The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel

by Rahul Bhattacharya

  Inside, the space was divided by a partition as in the shack at Menzies, making two rooms of identical size and symmetry, with a door and two wood windows that had swollen beyond their frames. We sat down for a few minutes on a low wooden platform in the back room, constructed, I think, as a bed. The Bible lay on it. The window framed a solitary Congo pump, long, lofty and lonesome. The rain had stopped.

  Presently we heard a man call out, ‘Yes, Labba, yes.’

  Naturally he was surprised when two gents who were not Labba emerged from the shack.

  From what I gathered Baby and the man, Foulis, did not know each other much, but were both pardners of Labba. And it was Labba they talked of for a while, about how he was getting on after his snake bite. Foulis warned us about the evening vipers around the shack – he’d killed six in the last fortnight. He was a quiet welcoming man with an understated air. He had large brown eyes, lovely against the rest of his body which was close to pitch black. He kept himself to himself.

  Only a few pieces of coal we’d brought with us had remained dry. Baby used them to get a fire going in the barrel. He went out to fetch some bush for bush tea, leaving me to hot up the pot. I filled water from the vat which caught the rain and placed the pot on the barrel top. The surface was kinky; the pot toppled over and put out the fire.

  Baby returned to damp fumes. For the first time he lost his patience with me. He muttered about where the skunt we gon get wood now, all the wood outside wet. More embarrassing still, he cussed himself for letting a man who knew nothin bout fire mind the fire.

  Eventually, with hard-won scraps of dry wood, he got a flame going again.

  Dinner was rice and a spicy blackeye stew, consumed in silence.

  Darkness came suddenly and absolutely, and with it exhaustion. Baby lit a ghostly bottle flambeau in the shack. We slung up hammocks on each side of the partition. I fell asleep for a few hours and woke because I was full of piss. Heeding the viper warnings, I did not go out till Baby, who had the torch, got up to go as well. Genetha, Genetha he hummed plaintively as we pissed into the bushes. He said it was a long-time song, the tale of a woman who had fallen from a high position.

  It rained hard again at night, and everything had to be rearranged to fit the holes in the roof, and the tin din, loud, vibratory, uncompromising, was both pleasure and noise – not, I suppose, unlike steelpan.

  WORK began the next morning pretty much. As it was going to be for a short time, Baby talked to Foulis about the prospect of joining him. ‘Yes, man, yes,’ Foulis responded. ‘Nah take worries.’ He offered Baby a quarter of the takings. It didn’t sound like much, but it wasn’t a bad deal. At the dredges the owner kept seventy per cent, and the remaining thirty was shared by the workers – the people at whom Baby had hissed ‘fockin slaves’ at Pamela Landing. But the dredge owner didn’t contribute his own labour, as Foulis would, and Foulis had already done the ground work. The offer was really because Baby was Labba’s pardner, and as Foulis said more than once, Labba had taught him all he knew about porknocking and life in the bush.

  Water is the essential truth of Guyana. One’s encounters with it were so frequent that one felt a little amphibious. Water everywhere, beneath the house, at the gate, at the margins of a road, falling from the roof into the yard, on leaves, grass and on sodden wooden posts, in canals and trenches and ‘blackas’, in the dark rivers and the ocean – too much of it, in too many forms, you sensed, for it to be of any account. Yet the most innocuous drop carried a stealthy force. Leave a cutlass in a shallow of the creek where the water barely trickled. Nothing in it, you might think. In a few hours water and sand will have filed the blade so that you could ‘slice clean through caiman’.

  And if water was Guyana’s essential truth, then porknocking was its most essential endeavour. It felt to me a miracle. There is a man in the forest; it rains; from this he makes diamond. The water cuts the land, washes away the filth and the soil and the sand down to the gravel, and there buried in the mounds of worthless pebbles lie the shimmers of desperate human coveting.

  A porknocker carried little equipment. He might work as part of a gang; equally he might be alone. In the old days he knocked about with rations of salted pork. Saltpork had given way to saltfish and saltbeef. But fishknocker sounded like a coital position and beefknocker like bootlegged gin. Whereas porknocker got the glory, got the rawness, got the adventure, got even the lone sorrow.

  Foulis, like Labba, mined diamond. It was easier to do by oneself than gold, free of the processes of gold. And the idea of the diamond, the elusive single piece that could change one’s life forever, was the more alluring.

  Our days passed slow and voluptuous. Although its volume dwindled with every shower, the rain still fell every day and night. We woke usually to the wet tingly aftermath of the night rain. There would be a heavy shower in the late morning and another one in the late afternoon. At dusk there was sometimes a spell of thunder, often without rain, the accompanying lightning was not in streaks but shapes, along the outline of large clouds, and not white but a fluorescent violet. Sometimes without thunder or lightning there could be a great rustling through the trees that bode a biblical downpour. But not a drop would fall. The trees would continue to shake violently for an hour, followed by a period of utter still, the kind of still that can make a man go mad, and Baby told of a Berbician unaccustomed to the forest who wandered off for a few minutes into the bush, and began to scream, just so. Afterwards, in the heart of the night, came again the melodramatic tin-roof orchestra. Here, waking up to see that nothing was getting wet, Baby would give praise to the rain. It meant the gutters kept denuding, the gravel kept collecting.

  I would rise at six without prompting. Though you couldn’t see the sun rise because of the forest cover, the morning light beamed in strong and direct through the eastern window, its frame laced with heavy clinging drops that made a man pine for a sweetheart. Baby would have already brought some fresh bush to brew, and its tea tasted not unlike peppermint, softer, more medicinal. Over in the other shack, Foulis, an earlier riser still, would have got his pot going. His shack was of a unique floor plan, with a small room in the front and a large veranda behind, three times as long as the room: or perhaps someone had simply taken down the walls. As the pot cooked he would sit on a flat stone in the absolute centre of the space and read and reread a thriller (he’d read the current one, Never Bitten, Never Shy, five times). Sometimes he would stop reading and stare into the bush for ten minutes at a time, getting up only to check his pot. Nobody said anything to each other in the mornings, save for maybe ‘maanin’ and often not even that but just a nod.

  We’d make breakfast and lunch at one go. They could be the same thing, or else lunch and dinner could be the same thing, it depended, but the idea was to cook no more than twice. Breakfasts could be of budder, a pot bread: three cups of flour to a cup of water, three spoons sugar, two spoons oil, a spoon of yeast, a pinch of salt, knead it ‘till time reach’, let it sit and rise, knead it back again, grease the pot and let the dough brown a half hour, flip the side and brown it again, then let it sleep through the night. In the morning the entire round loaf was gorgeously formed. We’d cut conical slices from these and hot it up pon the fire again and eat it with nut butter and coffee.

  The finest breakfasts were the bylanfry – boil-and-fry. Afterwards I would have the full-glory bylanfry, with egg, bacon and sweet potato in addition to the basic forest mix, but under the circumstances ours was perfectly glorious. Boil the salt off the saltfish, boil the plantain and peel and slice it, fry them up with onion and garlic and red peppers and bottled seasonings. This was pretty much how we cooked everything – with onion and garlic and red pepper and bottled seasonings, of which we had two, a blended green seasoning of eschalot, thyme, celery and married-man pork, which was a kind of basil, and a dark Miracle seasoning, the charm of which I was reluctant to kill by looking at the ingredients. We had tomato paste and coconut milk and curry powder, and these wo
uld distinguish one creation from the other. Saltfish, saltbeef, and potato, red beans, blackeye peas, and sometimes fresh heart of palm, from manicole: we ate everything with rice.

  The activity happened early, so it was still a good hour of the morning when we put on longboots and made for the backdam. Literally this word meant back of the dam, aback the rear mud dam of plantations, where labourers had been allowed to grow their own crop. Now, like interior, it had become an abstraction, easily understood.

  The backdam here was the area which last evening had looked storm-hit. The upturned roots were big as bare rooms, the mud on them caking in the sharp sun. Around the felled trees was a strange maze of pits and channels. Fragrant transparent water ran in them with silent noise. This was the most elemental kind of diamond works, and to work this miracle you needed to know how to work the water.

  The porknocker prospected a site. He might find two carats at one spot, eleven a few miles on. He cleared the treasure patch of its vegetation, felled the big trees, stripped away the bush. He dug the gutters in which water ran with its constant pressure, washing, denuding. It may not be enough to rely on the rain; and so he dug reservoirs at the head of the gutters. The clearing would be worked down in this manner, and then he moved on. In six months the clearing will be bush again, perhaps more a porknocker’s boast than fact, and in a few years there will be no trace of anybody ever having been here. ‘Me no leave no oil spill or nothin like the dredge. Me leave nature as me find it.’

  Foulis and Baby did the work proper. I ‘assisted’. It was out of kindness that they allowed me to assist. Their work constituted digging new gutters, re-damming gutters which had gone out of shape, digging new reservoirs. My work, on the other hand, due to a shortage of shovels, consisted of hoeing patches of short bush or clearing the grates of twigs and leaves. I would do this in fair conscience for a while, and then accept that I was not actually needed. I would return to perform ‘bitch duties’ as Baby called them: washing wares, filling buckets of water, collecting firewood, chopping onion and garlic, making bowls of lemon juice. I would wash my clothes in the creek and bathe where it stilled briefly into a round pool the colour of lava. I would read in the hammock. I would watch dragger-ants carry off whole lemon rinds upon their backs like a trail of palanquin bearers. It would occur to me that I ought to be doing something more responsible with myself and my time, but I couldn’t see what. We weren’t like the ants. They had collective insight and collective force. Man was doomed to be subservient to his personality.

  One day I thought to fish. I caught worms and, ignoring the advice that it was spawning season, stood at various parts of the creek with a stick and a line. Naturally I caught nothing. I did bring back in a bucket half a dozen tiny things with striped sides – yarrau I was told. I kept them in the veranda to watch them grow. We threw them bits of things to eat. But they cannibalised each other instead. After a day three of the six remained; and some hours later just the lone supremo. There were traces of blood in the water, and little stray rotting fragments of fish. It was sick. I released the supremo back into a pond, wondering if he had felt triumph or shame at swimming over those corpses, if we’d made this of him, or he had himself.

  By early afternoon the backdam labour was done. Working in the water you needed to know when to stop, for you could catch chills and ruin your joints. On the way back Baby and Foulis would stop at the creek and after the afternoon rain had intervened in the drying of washed clothes we would walk about the freshened earth for a while. Sometimes we would shoot arrows at tins with a bow Foulis had made or kick about a deflated football. We’d find a spot and gyaff. The talk was scattered. Short musings might fill easy silences. ‘When I meet the big man I got plenty question for he.’ ‘The Bible say nothin about marriage, it only say go forth and multiply.’ Baby might tell of sexual exploits, claim to have a dozen childmothers – ‘an dah is only the ones I know of’. They might list for me the synonyms for genitals. The feminine tended to be from the animal kingdom – cat, fish, pork – and the masculine from the elements – wood, iron, steel – though in the Caribbean any noun with the correct inflection could do the job. I might do my India routine, its numbers, its languages and so on, to reactions of ‘Tha’is one mix-up place, bai.’ They had heard, but did not believe that Indian nationals used their fingers to clean their battyhole. I assured them it was true. ‘You too?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘O skunt, Gooroo, me nah shake you hand ever again.’

  While they remarked often about freedom from the seven-to-four work routine of townpeople, I could not help but think how much more discipline this life needed. You had to be on top of all things at all times. Every task had to be done oneself, every fire, every meal to be made. You could lie dying as Labba had and have nowhere to go and nobody to call. You needed to know every trick, lime for malaria, mustard for cramps, this leaf for arthritis, that bark for fever. You needed to remember to upturn hammocks for snakes and longboots for scorpions.

  Diamond stories were popular. Foulis told of the largest stone he’d found. When he went to the settlement, there was a Brazilian about to whom he sold it for 600,000 Guyanese. Afterwards he learnt that the man, after polishing and cutting, had sold it for 2.5 million. It vexed him bad. He’d never felt like such a fool in his life. He done all the work and somebody else take the benefit.

  Of Foulis more than anyone else I’d encountered in the bush, I felt he was here because it was the only place he could be. He did not go to Menzies Landing unless he had to. He’d taken a Patamona wife at Chenapau, further upriver, and that is where he would normally return. He was a tranquil man, and in some way unmovable. The only times I saw him animated was when he spoke of diamond. His eyes would gleam, and he might say, with a coyness betrayed by his thick voice, ‘Yes, man, I like diamond bad, yes.’

  As usual, Baby would take over. ‘The way a diamond wink at you, no gal could wink at you like so.’ He felt less than warmly towards gold. ‘It have 338 documented ways of pilferin gold, but there is always more ways. Not even obeah could explain how gold disappear. I know two bannas disputin over twelve ounce of gold. They take the t’ing to the police to split it in two. The policer do the division in front of them face. When they gone back home, them two part only adding to eleven pound. Gold wicked prapa, bai.’

  In the bush everything could be wicked, everything left to chance. Foulis showed us a pile of gravel in a dry creek he’d worked earlier. He was still to sieve it for diamond. Porknockers sometimes left it like this. It was an act of unfathomable faith, or perhaps the exact opposite, of extreme philosophy, that the rain which brings can take. Foulis had already suffered once for this, gravel washed away in a late-night torrent. It hadn’t upset him so much, not like the Brazilian who bought his diamond. No, that was different, that man made a fool of him. He pointed with the porknocker’s twinkle to the gravel. ‘Yes, me sure there’s a nice surprise in there, yes.’

  ONE morning, maybe ten days in, it emerged that our supplies were all but finished. At once there was an anticipation, for it meant it was collection time.

  In the backdam Baby and Foulis sifted through the gravel they had accumulated. For hours they jigged through the mound expertly, sieves half submerged in water. Diamond being heaviest gravitated to the centre of the concave as they made frisky rotations. They say the glitter of a diamond in water is unmistakable, that you can take something for a diamond but never ever a diamond for something else. I found that I could and with ease. I did not exactly expect the Kohinoor, but these nondescript flakes were a puzzling anticlimax.

  In the afternoon we returned with the haul.

  Foulis brought over his equipment, an old-fashioned pair of magnifying spectacles that strapped around the head and a miniature set of scales with pellets for weights.

  We sat on the rickety wooden platform in the back room. The stones were laid out on a piece of paper. They were sad and crusty, like fragments of broken glass, some mildly white like chipped plaster. If I found them in m
y house I’d throw them away. But it was my eye which was untrained: when a good one was held up against the light it sparkled with that particular fragile hardness. Symmetry was elusive in all but a few pieces, and symmetry was the thing, not only because symmetry in itself is beautiful, but because of how it played with the light.

  They began to grade the stones, the glasses and baby scales giving an air of mock gravity to proceedings. They organised them first by weight, then shape and clarity. The majority of the stones were ten points or less – a point is a hundredth of a carat. The heaviest was forty points, less than quarter of a fingernail but a boulder in that pile of splinter. It was long, hexagonal, mildly yellowing. It might require cleaning with acid. It might fetch up to twenty grand at the Siddique shop, twice that in town.

  There were seventy-four stones in all, amounting to about six hundred points. They did the division, with a proportional mix of stones, though, of course, Foulis retained the forty-pointer.

  On the coast Baby estimated his share might fetch fifty or sixty grand, that is 250 to 300 American dollars. Up to a third could go into travelling back. And then, it depended. A careful man might make it last a month or more. Another might splurge it in an afternoon of high gamble or an evening of Brazzo strippers.

  ‘You make what you make so when you dead you can tell the big man you enjai you life,’ Baby said with abandon.

  ‘Yes … yes,’ Foulis responded, tentatively agreeing.

  There was a brief, hectic discussion about jewellers in Georgetown, on the East Coast, on East Bank, which man t’ief, which man skunt, which man tight-fist, which man stupid, most names put forward by Baby and then, with fist bumps all round, the session ended.