The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel

by Rahul Bhattacharya

  ‘Is only elections time we fight so. Just see how much dougla born after election. How come so much dougla born after election? You know what is the problem?’

  ‘Too much politricks.’

  ‘Damn true, bai. You bright.’

  Uncle Lance was a reader and could often be found perusing obscure pamphlets on the bench. He was a newspaper junkie, as I too was becoming.

  In the afternoons a cross-section of Kitty folk would assemble on the stairs of the house around a newspaper-wielding Uncle Lance, whose undertaking it was, in the words of one participant, to instigate n agitate the population. He ran the sessions democratically, throwing up an item in the air and letting whoever wanted run with it.

  CARIBBEAN MEN IN HIV NIGHTMARE

  Was Mr C. a Bajan who loved both soca music and a white woman in England?

  Was Mr B. a Jamaican with reggae music running through his entertainment veins but whose complaint started a police investigation and ended up blowing the whistle on what the authorities are calling a terrible crime?

  Finally did Emma Baxter, a white English receptionist in London set out to have unprotected sex with a host of black men who trace their roots to Barbados, Guyana, St Vincent, Antigua or Dominica, to name a few island-nations in order to infect them with HIV/AIDS, apparently in revenge?

  The point of instigate n agitate here was not the conduct of Ms Baxter, though one man did present the Guyanese truism, ‘Pussy make man skunt.’ No, the issue was that Guyana was referred to as an island. The report had been reprinted from the Nation of Barbados. ‘The problem with island is they from I-land,’ a man with hair buns remarked. ‘Is only I they unstan, not you or we.’ Trinidad came in for licks too, ‘is sheer oil they got, too much aisle in they brains’.

  AFRO DHULAHA AND DHULAHINE

  Dear Editor,

  I wonder how many of your readers have taken note of that rice advertisement on television, in which an obviously Afro person is featured as the Dhulahine, and an equally Afro individual acts as the Dhulaha.

  Of course, I did read an article recently which tells about an Afro gentleman of the incumbent regime who, sometime back, saw fit to convert to Hinduism. But that’s his affair, and such cases must be rather rare here in Guyana.

  These are clearly not Afro roles however, and the landscape teems, surely, with actors and actresses eminently skilled and appropriate to the parts. What is also notable is that no attempt is made to disguise the ethnicity of either that purported Dhulaha or the Dhulahine.

  So I ask once more; ‘What is afoot here?’ Or will I be dubbed a racist for even noticing this not very amusing attempt at comedy.

  Yours faithfully

  ‘Prapa talk, bai! Dah prapa talk!’

  ‘Don’t make stupid, banna. You know how that man go make racial out of anything. Besides, is not blackman who getting insult, is Hindu.’

  ‘Hold on, hold on. You even wonder why it have blackman with the rice? Is because till now coolie don’t accept that it was African who bring rice to Guyana.’

  ‘Don’t speed me head in morning time, banna. Blackman think he can plant rice. Give he one square yard and is ganja you going to find there.’

  ‘Hold on, hold on. Who bring the ganja here? Is them coolieman sadhoo who bring it.’

  ‘All two ya’al wrong. It’s chinee who bring it.’

  Uncle Lance took the stage now.

  ‘Hear nah, ya’al hear about Robert Waldron? It had one Robert Waldron in Wakenaam, good. From when he a boy Robert would wake up every morning before sunrise, good. Walk from house to house, fetch the milk, walk to the stellin, ketch boat to Parika, ketch bus to GT, sell the milk in GT. Wakenaam see him back not till nightfall. Robbie wukkin hard. Next thing he get a cycle, good. Robbie prospering, going by more house, makin more collection, sellin more milk. Bam, next thing Robbie buy a vehicle. Bam, next thing he get a man to work fuh he in town. Robbie doin real good. And then he decide fuh mind cow heself. Everyone in Wakenaam big up they eye. You ever hear of blackman or fulaman minding cow? Is only Hindu who can mind cow. Bam, inside two months they all dead out. One cow ketch disease, next one get mash down by van, next one die at chilebirth, next one feel lonely and take he leave for heavenly abode. And Robbie back to where he start.’

  ‘So what that have to do with rice?’

  And so it went, restless early days in Kitty, ripe with heat and rain and Guyanese sound and Guyanese light in which the world seemed saturated or bleached, either way exposed.

  3

  I WAS frankly unimpressed when I saw that blasted scamp again. I should say I was not wholly unprepared for it. I had described our meeting to Uncle Lance and friends, attaching to it a strange spiritual dimension. Now Guyanese are born sceptics. Their foreparents were either forced or tricked into coming here, and thereafter white man, black man and brown man had each scamped the hell out of them. To take things at face value was considered the most basic weakness.

  So they laughed when I told them about the suffering murderer and the terrible burden he carried in the vagrant streets. More so when I showed them the plastic pebble.

  ‘Man who could scamp with melted toothbrush, bai, that man gafo be professional.’

  ‘True professional.’

  One or two people gave me a hard scolding. These were people who left their wallets home and walked with exact change to the market. To the bank they went in pairs. If they saw a pretty girl thumbing down a car they stepped on the gas.

  Yet there was some delight taken in my man, since scampery was so rampant that the ones who shone amid the competition were reverenced. Of course I had been a packoo – packoo, the monkfish, superbly ugly, so ugly that it must also be stupid though it was very sweet to eat – I had been a packoo but I was also privileged to have been had by a scampion.

  I was about the city trying to extend my stay in Guyana. When I had come to Guyana first there had been a good basis. I was a cricket reporter. The first Test against West Indies was in Georgetown. I was twenty-two, and naive beyond my years. The visit had been for a week, a week of bewilderment and curiosity, moods and images, names and rhythms, contours of a mystery world one could perceive but not grasp.

  Now I’d come on the longest return-ticket available, of a year, and without valid reason. At the airport the suspicious Sherry had stamped me in for a month, leaving me a ladder of paperwork to climb. I didn’t mind it. To reinvent one’s living, to escape the deadness of the life one was accustomed to, was to be hungry for the world one saw. Every face, every bureaucrat, every office held in it a code to be cracked.

  I followed due process. I wrote to the Ministry of Home Affairs expressing cultural and topographical interest which would take a year to satiate. They asked me to prove my medical credentials. I went to the hospital, supplied stool, underwent a chest examination, took the doctor’s certificate to the Port Health Office.

  This vividly colonial-sounding entity stood bang on the Demerara, by Stabroek Market, or big market as it was known. Big church and big market: in a short town of white and rust, big church and big market were supreme, the cathedral looming white, wooden and airy as a large dollhouse, and big market, a heat-shimmered expanse of red and silver-grey, built half on land, half on river. Its four steel gables were like industrial tents, crowned by a clock tower that made a mockery of my little Kitty’s. Guyana converged and diverged from here via bombish minibuses. The streets sold everything. The sense of movement, the mood of hot shifting trades, the hustle in the air, Rick Ross declaring it from the music carts: it was the closest GT came to the ambition-cloud that is a city.

  One could give up on the world with ease at the Port Health Office. The brown river drifted by your feet like molasses, the air thick with river. The wooden torpor, it seeped through every sweating plank. The ceiling was high and beamed. On the first floor there was construction on – not true, it was not active in any way, but something had been taken apart with a view to perhaps one day rebuild. I walked thro
ugh the wooden skeletal frames of the thing being contemplated. In a room a man sat with his legs up on a chair, one Mr Rose. In one corner an ancient knobby boombox, a machine from its original days. In another corner a flat groaning freezer of similar vintage the size of a single bed.

  Across the port health officer I took a seat without being asked and pondered things with indecent laze. There was a blackout. The table fan clunked to a halt. Mr Rose spread a kerchief on his dome, undid two buttons of his shirt jac. We sweated gently in the warm river breeze, doing nothing with the air of people who had congregated there for that precise purpose. At last, when I was least expecting it, Mr Rose said he was tripping. What was he tripping on, I asked. He said he was dripping. He added that if he was tripping he wouldn’t know if he was dripping, and thereafter leapt forward to render signatures with a burst of vigour that one sensed would require hours of recovery.

  I went back down and had beef stew and rice in a cinnamon-coloured shop. It was the Ocean View Snackette, wrong on every count. It didn’t view the ocean and it was actually a roaring cookshop. It had pink walls, burgundy panelling and mesh windows. People were dripping here too. They were slaying Ivanoff vodka with coconut water and telling jokes. A man burst into the room with an awfully promising line – ‘Seven men get a divorce last night’ – but was drowned out by a commotion surrounding a knocked-over bottle. A row broke out. Somebody threatened to send somebody to hospital, ‘but me ain’t sure if they would accept an ugliness like you.’ There was supreme disinterest from the ladies running the shop. Every now and then they sent out large chunks of ice in a sad pink plastic bowl. Flies settled on their dresses, their cheeks.

  It was another hot wasting day downtown for the wasted. And coming out of the snackette after the inadequate stew, turning a corner, I saw Baby. We both realised this was a moment. His mouth gleamed with a gold tooth-cap and he was wearing a red beret, striking for how new it was in contrast to the rest of him.

  ‘What you doing here?’ I asked. ‘I not give you fare to go back?’

  I gone and I come back too, soldier, he said. There was more hardtime waiting for him. His ole man had been shot by the Venezuelan coastguard on the Orinoco. He was only smuggling in three-four case of Polar beer. Venezuelans real wicked that way. Till now they want half of Guyana, did I know that? So now he came back to ketch a lil wuk to send the family.

  With every passing moment I was more distracted by the tooth. It was an inverted heart.

  ‘You put a heart on your tooth?’ I asked at last.

  ‘That ain’t heart. That a batty.’

  ‘It’s an upside down heart.’

  ‘Is a big, round beattie. She sitting pon the iron. Heh heh. Watch close, soldier.’

  There were more pressing matters at hand. I told him he had taken advantage of me. I said I took pity on him because of his filthy crime which it seems he did not in fact commit. I thought of recovering my money from him, but he looked so smug I left and walked away.

  To my surprise he followed me, trying to correct the misunderstanding. He followed me to Raff’s on King’s Street, where I was to buy the racquet which electrocuted mosquitoes, a useful tool to stun humans with as well. All the while he kept telling me that he had murdered his pardner in the Cuyuni and I must not doubt it. He chopped him nine times, went to prison. He was relentless.

  As it was mildly entertaining I let him carry on. He suggested we go down to the court to meet Magistrate Van Cooten. Magistrate Van Cooten would tell me the truth. Fine, I said.

  We set off towards the court, as though Magistrate Van Cooten was waiting there just for us, poised with gavel in an empty courtroom to redeliver the judgement whereupon I may hug Baby for truly being a killer.

  Naturally, Magistrate Van Cooten was not there. Surprisingly, I was offended.

  I walked off in a funk into Regent Street. Amid honking minibuses and the commerce Regent Street had its own order. At the bottom the two photo shops and the two gas stations, followed by a row of Indian-national variety shops, all really the same shop run by different Sindhis, a single room which sold toilet seats, vases, prams, music systems, gotten on ships from some staggeringly large warehouse in Panama. In between the site of a new mall, which was to feature Guyana’s first ever escalator, and further up Bourda Market, first the unappetising covered market, hung with caps and long T-shirts and meat, and outside it, bursting with divine freshness, crinkled passionfruit, orange pumpkin, bold green pakchoi and tremendous herb, the scents of lovely life. Past it, in the Brazilian salao Brazzo strippers got their nails done or hair reblonded. Atop them in a hotel two red Brazilian men under an umbrella drank coffee, one sensed, with a touch of regret. The men were always there, sometimes different ones. They were an installation. Then the automobile spare-parts shops, and the street getting quieter past them, the two old trenches appearing, and the spacious wooden ministries, and opposite them Bourda cricket ground where they played terrifically ambient run-down flooded matches which could last a fortnight, a month, half a year, and nobody would be able to tell the time.

  By the time we reached the cricket ground, or maybe because of it, my mood was restored.

  There was a coconut vendor on the bend. I stopped to drink a cold one. Baby was still with me. The thing about Baby was that he never looked happy or vexed or sorry or anything like that. He appeared complacent and a tad downpress.

  As though there had been no gap between our first encounter and now, he started telling me about the conditions in the prisons. He spent seventy-one months in the Mazaruni, which was much nicer than Georgetown prison. In Mazaruni they could breathe some natural air, grow a little bhaji, pull some cassava, do a little good wuk. He did see some bad months. He got into a fight over a cigarette – a single cigarette – with a policer and was put in solitary confinement for a month. But even so it was alright, he learnt a lot about he ownself.

  Camp Street prison was hard. Nasty conditions, rough people, long-water stew. It was the long-water stew which caused trouble once. Convicts flung their watery bowls of salt and potato against the wall and bust a hole in the roof in protest.

  ‘You know, a hungry mob is an angry mob.’

  Roots! Of course I recognised it. I said, ‘Them Belly Full (But We Hungry).’

  For the first time in our dealings I noted a flicker of surprise in Baby.

  He gave me a touch and we spoke about roots reggae with exploding excitement. He sang a couple of tunes with a cracked voice and enormous meaning. Take any tune, I began saying, delving into thoughts since I couldn’t much sing, take a big tune – take the big man and the biggest tune. Like how he said let them pass their dirty remarks. Dirty remarks! Regular wise ones would not have put it so. What a simple and great writer. Roots was full of simple and great writers. Check Pete Tosh, check a line like I hear your words, but I don’t see no works. Music of truth, bai, Baby said, music of truth. Ska is the root, the rest is all roots, I proposed, modifying from the great Willie Dixon of Mississippi, who correctly laid down that the blues is the roots and the rest is the fruits. Yeah, yeah, soldier, he said, music of truth, adding incongruously, check me out anytime.

  Before parting I asked him if he regretted his actions. He said, ‘No, brother, if you can’t face what you done, you can’t a better man make.’

  It was a day or two later, drifting along Camp Street, that I came upon the high tin and barb of Georgetown prison.

  Across it was an officers’ club. There I fell into a conversation with a man by the gate. I mentioned a recently paroled life-sentence convict. No such person, he insisted. I provided details of the murder in the Cuyuni.

  ‘I would know, man,’ he said impatiently. ‘I run the place.’

  ‘Where will I find Magistrate Van Cooten? He’s supposed to have handled the case.’

  ‘Magistrate Van Cooten? He bin dead twenty years.’

  The next time I saw Baby skunt, we decided to go porknocking.

  4

  THE ope
rators of no. 72 Sita Sita had recklessly inverted minibus protocol. The driver was scrawny; the conductor was meaty. Possibly it was a father grooming his boy. That was very well for the family, but not a single passenger was about to be foregone to adjust for the excess volume in the back. A big lady with an accusing voice was not pleased with the strategy. The scrawny driver, who had foolishly given away the game by sitting at the wheel before time, escaped again to the pavement.

  Everything moved slow in these dripping Georgetown mornings, and a Mahdia bus took long to fill up. It occurred to Baby that I had no hammock, and we ran down to the road by the library where a man sold them. Then it was another hour of waiting.

  One watched things through sweat in the eyes: blots of loose checked shirts, fades of slanted caps, dark lipstick in soft focus. Small-time hustlers hustled, huss-lin huss-lin in the air, a soundtrack to the trade of aphrodisiacs, sex oils.

  ‘It must have nuff birds in India,’ a youthman said to me.

  Before I could respond another youthman intervened.

  ‘Puerto Rico, bai, dah is where I would like to go.’

  The first youth sucked his teeth. ‘Wa’m to you, buddeh? It have a ratio of nine bird to one banna in certain district of Venezuela.’

  Thus, without my participation, the topic was closed.

  Gradually the van was populated. A dreadlocks came with empty cages to bring back birds from the interior. For bird-racing.

  ‘They don’t fly away?’ I asked.

  ‘Nah, man, they in they cage.’

  ‘How do they race in a cage?’

  He emitted a series of high-pitched cheeps.

  ‘Is a race of whistles.’

  A presidential candidate arrived. Nobody gave an ass. In India garlands would have beheaded the man. As it was he had an eminently garlandable face, a bald, round head with successful, bespectacled eyes. He wore a waist pouch and a knapsack like a happy scout. He was a serious leader, defecting from an established party to begin a mixed-race one. Though elections were not expected till the second half of the year, he was going to the interior to spread the word. He settled easily into the cramped bus with the electorate. A sidekick, a jolly walrusy man, made running streams of rude jokes about the incumbent president.