The sun rises over this blessed patch of world, mud washed off gold. The leaves are waking, the first fruits are falling. We are gone in Sparrow the boatman’s boat, laughing into dayclean, the mokamoka, the forest, the filthy unbound Atlantic.
BUT I’ve gone two rivers too far. In the daydreaming heat, the giant estuary gentle, winking with sun, I thought back to an old travel article, conceived spiritedly at Big Market Big Mamma’s. For now, I had no further to go than the Essequibo coast.
The stelling at Supenaam hustled to life with hitherto cardplaying taximen, four passengers per share-car. We zipped down the thin road, silver with glare. I was dropped off outside a shop on the public road. The car beat on.
Inside the shop a man reclined in a chair, palms resting on his belly. He had a pleasant face and a tilted mouth, altogether approachable. Behind him hung an enormous photograph of the Kaaba, the clock beside it ticking to three.
I asked for help with the address.
‘This same place the address.’
It threw me.
‘You know Jan?’
‘The red gal?’
‘Yeah.’
‘She does come by the phone shop sometime’ – he made a hooked finger towards the adjacent door.
‘You know what time?’
He sized me up, wary.
‘Me don’t really watch that, you know.’
‘Thanks.’
‘No mention.’
I went next door to the phone shop. There was a sole woman in the room. ‘He want to suck cane and blow whistle too,’ she bellowed into the line, with such passion that I withdrew at once.
Beside the shops was a two-step wooden bleachers under a tamarind tree. I took a seat.
A static white day. Not even birds were to be seen. Run-over crappos were pasted flat on the road. Something like smoke rose from their dead skins.
Fone. Cheaply titillating. Like a flirt’s laugh, or popped bubblegum.
I waited.
Time passed, and people. A grandmother on a stick walked by, crumpled as forgotten silk. A boy sat down, twelve or thirteen years old, a butcher he said. He shared star apples with me. He bounded into the fields. Cyclers, walkers, limers in the heat. The house across, ravaged by ocean and apathy, its bright red and yellow jhandis astonishing against the blanched day, the blanched wood. Who lived in it? Man and reputed wife? A fisherman and his mammy? Extended family – step siblings, chachis, nanis? It didn’t feel like a nuclear kind of house. This felt somehow exciting. These lives.
Guyana was revealed in the country. Not because the city was so different, but so much like it. A large rurality, a social experiment, a time warp. Everybody was from the country. Hadn’t Rabindranauth Latchman sprung from one of these villages here? It was one of the generic ones. Adventure? Perseverance? With trembling self-regard he had told of his rise – ‘blood sweatin tears.’ Rabindranauth Latchman. Just the other night I’d seen him again in his print shirt, hosting a piece of ass on his lap permitting him access with a stirring mix of power and vulnerability.
Waiting, it occurred to me that I had waited a great deal since I left India. It was so different from Indian waiting. Indian waiting was the waiting of competitiveness, of crowds. Here I’d idled. To idle now would be to fail. But what was to be done? The mechanism was delicate. To be exposed to her was one thing, to the village quite another. It would be like walking in underwear. As it was I was drawing long looks, attempts at conversation.
The sun was going canary to marigold. The pressure-cooker day was building to a release, the air heavier by the minute. In the hot shade, wet jeans pasted to the wood, the mind dwindling to nothingness, I fell fast asleep.
When I woke I couldn’t place where I was. This kind of thing had begun to happen to me. It wasn’t a failure of memory, just that it felt surreal that I should be asleep on bleachers between the rivers of Essequibo and Pomeroon, or on a concrete plinth in the Brazilian savannah, mixed up deep but in nothing. While recovering my balance I’d be assailed by a variety of Indian flashbacks. A lover that was or wasn’t. Breaking a window in the building compound. The tension in the house when I abandoned my caste thread. It would take fifteen or twenty minutes to shake this mood. Sometimes there would be a mild headache.
It was turning to dark when I awoke and it disoriented me further. The sun had lost shape. Hours had been consumed. The ideas in my head had been foiled.
Unsure of the next step, I did as usual. I walked. Along the straight open highway unsuited for walks. To the right were the village houses, beyond them the courida and blacksage bush on the South American foreshore. To the left were the paddy fields. Above, sunset was a mauve smear over man and his preoccupations. There was mud in the air. Here and there one could hear stray voices, beating with phrases like ‘shying seeds’ and ‘pulling shrimp’. From the fields came the trombone of cows. Godhuli was the beautiful Hindi word for sunset: the dust raised by cows returning home. Godhuli, so right with dayclean.
With the slightest intimation, a rustle of leaves, a flutter of hidden birds into trees, the pressure was released. I was stunned by the intensity. Rain blew in lilac gusts over the rice fields. The palm at the margins were bending. Mud exploded onto my dustencrusted feet, into the crevices between my toes. On the nape and the forearms the new air felt like new skin. It was like waterbombs. I ran for a shed in the distance. It was a small lumberyard. I stood inside the curtain of corrugated rivulets. The zinc took a pounding, rising and falling in waves over the rafters, flapping. In utter din twilight was obliterated.
Darkness was ecstatic. Scents seeped from the earth, the bushes. The world was raw and desperate, all contrition washed off. It was ten minutes, till the wind abated and the zinc settled, that I caught the folkish Bhojpuri rhythms jangling through the rain. Sounds affect me in the most visceral way. I felt a little drunk and perverted. The mood of silver anklets, licked navels, sex in a haystack. I walked around the drenched perimeter. The sound grew closer. Lotay la, khub lotay la. I knew it from so many wedding limes. It was a red-hot drunken chutney. The dholaks beat relentless over cymbals and harmonium. It made you feel to dunk your head in a bucket of rum, spin in circles. It was an old Indian theme, wife and brother-in-law, rolling, soaping, bathing, and it ended in an Indian way, with wife-beating.
Three men were inside the lumberyard, surrounded by logs of timber, ghostly around a flambeaux. Their faces were full of rum. A portable stereo, a tiffin with phulouries, the smell of mango sour. There was a fourth man; he raindanced in wide arcs, his small dark body lost against the logs.
‘Who that jumbie there?’
I introduced myself. I was an Indiaman. They fussed over me, they plied me with their alcohol. The sharp ferment of bush rum. Two shots to begin with, one for blood, one for rain.
They were the lumberyard watchie, small-scale rice farmers, a postman. They could be thirty, they could be fifty, I couldn’t tell. They’d curried iguana in the backdam. They’d traded rifle cartridges with Amerindians for the iguana. They’d traded cases of smuggled Venezuelan beers with GT people for the cartridges. The meat was white and soft, soaked in curry powder.
We talked about flims, about Dharmendra, about Veeru of Sholay and Veeru Sehwag of cricket. ‘Man bat like he sleeping with one eye open and give one bap to mosquito.’
Bush rum has a stabbing, localised high. One can press the points of intoxication. Evasions dissolved in drink and rain, I let slip it had to do with a girl.
‘Ei man, the man want to ketch a t’ing. Abi take the man backdam, buckgirl sisters start t’ing there. Pink, bai! Sweet, bai! Abi take you in tonight.’
‘Tomorrow.’
The floor was smoothened concrete. Crappos leapt on it. Earthworms crept in and back out. The dry logs absorbed the smell of rain and the vibrations of the chutney. And the chutney clanged on. Phulorie bina chutney kaise banee? I had thought of chutney as a music without pain, but I had begun to see I was wrong. Reggae was the music of slavery. Its
impulse was resistance, confrontation, a homeland severed so absolutely, seized back by the force of imagination or ideology. Chutney was the music of indenture. Its impulse was preservation, then assimilation. There was a pain in this act of attempted preservation – a homeland part remembered and protected, part lost and lingering.
‘Ei brother, I’s make chutney good, you know. Is only one thing keeping me back.’
‘Contacts?’
‘Genetics, man. Me nah get the voice.’
They spoke of Bachchan, of Bachchan having come one time to Blairmont. After a while I couldn’t follow. The wind had risen again, playing with the zinc. Their intonations were too fast, drunk. Still the situation was effortless. I couldn’t have been in it in India. No chance. And standing at the open back of the lumberyard, the sleeper logs in proximity, looking out into the fields, was the feeling of travelling Indian Railways, the great Gangetic sweep, a country palpable, unknowable.
It was hours. When the rain tapered to a drizzle we left. We were going to Bunny’s. The night was fresh and silhouetted. Crappos were singing tenor. The wind lifted the smell of wet paddy from the fields, faintly like asafoetida. We passed the house across the bleachers.
‘Who live in there?’
‘Churile live in there. She ah churile.’
At Bunny’s the night was ending. The room was thick with alcohol and chat. Bush rum yielded to five-year. Fairy lights were wound around the safety grille, I couldn’t tell if left over from Diwali or in anticipation of Christmas. Against the dim lighting they made the mood of a finished occasion. The sound system issued old Hindi film music, of longing, of suppression, the idea of what it is to love, what it is to lose, Indian fatalism.
I looked around me: middle-aged Guyanese men in caps, T-shirts and short straightforward moustaches. They’d shied rice in the morning, brewed bush rum, sold timber, worked the post office, or who knows, done nothing or picked fights, and now they were happy and they were sad and the world was loaded with a thing you could not touch.
‘Ei, Bunny, jam the mike, we get an Indiaman heye,’ someone said, and there was singing. Suhaani raat dhal chuki, obscure among Hindi film classics, forty, fifty years old, maybe more. A man called Chabilall sang. He was joined by a few others from their spots.
I watched mesmerised. To sing in a language one didn’t know, it seemed to me an act of devotion. The half-baked, heartfelt, creolised delivery, I felt it in my bones.
‘Hear wha’happen, brother,’ Chabilall said to me after. ‘Rafi you ain got to unstand words. Rafi in we blood.’
‘Kishore?’
‘A great man. But hear wha’happen. When Rafi sing a dance song, you dance. When he sing a sad song, you cry. When he sing a love song, woman get fever. Rafi get inside of you, he become you an you become him.’
He went to a line from Suhaani Raat.
Tarap rahe hain hum yahaan, tumhare intezaar mein.
‘Hear how he play with the syllable. He make ten from one. Now that is feeling.’
‘You know what it means?’
‘Part part. But I feel it, my brother, I feel it. Let me tell you one story, my brother. When I was in school, I get suspended one time. Because why? Because in the patriotic song I replace “Guyana” with “India”.’
I would spend the night at Chabilall’s. The mile to his house we walked and sang, Kishore upon my insistence, Yeh Dil Na Hota Bechara and the oeuvre, under the wettened stars, the floating drizzle. These songs, these fields, in one of these houses her body in a damp bed.
HER mane was pushed back by an alice band. It drew attention to the shape of her face, cut like a rough heart. She squinted in the sun. The sleeves of her pink tee were rolled up. Her white shorts were folded up to half her long brown thigh, a line of muscle on its side. I had built her to absurd heights in my awake dreams. She was not a miracle, no. Rather, simply very attractive in a teasing, swaying way. Her face hadn’t finesse. It had energy. Her knees were grey. It came as a relief. She was within grasp.
‘Good morning,’ she said, walking up from the shop.
At once there was such a distance between us. The intimacy of dreams is a deceit. We did not know each other.
‘Marnin,’ I said, rising from the bleachers.
‘I was sure I wasn’t going to see you back,’ she said.
It was a curious comment, for it appeared to shift the initiative of pursuit on to her.
‘I love your hair but it’s nice how your face shows this way.’
She twinkled me a look.
‘So you get me the phone?’ she asked, playing with the bracelets on her wrist, slender.
‘The phone, no—I wasn’t sure what you meant.’
She pulled a mock cross face.
‘How we could be in touch otherwise?’
‘Oh.’
‘Motorola bring out a nice one. The pebble.’
‘I was thinking maybe if we together a lot we don’t need the phone.’
‘So how you get here?’
‘Number thirty-two from Parika, speedboat to Supenaam, share-car till here. I thought it’s the only way, unless you fly.’
‘They allow vehicle on the big ferry. You got a vehicle?’
Phoneless, vehicleless: within minutes our electric cocoon had been demolished. I was a letdown.
She leaned against the bleachers. Her legs glistened with perspiration.
I changed the subject.
‘How come you give me the address of the shop?’
‘How I could trust you, man? You could be who. You could be bandit.’
‘I could be pandit.’
She laughed.
‘How long you been here?’
‘Maybe an hour.’
‘That ain’t much at all.’
‘And all of yesterday too.’
‘You lie!’
‘Ask the shopman.’
‘Where you spend the night?’
‘Right here, on the bleachers. How it rained, how I shivered.’
‘So what part you from?’
‘India.’
‘Tell me for truth.’
‘Truth. You couldn’t tell?’
‘But you talk good! You talk like a Guyanese. I mean you talk a lil strange, but I thought is just because you is strange. You know how some people go foreign a couple of days and they come back and talk funny till the time they lie in coffin.’
‘I pick up a couple of things.’
‘You doing good! When you come here?’
‘A good while. Since the start of the year.’
‘What you come for?’
‘Look who asking so much questions now!’
‘I don’t believe you from India! You got to prove it.’
‘Even the federals didn’t ask for my ID, you know.’
‘I know you lie. You look full of lie.’
I showed her my driver’s licence.
‘Oh lord, is true. How old you was in this photo, seven? Nice name – is a starbai name! Say something. Let me hear whether you sound like a starbai.’
‘Is what you want me to say?’
‘That is up to you.’
‘I could say anything, how you would know it’s right?’
‘I ain’t stupid.’
And the words which came to mind were not, ‘How are you?’ or ‘The sky is blue’ – no, the only thing that came to mind was a song Chabilall and I sung last night, the song Bollywood had nicked from Shorty, Shanti Om.
‘Maine kisi ko dil deke kar li, raatein kharaab dekho.’
She wasn’t sure, I think, whether I had sung or spoken, and then she wasn’t clear if it was over or not. She tried to work out how to respond.
‘What does it mean?’
‘Well, that I’ve given my heart to somebody, and now my nights are, basically, ruined, destroyed. Like sleeping on the bleachers in the rain.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘I still don’t know your name, you know.’
‘Jan. I wrote it
for you.’
‘The full name I meant.’
‘Janaki. Don’t call me that, I hate it.’
Janaki! I hadn’t expected it. Not at all. She had some Indian in her, that had been certain. It was in her features, her skin. But I hadn’t expected the epic name.
‘How you spell it!’
‘J.a.n.k.e.y. But is Jan – just Jan. Is only the country gals who got names like Jankey and Parbatti.’
‘But you is a country gal.’
‘I ain’t! I only been here a lil while.’
‘You know what it means?’
‘Is like Sita, not so? My grandfather tell me so. He knew Hindi part part. Pagalee. That is what he would call me.’
‘Look at you – you a full-blooded cooliegal!’
She laughed.
‘Not all the way. My father got a lil Brazzo in him. But I ain’t seen much of him.’
Jankey.
We stood in the flush shade, surprised by one another’s Indianness.
‘You live here?’
‘Part time. Part time in GT. Part time Lethem. I grow up in GT, you know.’
She sat down on the bench, and I sat beside her. ‘I just trying to cut out of Guyana now. Is got nothing.’
‘Where would you go?’
‘North. I got peeps there. Life there good, you know. People got options. They get ahead. My friends send me pictures and tell me about all what it got there. Brazil I’d like to live too. I love Brazil. I been till Boa Vista one time. Barbados, they developed up there. Anywhere but here.’
‘It’s not so bad,’ I said, somewhat offended on Guyana’s behalf.
‘You only think that cause you been here a lil while. So why you come here?’
‘I wanted to get away. Like you do.’
‘You want to get away so you come to Guyana? I thought you was full of lie. But is not the case. You just mad.’
‘It’s a good place for madmen, you must agree.’
The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel Page 19