The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel

by Rahul Bhattacharya

  SHE didn’t wake me fore day morning, she didn’t wake me at all. She was already dressed when I stirred out of sleep. She’d taken the chair to the window, her wet hair pulled over to one side. She must have known when I woke: I rustled about with deliberate noise. She continued gazing into the shine of the terrace. The sun caught her in parts. Her burnished, braceleted forearm, her French nails, her crossed knees in the icy jeans from Carupano.

  ‘Marnin!’

  It was a gamble.

  She looked at me as one does an annoying child.

  There was no further communication. In any case, another lady was on my mind, and she worried me. It was Gomattie, the Guyanese vendor in San Felix.

  Gomattie was our only way back home. It occurred to me that in the languor of the previous days I had reposed too much faith not just in Gomattie but in things she had no control over. She was to have checked if the backtrack boat to Guyana was around. I had spoken to her on her home number. She didn’t have a cellphone. I was to meet her in the market at San Felix. For the first time I considered the possibility that it might not have worked out. My ticket to India and my Guyanese visa both expired in a few days, one year after I’d arrived.

  We left for San Felix. Ninety minutes on the bus we sat like cardboard cutouts. She made sure she didn’t stray on to the armrest even. What was there to say? There was nothing to say.

  At San Felix the taxi drivers refused us. They didn’t know where to take us. Market? Mercado? Covered market, Gomattie had said. Covered mercado? Half a dozen rejections from the taxi queue. By chance a passing taxi honked for us. Fortunately, he drove off as we entered.

  Conversation began minutes later. Mercado? Covered mercado? He was driving in circles. I looked through the guidebook. Nothing for covered. Indoor: cubierto. Mercado cubierto? No recognition.

  He pulled up and gestured for us to get out. The facts hit me: looking for a person one didn’t know in a city one didn’t know in a language one didn’t know. It was crusts of diamond in a pool of filth. She was beside me, looking precious, burdensome. Mercado? I said it to him like a prayer. Please, cubierto mercado? Gracias. Mercado cubierto? He was an unassuming sort of man. He drove again.

  After a long and anxious ride he deposited us at what was blatantly a market. Too much so. It was defeatingly large. Worse, its scope kept growing. Every few metres there appeared a side street, and those with further branches, each a slap in the face. There was a clamorous market air. People had no time for queries. To offer the words ‘cubierto’ or ‘Guyana’ was to be blinked at and dismissed.

  I considered examining the side streets one by one, but that way lay madness. We kept walking along the central road. Perhaps we’d already gone past Gomattie. Then the central road itself forked. Took the one which sloped down. There in the distance the most beautiful sight: the vast dull spread of tin roofs. Cubierto!

  The moment was ruined soon enough, for nearness brought bewilderment. The place was humongous, eight or ten times the size of Stabroek. And so dense. There was no way of standing back and taking stock. In fact, there was no place to stand. If you stood women pulled you by the arm towards their foodstalls.

  ‘Guyana?’ ‘Gomattie?’ For half an hour we sagged about among vegetables, clothes, plastic wares. ‘Guyana? Gomattie?’ She was tiring. She’d begun to shift her bag from shoulder to shoulder. She usually carried mine, the lighter, but not today. She was ready to say something in irritation, I could tell. She didn’t. It was wicked. What to do? I couldn’t let it show. Panic at this stage would be pathetic.

  I switched to ‘Gooyana’, as Carolina of Carupano had called it. To Gooyana a lady vendor responded with a nod. She led us inside to the very innards of the market, to a man with a smashed face, and he nodded and led us further inside to another man, who was – a prapa coolieman! And he led us to a section at the very end, where like magic there appeared a set of cooliepeople, some tending to stalls, some milling about just so. From a tower of speakers the song played loud and proud: Yaad aa rahi hai, teri yaad aa rahi hai. Love Story. It was Lata singing all right, but big Caribbean beats had been added in.

  An unexpected thing happened here. A tear welled in my eye. I don’t know. There was something in the scenes. The Venezuelan shed, the song from Love Story, the beats. Cooliepeople milling about in coolie ways. The shabby, sparkless dressing, the uninspiring hairstyles, the flat resignation in those eyes that I knew from India to Guyana. The packets of Guyanese curry powder and Guyanese chowmein and bottles of brandless coconut oil, the stacks of Hindi discs. Twice-removed diaspora, twice-removed attachments, perhaps twice-strong, the absurdity and obviousness of so many journeys, so many displacements.

  And there in the far corner, I could tell without asking, was our Gomattie, named for the river Gomti. From the banks of that river her great great grandfather came across the world to cut cane, and at the immigration depot he would have humbly answered what was asked of him, his birth, an approximate year, his caste and village and tehsil, the spelling of his name and those of his progeny mangled forever by the white officer, and he would have put his thumb on the paper, put his time in, and now, generations down the line, in the covered market of San Felix, Venezuela, selling curry powder and masala and Hindi movies, was Gomattie.

  Gomattie, wall-eyed and maternal in a flowery dress. She’d checked for the boat. It had gone. No, she didn’t know details of the overland route. One could fly from Eteringbang but she wasn’t sure how to get there. She only used the boat. Everybody here only used the boat. It was much cheaper, didn’t need papers. I asked others nevertheless. No, they all went backtrack.

  Jan was no longer with me. She’d turned away at the mouth of the Guyanese section. I found her at a cosmetics stall outside.

  ‘We stranded,’ I told her.

  ‘Good,’ she said, examining a hair clip.

  THERE was only one thing to do in the circumstances, which was follow urban man’s primal instincts and make phone calls. I took directions to a phoneshop. It was on the riverfront. We walked in silence towards it. My panic had receded. In its place there was contemplation of a serious fear. In a few days I would miss my flight back to India. It wouldn’t even come to that. My Guyanese visa would have expired. They wouldn’t let me into the country. Was there any other way? We couldn’t return as we had come, because the ferry to Trinidad had left for the week. Flying via Caracas and Port of Spain would cost 1,500 dollars each, out of the question.

  I called and waited, called and waited, a sweating iteration performed for an hour. She was outside. She was under a canopy. She was sitting on her bag, drinking a juice.

  Information trickled in. I had called de Jesus – I had a recollection from a lime of his pardner saying his childmother was Venezeulan. De Jesus rang his friend. His friend rang his childmother. His childmother rang her friend. And that friend had a number for Admiral Rambo.

  I rang Admiral Rambo.

  ‘Is that Admiral Rambo?’

  ‘Ai.’

  I explained the situation. He asked for my exact location.

  ‘Don’t move. I comin there jus now.’

  In twenty minutes Admiral Rambo arrived, stepping out of a grey jeep, a fluffy gent in an old green T-shirt and fawn trousers, with big tits, a split-legged walk, a thick smile under a bushy-tail moustache and thick black hair heaped in a bouffant.

  ‘Ai, Sharook Khan’ – I had told him I was from India – ‘wahpun there!’ He took my hand to shake, and did not leave it, swinging it gently side to side with constantly shifting grips for two or three minutes. ‘Is wildlife you got in India – me foreparents from India, you know, me right name Rambarran – so we got jaguar right, but in India you got tiger. Tiger. Yeh, that’s my cat, bai, dah is the cat for me. Yes, Admiral, well I tell you why, you see I used to run a boat – eh he, Essequibo – sweet guess, man! I like how you make the guess there, Sharook! – so there is where I pick up the name of Admiral. Nah, nah, nah, Captain is too … too … common you
know. Any banna playing cricket pun the tarmac could turn captain. Now Admiral got a lil style, a lil power, somebody you could admire. That is a man which can take on tiger. Eh he, 120,000 bolivar each passenger till San Martin. Eteringbang … yeh yeh yeh, is the same thing, you see is San Martin on this side, Guyana side is Eteringbang. The plane to Georgetown, that is next cost of 125 dollar, so that is 250 for you and the mistress. Yeh, US dollar not Guyanese. Ha ha, Sharook, is joke you jokin, bai! Yes, man, pay in any currency, so long is in cash not kind, I ain’t know what is the kind of kind people givin nowdays! Eh he, day after marnin we leffin, say about twelve o’clock time.’

  By the time he had completed the handshake – slap to clasp to swings to jousty push-pulls to squeeze-and-release, the thing was done fix.

  We got into his jeep. He gave us a ride across the river to San Felix’s twin city of Puerto Ordaz.

  ‘YOU got a wife in India, right?’ she said, changing out of her jeans. The white hotpants revealed the final suggestions of the streaky stretch marks under her cheeks.

  ‘She deh waiting pon you, a nice fat wife. I know it. Man, I know it. Is easy for you. Go away after you lil adventure. And look at the shit you get me into. I stuck in the same place. Worse. Worse than before.’

  Her voice, thin anyway, assumed a trembling quality in the echoing room, not the tremble of rage or emotion but of suppressed bitterness leaking out.

  ‘My mother vex with me. And the dog going to give me licks – if he even realise that I gone. Sometimes he could go two month without checking on me. But somebody must have told him. People wicked, man.’

  She began to perform unnecessary tasks around the room, shifting a bag from one corner to another, which in that degenerate cement square, devoid of furniture, would make no difference this way or that.

  ‘You ain’t done me nothing good, you know. Nothing nothing nothing. You ain’t even anything to look at. If I show you picher to my friends they will say, gal, he must rich or you get a raw deal. I thought you were different. I thought you were genuwine.’

  ‘What do you mean!’ I interjected. ‘You never said anything. We never discussed anything.’

  She ceased her activity and leant for a moment against the wall. She flashed me a serrated, cheated look:

  ‘You didn’t even gimme the phone. Not even the phone! I ask you it when!’

  Upon this utterance, she slid down slowly to the floor, as if to demonstrate the effort it had taken to withhold it all this time.

  ‘Tell me what happened to yours. Tell me really.’

  ‘He take it back, the skunt. He try to call me one time at night, and he get it busy busy busy. He come over, smellin like a distillery, create a stink scene, the baby start to bawl, the neighbours come out to see, and he snatch the phone from me hand and drive off. Good thing I done erase all the records before he come in.’

  ‘He hit you?’

  ‘No. He never done me that. He try one time. But I tell he I would report he skunt. I know what happen to mummy. I ain’t one for keep quiet.’

  I felt the situation was improving. Right then she charged me with trying to sidetrack the discussion. She may have been right. She called it tactics. I disagreed. Perhaps it was a mechanism, but it wasn’t a tactic. Regardless, she spoke with twice the earlier bitterness, sometimes with venom, with touching frailty. I lay on the bed, not hearing her as much as watching her.

  Her eyebrows were knotted. Her eyes held a blaze of defiance. Her wide mouth, her brown lips, were pursed even as they moved. Her arms, a sprout of hair on them now, were crossed tight on her shins. Her toes were curled in. Every bit of her was in resistance.

  I felt it was not right to be lying down at this time. It felt dissolute. I considered standing up. She rose before me, and began to pace about, moving the bags again, letting the physical momentum raise the pitch of her voice. I didn’t think two people pacing about that stifled space would help the situation. The room made me feel claustrophobic. I felt to get away for a walk. But where? It was one of those modern planned towns of exalted dreariness. Nothing was walking distance. The holidays were still on. In the city centre a few hours ago the shutters on restaurants and cafes had shone like metallic barbs. The roads (there were no streets) were devoid of people. When would Santa stop waving from a rooftop to nobody? When would the feliz navidad lights go out? At any rate, walking out would have been too escalatory a gesture.

  So, I didn’t throw myself into combat, and I didn’t escape it through the door. I remained on the bed, propping myself against the wall.

  THE rest of our stay was a sequence of implosions. Inevitably the echo of one carried into the next. Of course, we were not fighting about things we actually fought about. The things we actually fought about were petty. Food, we had one fight about food. She rejected an empanada stall, because she felt sick to be eating stuffed cornflour all the time. She wanted fried chicken. Out of spite I refused to eat anything but fried chicken. Thus we reprised earlier starvations, of Guiria and Coro, starvations which had acquired a retrospective glow, descending to deeper hells than they had been.

  Another fight around money. I had given her a hundred dollar bill. I needed to change it. She said she didn’t have it. ‘But I gave it to you,’ I said. She shrugged. I looked through my wallet again. ‘You got to have it,’ I insisted.

  ‘Are you saying I thiefed it?’ she said with her eye-roll.

  ‘No, I’m not fucking saying that. Why must you twist what I’m saying?’

  ‘Don’t fockin be cussing off you skunt on me.’

  ‘I ain’t cussin you. I just cussin.’

  Afterwards I found it in an envelope of souvenirs: bus tickets, beer labels, the perforated paper from the journey to Caracas, a scrap of her burgundy negligee that had caught on a bathroom nail.

  Till some time ago these incidents might have prompted passionate reconciliation. We seemed to have run that spirit dry. What we were really fighting about hung before us all the time like accusations. It no longer took much for me or her to say something irretrievably mean, and elicit a worse response. She liked a crystal figurine of Simon Bolivar on a horse. She wanted it. ‘For memories.’ It was four hundred thousand bolivars: a hundred and fifty US. I couldn’t afford it, I told her so.

  ‘Why the hell you ask me to come with you?’ she asked, she spat it.

  ‘Why the hell did you agree?’

  ‘I should never have. I thought you knew how to care for a woman. Even that dog better than you. At least he give me something. You ain’t going to leave me one red cent.’

  ‘I pick up all the expense for the trip!’

  She looked at me aghast.

  ‘You the man, you suppose to.’ She sucked her teeth. ‘I really shoulda never come.’

  It inflamed me to the point of disgust.

  ‘You’d go away with any fool if he gave you a couple of things.’

  Having pierced one another with these arrows, we left one another to bleed separately. We were at an enormous supermarket. And there, in the neutering maze of products, diapers and repellents and onions, we lost each other again.

  9

  SHE looked like a fairy in the morning. A feather had blown in from the ventilator and fallen on her brow. She slept on, innocent, and unbeknownst to her I pecked her lightly on the forehead.

  By noon we were gone. We left with Andre, the leather-gloved son of Admiral Rambarran. I took the front of the jeep. It was a crush at the back. There were elder, greying Mildred and her three grandchildren. There was another child with her large Indian mother.

  The two ladies were in conversation. Grandma Mildred was speaking of her daughter’s death. ‘In her prime.’ When she got the call she thought it was a prank. Then her daughter’s husband called. ‘That’s when I knew. I knew.’ She’d moved to Venezuela and been raising the grandchildren since. Long-time it used to be so hard to cross over, she reminisced. You could wait up to three months before someone undertook the trip.

 
It was a hot day. The air was thick with the stifled sounds of heating, struggling children and their minders. We left the conurbation of Puerto Ordaz. We were in tropical country. We were slowly leaving Venezuela behind, Venezuela properly settled over centuries, given a chance, and we were going towards the rudimentary construct of Guyana.

  I turned to steal a glance at her. She was lost in the clutter. She was staring out the window. She was flushed and sweating. Her hair was tied. The danglers on her ears were like onion rings.

  As the journey grew, the rush of autobiography matured to comfortable silence. Before long the children were knocked out in the heat. One of them, a mulatto boy with brown curls, had climbed into her lap. He must have been the same age as Brian.

  ‘The bai gettin lawless!’ she had squealed after speaking to him from Ciudad Bolivar. ‘He learning words to Dutty Wine! I tell mummy to clean out he mouth with Foam.’ He had been playing football, fishing with his cousins, hardly sleeping.

  She herself was falling asleep against the metal. It would have been hot on her temple.

  It must have been in Caracas that I had thought of the final days. Caracas, or Coro, roughly then. Last year. The thought came to me at ordinary moments, in the boredom of weak conversation, in the lethargy of nudity, playing with her spots. I thought of it and postponed the thought. I could not sense it. Nothing which is made is without wound.

  But what was the problem? There was no problem, that is what I was trying to tell myself. These ought to be hours of triumph. Despite troubles the trip was fab. The girl was sexy. We were bold and true.

  We were going through landscapes. High tropical, palm, plantain, clumps of jackfruit and their clumps of dark leaves. Then we were on the hills. From the hills we were lowering into green savannah – Venezuelan landscapes receding to a far point in the forest, never to be tramped again. I tried to yield to the liberty of the road, its idea of everlasting impermanence; to music, What a Botheration and Tenement Yard, floating in the jokey lightness of their despair. Life was attitude to circumstance, no more no less. The plains were flashing by with emptiness and occasional baseball. Soon it would be the border. Soon thereafter India. It must have changed. I had. I could approach it differently. I went to U-Roy. No more sighing, I told myself.