt, magnanimity, pity, fear, or all. It was sheer dignity. Baby accepted the stones with the air of a man who believed he was being scamped.
And with that Foulis, he was a slender man, he retreated slenderly to his shack.
 
 
THERE was a light drizzle as twilight fell. The wonder of the water felt a nuisance. Mud got on to one’s ankles and toes, dried there slowly, attracting insects. On the line the clothes were damp again. The sandflies, which came out for a hungry hour at dusk, had an aggressive session. Despite my faithful applications of Shoo, there were clayey mounds on my arms and legs.
We had our first meal since breakfast, and at different times. The rice was lumpy and had to be treated like balls, rolled in a long-water potato curry.
I got into the hammock earlier than usual. I could not fall asleep; and afterwards when Baby climbed into his on the other side of the partition I sensed he couldn’t either. When a man shifted in the hammock the beams creaked – when a man shifts rather than sways in a hammock he cannot really be asleep. That night was long and creaky.
It occurred to me that I did not actually know him – not in the ordinary way. I played events over and over in my head. With a little distance now, things seemed obvious. Foulis had done nothing wrong. He’d asked Baby to be careful with his stones – he hadn’t touched them. Even the spillage could not properly be seen to be his error. It had simply happened. Baby had come here a near stranger, a pardner of a pardner, and Foulis had allowed him to work on his site. For this he almost had his head split open by a cutlass.
Yet when I considered things from Baby’s point of view, it seemed surprisingly compelling. He’d worked hard. Foulis might indeed have placed the stones on the scales as Baby had requested. Of course, his stones were his responsibility. At that moment he was swimming in common complacency. Perhaps the confrontation was really his confrontation with the complacency. I tried to give him benefit of the doubt. It had simply been a lapse of sense. And yet – the terror of a man quivering for his life.
It was a rainless night, cool and welcoming. I felt to go for a walk. Baby did, too, for I heard him get up and leave through the back door. I thought of joining him, but I let it drop. I lay in the hammock, creaked myself to sleep.
 
 
THE morning broke orange and fresh. Every day with my first step into the veranda I would be struck by how busy the vegetation was around the shacks. One went to bed thinking it was a clearing, and woke to lush bush, patches of Spanish nettles, a noni tree renowned for its medicinal properties and used by Labba during his convalescence, a few ité palm, the most distinctive of all palms, with its lovely round fronds, though I was told this was not supposed to be ité territory.
For breakfast we ate the cane and pineapple that remained.
Foulis cooked his pot in his back veranda. We nodded at each other but said nothing. Afterwards, when I went over to say goodbye and thank you, he wasn’t there.
It was a pleasant, peaceable day of lengthy bird tweets, gently humid, a day for picnic, playing, snoozing. We set out on the half-hour walk to the boat. The trail was much drier now; my shoe did not once sink.
The paddles and the polin were intact in the tree trunk, but there was no sign of the boat. Eventually it was located. It had foundered in the dropping water. Baby threw a rope over a branch to fashion a pulley. We spent half an hour tugging it out.
We spent another forty-five minutes bailing out water. We were drenched.
As Baby was about to push off he stopped. He jumped off the boat with a hasty ‘Jus now’, the Guyanese for any length of time. I waited in the boat. I thought he’d gone off to shed a tear before the journey. Persuaded by the good sense of this measure, I too decided to piss.
I climbed out and I saw him through vines and tendrils – I saw him pull out a little knot of cloth from his crotch and untie it. He heard me coming and whirled around. I had alarmed him. As I approached him he maintained his poise, emptying the contents of the open cloth into a small plastic cylinder without accident. Diamond! Many more than the six or seven stones he had. He placed the cylinder in his bag and walked back towards the boat.
I pissed. My instinctive reaction had been of excitement, as if a cruel twist of fate had been ironed out. But now I felt involuntarily disturbed; then confused.
We got into the boat. We sailed downstream like driftwood. It was the greatest luxury. The river had fallen drastically. The trees now visibly rooted in earth were robbed of their earlier mystique. You could see water marks on the trunks.
I sifted through my confusion. The slow rush of thoughts and images ended each time with Baby leaving the back door at night. Did he take them off Foulis? But how? Foulis would have guarded them on his body, surely. Perhaps Foulis had given him some more in the morning, before I’d risen. But why? At any rate, it did not square with Baby’s reaction when I stumbled on him.
There was only one other possibility. It seemed too far-fetched. Yet the more I thought of it, the more it made sense.
Our journey breezed by. What had taken us four hours against the current with supplies was done in an hour. And I was shocked when, after the last big bend before the settlement, we pulled into a stelling. I had no idea there had been one: it had been wholly
submerged. It was one of those little mind-images that had been misshapen without reason. There used to be a slide in the playground of my childhood school; when I visited years later, it had moved to a different position. It had upset me for days.
Baby tethered the boat.
As we were about to get off, I asked: ‘You worked his old pile of gravel?’
‘Leff it, bai.’
‘O fuck, man. You did.’
‘Rest yourself, bai,’ he said, assertively now.
He added sharply, making eye contact, ‘Sorry fuh maga dog, maga dog turn around bite you.’
I knew the saying, because I knew the song good and I knew Tosh good. Maga dog. Maga: thin. Sorry for maga dog, maga dog turn around bite you. Bite the hand that feeds you. I hadn’t expected the stinging self-assessment.
The settlement was quiet. Nasty wasn’t around. Neither was Dr Red. Roots and his wife had gone across the river for a few days to tend their farm. There were a couple of people liming beneath the mango tree.
I slept through the afternoon.
In the evening I took a last walk on the plateau, a last sit-down before Kaieteur, thinned, snipped from the sides.
At night I heard all the versions of Maga Dog I had on the pod, the first playful ska which bounced to the Skatalite harmonies of Simmer Down to the later biting reggaes, each more biting. I heard its offspring, Skanky Dog, Maingy Dog, Fat Dog, Boney Dog; their cousins, Dog Teeth, Once Bitten. Perversely I felt a thrill in mining the meaning first hand, a true rising thrill. I felt so thrilled that I felt debased. And it occurred to me that Baby had not made a self-assessment at all. He believed that Foulis and not he was the maga dog.
 
 
THE following morning, waiting in the benab for the plane, I felt terribly removed from everything. There were four of us. Baby was bringing down the roof with his tales. Labba and the ranger’s son were doubling up, slamming the benches with their palms. The current one was about a thick red t’ing he ketch.
I don’t know, I watched him with idle curiosity, like he was television.
Soon light-eyed Siddique arrived with a bag on his back. He was looking for a passage to town to sell diamond, among them perhaps Foulis’s. There was no guarantee of either of us getting a flight. A plane may not come at all. If there was one, there may or may not be a free seat to cut a deal with the pilot.
We waited. Baby talked of a gal who could take a whole fist inside she. Labba fixed the handle of a cutlass. The ranger’s son pulled dance moves. Siddique drank cola.
Eventually one heard the distant mechanical whirring of an Islander. We watched it make a slow landing. White folk stepped out of the craft, each carrying a bottle of water and a camera. They were followed by the guide. We counted them: there was place for one. This worried me. Though I had been waiting before him, Siddique was sure to hustle me if we both got to the pilot. I did not want to stay another day. Before either of us could move I proposed we toss a coin. The suggestion was cheered on. Bemused, Siddique agreed. I won; I knew I would. It led to much merriment. Labba said ‘man bright’ over and over. They gave me high fives, laughed at Siddique. He concealed his resentment by sipping cola.
The tourists came into the benab. They were Americans, spoke loudly. They set off for their guided walk, leaving behind a young, desperately ill blonde. He lay sideways on a bench and groaned profusely. Sometimes his head fell over the side as if severed.
‘They come out here but they en’t able,’ Labba pointed to him with derision. ‘En’t able at aal.’
For the benefit of the ill blonde the walk was wrapped up fast. Time to leave.
Baby came out to the cratered airstrip to see me off.
‘So you enjai youself, soldier?’
‘Yeah.’
He said he’d beat about here and there for a while. We talked of perhaps catching up in town, though we both knew. We parted with a fist touch.
‘Walk good, Gooroo.’
‘Walk good. And thanks, right.’
The Islander worked itself into a toy fury. We bumped along the tarmac and made a strenuous ascent. I looked down at the airstrip, the benab on the tepui, diagonal Baby, with an arm raised.
The pilot regaled everyone by circling the fall. It was the most spectacular view yet. The river was a simple stroke of brown, so that one could be deceived into thinking it was stationary, and as we rose higher, so too the great white spill. We left it all behind. And now there was only forest. The extensive carpet was like so much pubic hair, mile upon mile of it, and from up here and now in my current state of mind, too monotonous. The sun hit me straight in the temple. Maga Dog played in my head – riddim. The sick American groaned loud. He could be heard over the engine. Other Americans pointed and clicked. ‘I’m
so
gonna upload these.’ I was sat at the back with Tony the guide. Basdeo Kumar was his right name. He loved India, would like to walk there sometime, check out the mothership. His grandfather was a pandit, he had repatriated to India. But the village hadn’t accepted him. He had returned to Guyana. All that journey just to come back. I felt he looked it and asked him if he was mixed: it was polite conversation in Guyana. I hurt him. ‘Pure, man,’ he said defensively. ‘Pure all the way.’ He took off his cap, ran his hand over his very short hair, buzzed down to the scalp. He pulled the strands up to their exerted millimetres, inviting me to touch. ‘Watch man, straight. It straight.’

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