The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel

by Rahul Bhattacharya

  I laughed. I took it to be a mock heckle like last evening; but really I laughed from pure gratitude, from the relief of being pulled back into an everyday thing. I laughed because I was grateful for the fact of her. Mistake. We spoke no more for hours.

  Not till we changed buses at the highway terminal for a local into Caracas and over the valley did the first stunning accumulation of shanties appear on a mountain. The scale of the barrios, their utter verticality, colour dots toppling towards the sky, it supercharged our retro bus with anticipation. A country boy, aiming to capture the terrific thrill of the journey on his cellphone, finding himself on the wrong side of the aisle recorded instead the meaningless red rock face. A lady pulled out her hand mirror and applied bright pink lipstick. The city was coming.

  We disembarked at Avenue de Mexico and made a long inspirational walk towards a recommended budget hotel in the guidebook. There were refrigerators and printers and electric saws being sold bare on the jumping metropolitan road. The girls of Caracas were thick, to use the Guyanese. ‘Look you get all you Miss Universe here,’ she said, still smarting, ‘an you stuck with you Miss No Beauty.’ Men could be fair with dark eyes. Some looked like pimps. A city of bursting boobs and frightened shotat pigeons who fluttered through the hilly tall buildings carrying echoes of the shot with them. Epical, vivid, a city of slopes and angles, vicious little cigarettes, umbrellaed stalls of mobile payphones hanging from chains.

  We hauled our bags uphill through the brilliant evening market streets. Latin horns were spilling out of shops and tascas that smelled of fish broth. Around small grassy squares Caraquenos bought grocery and newspapers. People were everywhere: to be in a city of millions again!

  I had been almost offended by her semi-passivity towards the miracles of travel. But now I felt her genuine participation.

  ‘It got this much people in India?’ she asked, pressing my arm.

  ‘More. But the cities are ugly. There are wires everywhere, unpainted buildings, garbage on the streets.’

  ‘I can’t imagine more people. Is like this when everyone go down to the tarmac at the national stadium for concert. But here they just movin about streets like so.’

  The hotel was on a sloping corner. It was a high matchbox room. The small window opened to a Bombay view: pigeons, grilles, sliding windows, shredded noise. We went downstairs straight away. We sat at a tiny sidewalk corner cafe and drank sharp café marrón from plastic thimbles, inhaling Caracas. Outside a licoreria a woman in a long dress roasted what looked like kebabs. A posse of upstarts threw handbombs, giving off illusions of a student riot. A black maga dog attacked a battered taxi that groaned uphill. Men reeking castaway regret turned corners, putting things behind them once and for all. Down the slope and far away on hills was the glimmer of lights.

  We were in synchronicity. I was so grateful for her presence, I wanted to hold her and kiss her all the time. The night was primed to unfurl before us like a silver ribbon. Even so, I could never have bargained for the forthcoming stroke of fortune.

  We went out to a terrace pizzeria in Altimira. There we drank numerous Solera Lights from blue bottles so pretty you could stand them in display cases, and she cleaned the chicken wings to the white of the bone, claiming it to be the mark of a Guyanese – even the president did it so, she’d seen. Skipping down the steps a little high, walking the hip circles of Altimira, we came upon a posh jazz bar. It was dim and rich, reeking of cologne, cigar, petrodollars. A band played fusion cosmopolitan. Large oil barons danced with small aristocratic movements, spreading their thick fingers on barebacked ladies. They would return to their seats after every song, only to get right back up when the next started. Everybody in that velveteen room moved like smoke. She did too, but I knew not how to salsa. We wined down without shame. ‘Bravo,’ shouted the oil tycoons. We drank from long crushed-ice glasses Black Label and Baileys, the best thing she ever tasted she said, and in the gentleman’s she whispered to me, ‘Leh we stay here, we could learn Spanish, we could live here’.

  We wandered drunkenly again, speaking marginal sense. She made assertions. ‘Goat more stupid than sheep,’ she said. Sometimes she let slip a ‘fuck, bai, cole breeze, bai’. Her cheap blunt heel stuck in a gutter grating. About then, pausing to pull it out – that is when we struck divine luck.

  Its first intimation, as with many good things, was the molecular thump of bass, and tracing it we arrived at a plaza. It was a West Indian music extravaganza, planted on earth just for us.

  We talked again amid people who spoke English. The freedom of that! What exertions and isolations language had brought on. We’d been fluttering fish. The difficulty of every transaction, the handsigns, the stupidity of making as if to shiver while saying frio to a bus hostess, the exaggerated presence of one another.

  We swigged rum and ate dukanu. The burlesque Caribbean was out in force making vulgar harmony. The Bahamians played the greatest music of all. They blew away jump-n-wave Trinis and slack raw Jamaicans. Full-blooded black Bahamians played rake-n-scrape; they played saws and accordion, they meshed cottonfield blues and carnival jump-up and zydeco stomps. They told everyday truths. A black man in a suit and hat and beautiful crepe skin sang, Don’t tell on me, and I won’t tell on you. Those were the only words. There and then he kept summing up life. They marched to the junkanoo, the terrific noise of drum and brass and whistles making exuberant madmen out of everyone, sweeping up people in its path like a tornado, a whole infantry of masqueraded music makers led and trailed by feathered, costumed Bahamian girls getting up on their toes and letting their heads drop and their pelvis round over in free perfection.

  It was the vitality of the Caribbean, waiting for deflation. Jamaicans dropped their ‘h’s and put them in where there were none. Bajans wore Christian moustaches and slapped their thighs in great old laughters. They spoke of cricket at Pickwick in slurry Scousey tongues and said ‘shite’. Saint Lucians said awrie and drank sweet beer from green bottles of Piton they’d brought with them. Guyanese weren’t there. Jan, she wound and unwound her waist around mine, and not a bitter word was spoke.

  CARACAS days of morning baths, wet towels and unmade beds. Burgundy negligee. Eyeliner, her brown eyes energised to ferocity. Days sunk in quicksands and intimacies. The ooze of sex and obstacles, friction and revelation. Resentments burnt up in furtive fucks. Misunderstandings plucked from the air.

  Afterwards I thought the ain’t a beauty fight was crucial. It loosened our behaviour. It was the first time the frontier of brinksmanship was breached. It permitted sulks, gesticulations, the odd cussword. There were no standards thereafter. Soon our tongues moved past the early stage of clearest dictions. She could groove into something too fast for me, I could mumble. Her eyerolls infuriated me.

  And the city offered so many chances for disagreement. Where to go, what to do? Walk or take the bus? Get an empanada at the cafe or hold back for a big meal afterwards? The matter of food was loaded. She was fussy about what to eat and I when.

  The tension that gnawed and grew was that she always wanted and asked. The bolivars flew by. We bought brassieres, dresses, perfumes, tees and toys for the child. Her own attention to money was keen, when she talked about tomatoes at 240 dollar a pound or the speedboat fare to Parika. But she thought nothing of asking.

  Anything was liable to catch her fancy. Passing a salon, she wanted highlights. This meant not only money but time, and I pointed it out. ‘But I want to look good for you.’ A sexy directness like that: and man’s pre- and post-orgasm wisdoms are very different beasts.

  The treatment ran to hours. I went out for a wander and a bite. When I returned she had, on the advice of the stylist, got her hair ironed as well. Her nails had been redone, to French. Further he had encouraged her into cherry lipstick to bring out the highlights, which were blonde rather than copper. It gave her a certain Latina appeal, but the full effect – the ironing, the wet lipstick, the white nails – it was plain mollish.

  My reaction
to these expenditures grew progressively worse. Sometimes I withdrew or became deliberately inattentive. Disarmingly, she appeared to carry no weight. It occurred to me that it is how she saw things. She’d always expected indulgence of this sort, and I had set us up for it. Guyanese men had a term for it: ‘fat fowling.’ I could tell she had experience. She wasn’t a fowl, she was a cat.

  I learnt about her life, felt it on the landscape like a memory, the line down from the cowbelt of north India. She was born in Georgetown Hospital on a night of November, early enough for Scorpio. She loved Scorpio and town. She liked liming, shopping, lived often with her wild friend Aaliyah. She did have a few boyfriends, ‘nothing you got to worry about’. Her mother, named Savitri, no less, had turned Anglican. She was a crochet and embroidery expert. They moved to Essequibo for an assignment some years ago, and ended up staying. The mother lived with the man who converted her. Jan hated him. He looked for excuses to hug her up, wanted to know where she was going, when she was coming back, and she didn’t like staying with them. She stopped working eight months ago, it was sheer exploitation. She’d been a salesgirl. Brian’s cousins were in Lethem. Goldy Persaud, his father, she hardly saw. He chased up all kinds of girls, girls she felt were just like garbage.

  Caraca days of altitude and sunshine at twenty-two degrees. The central districts cool and lime, the streets selling mounds of yellow panties, Bush Assassino scrawled on walls, music stalls sampling Alphaville and a-ha, wheelchair queues awaiting state concessions for the handicapped. And the plazas, plazas upon plazas, the mandatory Plaza Bolivar with the statue of the besworded liberator, plazas with stone fountains, with tribal flautists, Latin Americans. The plaza where we first lost each other.

  We were on steps, I between her legs. She sketched. I drifted into sleep on her sunny thigh.

  She prodded me to show the sketch: the pillared cafe on the far side, the edge of the fountain, a boy with a dinky car. It obliterated movement and crowd, yet it caught the essentials so that when I gazed up I could not for a moment see what she’d omitted. I asked her if I could have it.

  ‘I’ll keep it with the bird,’ I told her. ‘You know, I always thought about the crayons. Was because of the baby.’

  She smiled.

  ‘He draw nice too. He got to learn to loose up he fingers. Mummy workin with him.’

  I visualised the homely scene. I could see a bottomhouse in the country, sun outside, a clothesline, a bench of old 2×4s, a drawing child, an observing mother, a teaching grandmother.

  I asked something that had been on my mind.

  ‘What happens if the big man find out about me?’

  ‘He gon take a gun and bust a hole in your head.’

  ‘Oooh. Exciting.’

  I laughed. She didn’t. She ran her pencil on the back of my neck.

  ‘Why does he care?’

  ‘Cause he a fockup. He want me always to be there for him.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask him to fuck off? Give him back his house and ask him to fuck off.’

  ‘Is easy to say. Who going to look after the maintenance?’

  ‘You still love him?’

  She thought about it for a while.

  ‘I don’t know. I give up on all that now. I just want to leave Guyana.’

  ‘And the baby?’

  ‘Is for he I want to get away.’

  She played with my hair, looking into it as if for something.

  I became consumed by her predicament, the tug of her strands – her youth, her dependence, her independence, her responsibility.

  ‘You ever wish you had waited awhile for the baby?’

  Her fingers froze on my head.

  ‘What you mean?’

  I didn’t answer. I could feel her posture stiffen.

  ‘You mean I shoulda throw away the baby?’

  ‘That’s not what I’m saying.’

  ‘Is what you meant.’

  ‘No, it’s not. I just wondered what—’

  ‘What. Be a sweetman when time right and then ask for kill the—’

  ‘It’s not killing.’

  ‘It is fockin killing.’

  ‘I’m not even saying that.’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘I’m not, and I didn’t.’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘I’m not. I just wanted to know, you were so young then, I just thought if you ever feel it happened too early—’

  ‘The baby ain’t a piece of toy, you know. He got a fockin right to live, you know.’

  It was far too sharp.

  ‘He does. But you not there for him right now, are you. And you don’t know where the fucking big man is.’

  She tossed the pad off her lap. She was on her feet.

  ‘You a real fock-up, you know. A real fockin fock-up.’

  She stood there a few moments. I looked away. What a misrepresentation. She began to walk off. I determinedly faced away, fixing my gaze at a far end of the square; children with paper masks ran after one another. I could sense her getting further away. I did not want to have anything to do with it. When I turned she’d covered a good distance. She was walking past the central fountain. She had a moment of hesitation. She looked to see if I was coming. I wasn’t. I was wishing for her to come back, I was challenging her to go on.

  She turned and quickened. The sun caught her brilliant highlights. She was a blur of skin and clothes. She was merging with other blurs. She was a point. And then indiscernible. I stayed rooted to the spot, blandly looking at the sketch in my hand.

  CORO, the thirty-first of December. Not a soul trod the streets, not even a dog. These were streets of the like I had never seen before. Narrow, bare streets tunnelled by high looming walls of peeling paints, once bright oranges and greens worn down to suggestions of their former selves. The doors were enormous and forbidden. The windows were of coloured glass, set behind baroque grilles. Underfoot were cobblestones and overhead a fading sky.

  We had travelled all day to reach Coro, taken three buses. I had found her sucking on an orange ice lolly on a bench in Plaza Bolivar. I apologised; she conceded she could have handled it better. We kissed fingertips. It felt like the most intimate thing we had done. I suggested we’d been here long enough, perhaps too long so let us, jaan, go away somewhere nice for the new year. She agreed quietly it was a good idea.

  Part of the reason I wanted to leave was to find more romantic accommodation. Our small, sun-starved room in Caracas had been much too harsh. Everything about it said: it’s a jungle out there, man must hustle. We’d made inquiries in the city centre, but the inns were full.

  But here in Coro the posadas were abandoned. Their doors opened after minutes of knocking. Their walls were mustard and dim-lit, their furniture was old and rich, their open courtyards filled with sad pots. We walked on in simple wonderment and settled in the third such. It too felt like a place where ghosts rested with roses in their teeth, but with the crucial difference they were well-intentioned.

  Our room had a fifteen-foot ceiling and a television. We watched jaunty salsa, and she tried to take me jauntily through the bits she knew. In retaliation I taught her the bits of yoga I knew. In the nude we did the tree pose, facing each other on single right legs, left legs bent into our thighs, palms stretched above our heads in a namaste. She stood tall on her toes. My nipples were lodged over hers, her breasts were smashed against my ribs. I was hard, pressing against her navel. ‘I ain’t feel like a tree at all, bai,’ she said through suppressed laughter. We collapsed into tangled limbs.

  We had begun to go bareback. It happened first in a stairwell at the National Gallery in Caracas, and repeatedly thereafter. There was no thought to disease. I knew her now. I knew her like a quick addiction. I knew the bittersour smell of her armpits and her vagina, the mingle of our fluids. I knew my nerve endings against hers. Did she feel it so? Was it true that a woman’s pleasure cannot be approached by a man? We were kissing big. Her breath was all over me. She was pressing my nipples ti
ll they hurt. She was bearing down, wining down.

  We were wasted on the floor. Her hair was spread across my torso. It occurred to me that the one true intimacy we had was sexual. She would tell me about dicks and how they felt, about watching ‘blues’ with boys. She asked me things I had never been asked and I, surprising myself, answered.

  With climax behind us, the dim energy of the posada was nibbling at our mood. In my miscalculating head in this courtyard here would have been violins, accordions, champagne, hands around dancing waists. But it was weak lights, large flower pots and the sound of the simpleton caretaker watching television in a dark corner. There was no food or drink. I was hungry.

  She wore a new red and white top from Caracas that showed bellybutton and we made into those haunted streets again. Walking past the white cathedral, blinding as noonday snow even by night, we entered the Plaza Bolivar. Here were empty benches and closed shops bleached in sickly halogen. At the next cathedral, grand and lemon yellow, there was a service on. She said a prayer from outside, standing on the cobblestone with head bowed and hands clasped. She said her mother would like it. How vulnerable she felt at that moment.

  We walked on. A ragged wind blew. The restaurants and cafes remained closed, the doors remained inscrutable. It occurred to me that perhaps when they said this was the capital in the sixteenth century, there was something to be gleaned from that. Maybe we were just a little late.