The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel

by Rahul Bhattacharya

  Looking at the aircraft, Uncle Lance said at last, to some degree reverting to his old self, ‘I tell you something, bai, if we could grow sugarcane by every airstrip in this country we never got to buy a single barrel of fuel.’

  ‘How so, Uncle?’

  ‘Ethanol, bai. It got nuff ethanol coming from the sugarcane to run them Islander. Like bush rum, you drink bush rum? Bush rum could run a car. So long as you got the converter in the carburettor, right.’

  He added with a kind of morose chuckle, ‘But we only runnin we own self on rum.’

  We watched the plane dip out of sight. He lapsed into his unfamiliar self again.

  ‘Who knows where that plane going, where it coming from.’

  ‘Ogle, I guess.’

  ‘Heh,’ he chuckled again. ‘You young, bai. You hand soft and you mind clean. Let me tell you, bai, airstrip come up anywhere in the country, and it ain’t use to carry people alone.’

  I expected him to get into a cocaine riff, at how the government corrupt, but instead he sat slowly on the plastic chair.

  ‘I walking the last half an hour.’

  ‘You mad! Sun hot, Lancy.’

  ‘I coming from a funeral. Beepat.’

  I knew what he was talking about. Even by the standards of Guyanese daily crime it was a gruesome affair. The man owned an electronics store. Abducted by bandits one day, his body, decapitated, both feet hacked off, was found weeks later in the D’Urban backlands. A revenge killing, the papers called it.

  ‘You knew the man?’

  ‘Everybody know everybody, bai. It had a time when two or three murder a year was a big big thing. Now we gettin one hundred, one fifty. Now out of three quarter million that does give a rate of twenty. If you look up the statistical recordings, that is a very high number …’ Momentarily he seemed to find pleasure in numbers.

  ‘Politricks rip apart we country. When I was a bai in Wakenaam,’ – he held his hand absurdly low, by his ankle – ‘black people kwarril if they see me barefoot. They make me put on something on me foot! Tha’is how much love there was. Then we get the race riot and the same people hold their nose when they pass we house.

  ‘It was stupidness at the burial. People talking one set of nonsense. People bawling, people high, calling for Phantom to come back. They was a blackman there, just a limer, lookin a lil yardy-yardy. They chase the man away. The wife and she sister bawling, “get that man out of there”. I can’t take that kind of stupidness. Look, a man dead. People got to understand what that means. I walk away before it speed my head.’

  With that Uncle Lance downed the rum and stood up. He rolled the ice cube about his mouth and ejected it in a graceful arc into the yard.

  ‘I gone, bai. Get home and catch five.’

  ‘Alright, Uncle. Take care, right.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll pass you sometime.’

  ‘I’ll look out for you.’

  ‘Good.’

  Placing his cap tight on his head he set out again in the sun, round-headed and wide-hipped, shrinking till he reached Garnett Street, which he crossed, paused, then turned into.

  I lingered on the balcony.

  The humidest day. Sheriff Street passed. An emaciated Luna. A boy’s face pressed against a water jar. The clop of a dray cart. Slow Guyana, its time stretched in the sun.

  A red-suited lady in cornrows. She stares at the flaming tips of her shoes. Langour, introspection in downward profile. The suit contours her body. Humidity is falling on her. She tosses back her head, to make air on her sweat. Her nostrils quiver, a face now flagrant, vulgar. I wish I could invite her up. I wish I could drench her.

  Her parasol has a rip. A triangle of light flaps on her chest. Her bus has arrived. Her calf tenses as she climbs on.

  Not still noon. A day to be negotiated, and another.

  2

  THE one thing I knew about my parents’ courtship was that they had met on the train. New to the city, he with his simple side-parting had strayed into the ladies’ compartment, where she had ticked him off with a raised umbrella. The following day he made the same error.

  On a wet July morning in Georgetown, I was jolted back to the story in a moment of stupidity.

  The day began like the others, with the kis-ka-dee of kiskadees, slatted rays, a contemplation of the hunk of hours ahead. Lying in bed, I pencilled in the purchase of a pressure cooker as the main task. I had one already, carried across oceans in the manner of an Indian national – my eldest sister had insisted. I had negotiated on the size. The vessel I accepted was an aluminium knot, good for no more than two fists of rice or six pieces of goat. I hardly ever used it. I preferred an open pot for the company of aromas, for the time slow-cooking consumed. But lately I had begun to feel ghostly tending to dishes in solitude.

  In the after-rain morning I walked out to Survival on Vlissengen. There I ran into Mr Bhombal’s old flatmate, a reserved, shrivelled accountant from Jaipur with tufts of hair erupting from his ears. ‘Namaste, how do you do?’ he asked, employing his usual juxtaposition. For the first time our conversation went beyond this. And as he told me of the train bombings in Bombay I was struck by a dumb moment’s fright for ma and papa.

  The high commission had rung his office to let them know. He was registered with the high commission. Was I not? Why not! It was the duty of every Indian national to register. Why didn’t I get registered now? There was an unbecoming forcefulness to him. Didn’t I have people in Bombay? Then I had better go to the high commission right away. And get registered. He would not let it go.

  Caught between his aggression and the stupidity of my first instinct, I wished to leave. I remember having done this – influenced perhaps by his ‘how do you do’, or perhaps the magistrates of Georgetown – with the words, ‘That will be all.’

  Outside the sun had come out. The light dazzled on the dark of the trenches. On the bridge the bearded man of unsound mind, sometimes employed to clean the trenches, peered into the trees, scratching his forehead. Across the road Chin the chinee coconut man sat beneath his umbrella with his radio. ‘Kitty Kitty Camville Kitty,’ the conductor of the no. 41 shouted as he whooshed by. Nobody had the faintest.

  I walked to a phone and internet shop. The lines in Bombay were jammed. I looked at the news online. Things were sketchy: seven or eight coordinated blasts, rush hour, hundreds feared dead, Islamic terror groups.

  After a while the first blogs were up, first pictures, helpline numbers. On the line-maps of the tracks the blasts were red flares like a Diwali loom going off. They were my places. Matunga, near where the big family house stood, where I had grown up, where my brother and his wife and child still lived; three flares down, Santacruz, where I had moved into a one-room-kitchen, to use the Bombay lingo; and though these memories were so recent they felt from such another dependent time.

  I stayed a long time in the shop. The more I didn’t hear back from people the more I was certain they were safe. In Bombay one learns the probability of anything is negligible.

  When I stepped back out of the shop, two or three hours later, it was cloudy once more. I could have gone home, or indeed, to the high commission. Instead I found myself walking towards the hospital.

  The doctor had recommended I come in for a platelet count two months after dengue. It had been over four now. I hadn’t gone because I did not want to face Roxanne at the reception after the abrupt end of our thing.

  ‘She stop work here,’ the guard said.

  I now really wanted to see her. I considered ringing her. I liked her laugh, her lips, almost pined for them. But I took it as a sign. Only a fool forces awkwardness upon himself.

  There was no reason to check on my platelets, of course. Still I settled in the hospital. The sick white tubes, the antiseptic smell, the listlessness of the afflicted, it was easy to sink into. I seemed to have occupied the section near the obstetrician, for I was among pregnant girls. They flatly considered the bumps of their bellies. One or two were in tears.

/>   The wretchedness of Bombay trains. You teetered on the edge of life’s urgencies and futilities, a compressed body in a compressed city. The debasement and energy of slums, pools of sewage, bushes of excreta, the utter fact of India. What dirty ambition was forced out of reasonable persons; abuses flung, shirts tugged, punches thrown, feet trampled, a misery that ceased to be one when you saw a boy without arms or eyes in the same circumstance. People struggling, making do, trying to get home, for a date, a movie, a family function, fighting the good fight – and boom, a mangled limb. What a thing, eh?

  I sat in the hospital till I was asked by a nurse, ‘You gettin through?’ I glanced at my wrist. Though there was no watch on it, I sprang up as if to show I was running late.

  It was early evening. With an eggball I walked to the seawall. The tide was out. The shore looked rotten. On the mudflats a dog chased crabs. Elsewhere sweethearts sat in a curl, ladies walked dogs, gamblers gambled with naked-girl cards. Presently the clouds, thick and bulbous, were backlit by the orange sun in a heavenly glow. Before India, Guyana’s problems were so fresh and small-scale, and I couldn’t tell if more or less hopeless for that.

  Walking on the wall, I took a decision to do more journalism than I had been doing. Travel pieces, reportage, cricket articles, preferably for pounds or dollars. The exchange rate being what it was, even one a month would easily sustain me so long as I lived a basic life. I didn’t have the heart to eat further into my savings, and frankly, ambling along wasn’t a simple business and adventure an expensive one.

  Mr Bhombal was right. I could have gone anywhere. But I had come here. To look it in the eye was important.

  Returning home, I checked into an internet shop again. Safe. I bought a handsome pressure cooker. It was months before I learnt that explosives in the Bombay bombings had been stuffed into pressure cookers and laid on the tracks.

  I LIVED over a studio. El Dorado Recording Studio was the name. It was only slightly older than I to the building but its mood had fixed deep already: the homie sprawl at the gate, the broad-brim NY and $$ caps carefully angled to five degrees, the jerseys, the bling, the low-ass denims, and since some among them were deportees from America, the ghetto talk ringing tring-ta-tring with yo-yo-yo and dawg and ho and shawty. As a matter of fact they’d recorded a song called Ho And Shawty (Ballas Get Notty). Prick the knife into the apple (ho and shawty) / Twist it round till it shake the chapel (the ballas get notty).

  The composition was by the inhouse trio, El Doriders, comprising 9MM, Midas and Mista Capone. Their sound was American. This was the wheel of music: rap, hiphop born from Jamaican deejays toasting over dub, and American hiphop sent back with new glamour and new context to the Caribbean. They wrote about fucking, cheating, pimping, balling, trafficking. They weren’t hardcore badass, I don’t think. Their effort was to be badder, harder core than they really were. At any rate, I only once witnessed a bad mofo showdown, and that too had the feel of pantomime.

  I was boiling sweet potato or doing something similarly unhiphop when I heard machine gun exchanges of ‘don’t fuck with me nigger’. Downstairs Midas and a man I’d never seen around the hood before were shuffling about in boxing stances. They had drawn blood already. ‘You wanna play me, nigger? You wanna play I?’ They leaned on one another at the forehead like battering rams, fucks, niggers, fucking niggers, and don’t fuck with me niggers booming about like bullets. Around them people struck casual poses, a finger in the pocket, a smirk, yo-yo-yo, cut that out ya’ll. More punches thrown, the crack of knuckle upon jaw. At the peak of the brawl 9MM slunk away into the studio and emerged with a pistol. He struggled with it in a corner; something seemed to have jammed. He worked it out finally, and began circling the fight in a tilt-head, my-hand-in-a-9mm way. For minutes he did this. Nobody took note. He wasn’t gangsta enough. Shortly after, a woman appeared and wailed, also in an American inflection, ‘Is this how nigger run thing?’ She dragged away the bleeding fighter from Midas. 9MM went back inside with the gun, still unnoticed.

  I became well-acquainted with the Doriders. The lady at the roti shop had warned me to keep my door locked, but apart from the odd grand bummed off now and then they were very good neighbours, interesting and uninterfering. They’d been deported for small-time peddling. Each knew exactly when he’d got into it; when the mother refused money, when the brother was gunned down, when the girl wanted a diamond stud. They’d cleaned up, made babies, did only ganja to clear their head of negative vibes.

  They were young, tall, muscular, wore braids, looked cool, hung loose. They had an exceptional capacity to hang. They came in before noon and returned at night. Almost all the while they hung in the yard, by the gate, on the steps, standing, sitting, watching, waiting, smoking weed, inhaling which 9MM, supposedly Rasta, might remark ‘Rome burnin’ or something similarly delusional. Their world was getting smaller, from Brooklyn and Queens to Sheriff and Ruimveldt. They’d signed contracts but had seen no money. It wasn’t easy being a recording artiste in Guyana. It wasn’t that there was piracy but that there was only piracy. They refused to bow to Babylon and do jobs. Besides, I don’t think they minded the hanging too much. ‘I do what I want, man,’ Mista Capone said. ‘Make some music, chill out, fuck some bitches, fuck a lot of bitches. You got to keep bitches wanting more, see. You got to tell the bitch, Not today, I ain’t fuckin you today, come back Sa’rday, I’m gonna fuck you Sa’rday.’

  While the Doriders hung, the studio was abuzz. It was small, two cabins the size of cubicles, a computer and a console. Righteous Man ran it. Lil Miss Hot came by to cut soca and R&B, I-Frikka for reggae and culture, Aggressive Youth for hard dancehall. Then there was hiphop from the Doriders. Between all these Righteous Man amphibiously switched. He played with knobs, generated loops, ran the voices through auto-tune, supplied baritone dubs, and also cut solos. I didn’t have a particular taste for the stuff, but I admired its casual Caribbean prolificacy: that there is always more and no matter what it will keep on coming.

  The studio was soundproof, of course, but there was music in the air all day. In the mornings the Double D music cart rolled by, hawking anything from Akon to Jim Reeves. In the quiet of the afternoon one might hear Lil Miss Hot practise on the stairs, or I-Frikka rehearsing with touching sincerity into his dictaphone. In the evenings a vehicle pulled up by the gate, a personal sound system for the Doriders, a louvre-rattling two hours while they grooved to their own songs over and over. At night the music from the fish shop was turned up.

  On Sunday came the cleansing.

  The studio was closed, the traffic was thin, the leftover sound fragments of the Saturday lime at the fish shop were vapourised away by the new sun.

  There was music in the air, but mere strains. Across the road in his patched-up balcony, a man transmitted tinny suggestions of oldies or lovers rock reggae from his portable. From the back of the house more strains blew in. These were of gospel. Its feathery notes held a grand and rousing promise, and I liked brewing tea to it. One morning, unable to control the impulse, I put out the stove and went in search of its source.

  But in the gospel hall, rather than swell, the notes shrank into something depleted and echoing. It was a small, plain room. There were two dozen people, of all races. Some were in church dress, the majority in everyday wear. They sang reluctantly, seated, with minimal swaying, to a student casio.

  I took a seat in the last pew. The preacher, speaking up for evangelists, railed against the mainline churches. An Amerindian brother from the interior told amid quick compressed amens of the spreading of the light among the tribes, and condemned the avaricious businessmen who worked Amerindian staff even on a Sunday so they couldn’t pray.

  Thereafter people got up one after another and talked of their problems, a teacher refused leave from work, a senior citizen disturbed by a nightspot, a mother employed below minimum wage, yet she knew she had been blessed. There was a strange and lonely semi-confessional intimacy to proceedings. It made me feel, I don’t
know, like a cheat, an intruder on others’ piety.

  I stayed till the end.

  ‘I’s glad fuh see you here,’ I heard someone say as I left.

  It was Jackie, the cleaning lady from the studio, and Jackie, no longer in denim three-quarters, had dressed for church.

  ‘I keeping after boys dem fuh come to chu’ch. They en listen.’

  ‘Well.’

  ‘You know what I see Vincent, wah he call heself, Capone or wuhever, you know what I see he doin in the yard the other day? What you suppose to do in the toilet, dah is wah.’

  ‘Sheddin a tear?’

  ‘Eh he! I tell he about it and he go cussin off he mout in the marnin. I axe he if he gon pray that he prattlin off so.’

  ‘Is just how he talk.’

  ‘Well, I’s glad you a chu’chman. See you next Sunday, right.’

  She sashayed away, carrying her African bearing in her big black dress, humming a hymn we were made to sing at the morning assemblies of my Christian school in Bombay, standing in lines, wearing our ties, Praise, My Soul, The King of Heaven.

  ‘UPSTAIRS, upstairs,’ I heard a hoarse voice call out early one Sunday morning. I had returned late the previous night from the bank robberies in the country. I feared it was Jackie hauling my ass to church.

  I went out to the balcony. Below Uncle Lance stood in a cuddly, grumbly teapot stance that appeared to suggest that I’d stood him up. I mentioned this.

  ‘You got to be sharp, bai, you got to mean what you say.’

  ‘Mean what, Lancy?’

  ‘You said you going to look out for when I come.’

  I invited him up for a cup of tea.

  ‘With lemongrass,’ I lied, well aware that the specimen I had planted in a pot had mutated to regular grass.

  ‘Mornin ah wastin,’ he growled back.

  I splashed water on my face and left in boxers and tee.

  He began to walk even as I descended the stairs. We walked a few minutes, over the stink canal to Drury Lane.