The Sly Company of People Who Care

by Rahul Bhattacharya

  At the completion of this series, the promenade opened out into an Arc de Triomphe – like gate. Here, on a stage, was a man in bicycle shorts and before him hundreds of all-encompassing hotties. Free aerobics class! The hotties moved on to be replaced by a new set, and on the stage one bicycle-shorts conductor swapped with another. Free dance class. Somewhere were also children bouncing on free trampolines.

  Coming from India it was such a marvel to me. And later at night, as de Jesus pulled punts and I read of a two-bit missionary flea-stop called Boa Vista whose inhabitants looked ill, discontented and fleshless, my mind went to bespectacled Aunty Mimi saying ‘When Georgetown was Georgetown …’ and to the minivan of smuggled fake Nikes hurtling down the bruck-up trail of startling red mud through the Cooperative Republic of Guyana.

  WE returned the next day via the dust and grassland of Bonfim. We crossed the ever thinning Takutu, leaving Brazil to our backs, and soon we were in Clarence and Suzette’s yard, lying on hammocks between trees and strumming a guitar.

  I felt I’d come out of a dream. The spool had unspooled slow. The senses had detected every change, yet they were unprepared – as there was rainforest and then there was savannah so there was Guyana and then there was Brazil. I walked about Lethem. Walking about, a little tangerine whisky in my head, I felt easy possibility. Boa Vista becoming Boa Vista, Brazzos dancing with fluid harmony under the Arc. The world was out there, to be partaken of, without observation, hindsight.

  What an innocent little thing was Lethem. Mountains and grasslands and a football field dropped in between them. O to be a child kicking a ball in that exact field, at this exact hour of low sun! I liked how the warm sand felt between my toes as I let my slippers sink in. I liked how people cycled in holidaying ways.

  I walked further along and came to a little store which sold slippers.

  And there, as it happens that men are bedazzled by a fleeting glimpse, so I was. The precise glimpse was a thin bra strap of shocking pink against smooth burntsugar skin. I responded with the involuntary utterance of something stupid, namely: ‘Nice colours.’

  She whirls around. Her hair is full going to big, and streaked a long time ago so that only the copper tips glow on the whiplash curls as she turns.

  ‘What colours?’

  Front on, there is the quality of a mane to that wild frizz, a brown that stops short of black. Beneath it her forehead is large, high rather than broad, moistened in the heat. Her eyes burn brown and bright, a touch intimidating.

  ‘The pink, uh … slippers you got there.’

  She glances at the pair in her hands.

  ‘Is blue slippers.’

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘You bin starin.’

  ‘I was just thinking it looked nice on your skin.’

  ‘So you bin starin.’

  A mole on her collar bone, moles on her shoulders. Sweat on her chest. Breathing pores.

  ‘Not starin really. It just caught my eye. I mean, I might be starin now.’

  Her face relaxed a little. The blaze in the eyes switched off. On cue, the cheekbones softened, the lips loosened. Their parting suggested warmth. On their edges the intimation of a smile.

  ‘People only stare in the zoo, that is what Aunty Horretta did tell me.’

  ‘Aunty who?’

  ‘Horretta.’

  ‘That’s a mighty name.’

  ‘Well, she nobody to you. So I look like anybody in the zoo?’

  She was playing.

  ‘Like the macaws. They’re pretty.’

  ‘Them birds is a real festival …’

  Re-al fes-ti-val. It was beautiful how she said it, slow, saturated, round-mouth.

  ‘ … I wonder if you would say tapir or agouti or one of them funny kind of thing.’

  ‘When I went by the zoo the tapir, it had a hard-on. Was like a fifth leg, it almost touch the ground.’

  ‘I seen donkey like that.’

  ‘But think how funny a tapir would look that way.’

  She laughed. Some girls with their laughs can make you feel so close to them.

  ‘So I look like a macaw? Like I got a beak and feather to you?’

  ‘No. It’s just that someone took joy in making it.’

  She threw back her head in complicit exasperation. Cleft between her nostrils.

  ‘Is the yellow-and-blue macaw I look like, or the red-and-green?’

  ‘Uh. Let me close my eyes and think.’

  ‘You must remember to open them again or I won’t be here.’

  ‘Shh … Yellow and … not blue … green. Yellow and green.’

  ‘It ain’t have any like that. Funny you say that though. Was green and yellow slippers I was looking for.’

  ‘Me too!’

  ‘You look like you full of lie.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘I don’t tell strangers.’

  ‘We still strangers?’

  ‘Well, you is kyna strange. I thought it was your eyes. But when you close them I find you was still strange.’

  ‘I should be in the zoo?’

  ‘Yes. Zoo a nice place for you.’

  ‘I’d like to be a manatee. They get so much respect. They got they own pond, and everyone come to feed them and stroke them. You live in Lethem?’

  ‘O lord, you ask plenty question.’

  ‘I was thinking how nice it must be to live in Lethem.’

  ‘Be nicer to live over so.’

  She pointed towards Brazil.

  ‘What about over so?’ I pointed the other way.

  ‘Is nothing there. Sheer savannah.’

  ‘I thought the coast up that way.’

  ‘The coast up over so.’

  When she pointed, it looked pointed. Her arm stretched out long and taut. Her palm arched and her fingers curled. The tip of her acrylic nail cut through the air like a spear.

  ‘What design you got on the nail?’

  ‘O meh mamma! There you go again with question.’

  ‘If you get it done you must be happy people notice.’

  ‘You noticin too much.’

  ‘I hear it’s painful.’

  ‘You must get it done and see.’

  She giggled.

  ‘I’m staying by Suzette’s shop. The green room by the avocado tree.’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  She giggled again. The giggles were unnerving and encouraging.

  ‘I got to go now,’ she said, returning the slippers to the rack.

  It came as a rude surprise.

  ‘Of course. Bye.’

  ‘Layta.’

  ‘You coming to the Frontier tonight?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You must come.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked with deliberate blankness.

  I hesitated. ‘You can show me the acrylic design in the moonlight.’

  ‘Well,’ she said coolly, ‘maybe I’ll see you there.’

  She went off up the broad, darkening path in the finishing day, puffs of red sand rising as she walked. I watched her exquisitely balanced silhouette, slim, swaying, bouncing mane, Caribbean derriere, electrified.

  WE ate tough beef and farine at dinner, waited, got dressed and waited again for the hour to grow sufficiently late – a routine which seemed to spoof the scale of this savannah outpost.

  But down at the Frontier I understood. This was a Saturday night crowd. SUVs screeched up in the sand, their sound systems competing with the Frontier’s – Mavado on the Frontier’s, Evanescence from an SUV, the overlap a phantasma, a hideous dream. There was an unlikeliest hipness to the spot. There were aid workers from Britain, Brazilian youth from Bonfim, four bank employees from Georgetown, several Rupununi sons and daughters.

  Moonsammy was there as well, talking hard with toxic eyes, following the batty of every girl who passed him. He’d had a productive couple of days in Lethem. He’d stood third in the lolo competition at the Chineeman shop.

  ‘When it small it called a
peepee,’ he leant against a car and explained to a set of youthmen. ‘When it big it call a lolo. When it extra large it called a dunlop. Some man got a lazy dunlop, though.’

  I looked into the crowd outside, stepped inside the premises and let my eyes casually scan the garden.

  No, not yet.

  I got a rum and went back out.

  ‘A buckman win fust, blackman win second.’

  ‘Buckman win blackman?’

  ‘Eh he. Blackman chupidness compare to buckman. Blackman saaf in the middle, bai. Lazy dunlop.’

  Over on the other side of the sandy road de Jesus exchanged hugs with enormous people. Their necks were thick, contained by big gold chains. Looking at de Jesus’s neck I concluded it was bigger than my head. I tried to put across the observation, but the music was too loud, and few things can make a man feel as immeasurably foolish as yelling ‘your neck is bigger than my head’ in the savannah and not even being heard.

  I took a walk up and down the lane.

  No.

  Everywhere individuals were looking interested in each other, all kinds of individuals, with pincered eyebrows, with chipped teeth, with heavy flanks, with tattooed forearms or swollen biceps, people with the honest desire to play the game.

  I tried to look like I was liming easy. Inside, I was beginning to wilt.

  I got another five-year.

  I chatted with the British girls. They had blunt bobs, pert noses, open eyes. Conversation was terribly deflating for an odd reason. They only spoke in pairs.

  ‘The fishing was bloody brilliant, wasn’t it?’

  ‘You’ve really got to experience this once, don’t you?’

  A second person always reaffirmed these statements. Every single time. ‘Could you please not do that,’ I almost told them. ‘We could, couldn’t we?’ I heard them say back, ‘Yes, we could.’ It had a disastrous effect on me. With every reaffirmation my soul sank, and after about twenty minutes there wasn’t much of it left.

  I lost appetite for all conversation. I drifted away.

  The moon was high and shining, eating up the stars around it. I switched to Banks. I thought of the lad in Canal who could drink countless Banks. Under a tree I drank one to him.

  Looked around. Took a few rounds of the garden.

  I returned to Moonsammy, who was now reduced to holding court for a single youthman. Despite the dwindled attendance there was no slacking on his part. ‘Face and waist, cooliegal win the race,’ he recited, ‘bubby and arse, blackgal kick she rass.’

  The youthman nodded.

  ‘Coolieman got to learn from blackman how to take care of a gal. That is why cooliegal going to blackman. He bring she a lil chinee food, get she a lil earrings, take she out fuh a lil dancin. That is when she do everything for you. Me neighba a blackman get a coolie wife. He say the lady roti like the pages of the Bible.’

  I went to de Jesus. He held a Nova Schin in one hand and a Banks in another and told extravagant accounts of our Boa Vista sneak-in. It was an unrecognisable excursion which included naked women in the hotel pool and federals giving us chase through the goldwasher’s park. He tried to involve me in the telling, but my anti-participation in what I’d ordinarily have jumped into with relish was brutal.

  I looked everywhere, in the bushes where people had begun to make out, at the deejay’s table, in the cars.

  ‘F.B.I.’ I heard Moonsammy say somewhere, ‘Flat Butt Indian. That is wah we did call them. But now you find even coolie growin big beattie.’

  I left suddenly. I returned to my room beside the avocado tree by the gate, and there I lay in sweat for several hours, feeling inadequate, dull and charmless, acutely aware of my lack of confidence, of the fragility I tried always to keep hidden.

  4

  RETURNING to the room after breakfast I noticed folded paper under the door. In light swishing crayon lines of yellow and green was drawn a bird, curving beak, long trailing tail. A macaw. There were no more than a dozen strokes. It was eloquence.

  Below, in neat blocks an address was provided. At the bottom, in the petite running hand of a whispered note: Get me a fone. Jan.

  I stared at it for a whole minute. And then, drained in the porous night, I treated it with deliberate nonchalance: that is, I stared at it no further.

  It was a day of dry wind. Sand blew and settled on the skin. You could draw on your forearms. I spent most of the day in the hammock slung between coconut trees trying to read. I could not concentrate. Janelle. January.

  The Bedford had a car to transport to town. From time to time I went to assist in the loading and strapping, an act which accrued no discernible benefit to the process. It was a precarious affair. The vehicle, a white Seventies kind of hatchback, was as long as the tray of the truck and so permanently on the edge of catastrophe. It took till evening to secure it properly, and even then the straps required tightening every hour.

  At the fuel-seller’s Moonsammy sucked a pipe and siphoned a vat into the truck. De Jesus and I took the cabin. A Wapishana youth lounged with furniture inside the strapped vehicle.

  We left Lethem as we’d come, in the hour approaching sundown. Soon the light died on the Rupununi. There was a hatch above my head. I climbed up through it and sat on the roof to watch.

  The whole round sun glowed red on the flat expanse, bold as a bloodprick on a finger. Swiftly the colour broke around the edges into a plum post-dusk. Within fifteen minutes the big black night fell on the earth that had burned all day with a hiss. Thereafter only blackness remained except for dotted orange flares of savannah fires.

  We stopped for the night at the restaurant in Annai we’d stopped at on the way in. We ate sandwiches, sausage, drank coffee. We slung up hammocks between pillars in the open corridor.

  Sleep was impossible, first because of the coffee, then the cold.

  The wind howled down the savannah. I was still with my thin camouflage hammock from the Baby days, and I had no other sheet to cover with. De Jesus was housed in his heavy Amerindian hammock, so large that even a man of his size could fold over the sides to make a blanket.

  I shivered. The wind kept blasting across the plain. It gathered a tunnelled intensity in the corridor. I put on a second shirt, a pair of socks, and finally shoes, but the wind pierced everything.

  In the middle of the night a bus of music screeched in and expelled squealers. Venezuelans, de Jesus said. He’d been snoring till then and was not happy to be disturbed. Two couples, frolicking upon the wooden tables, created such a racket that he stunned them and the entire endless savannah by yelling in Spanish. Afterwards he told me he’d threatened to pulp them with a stool. A stool! Of all the things de Jesus liked recounting, he took most pleasure in narrating how he, a calm man, a reasonable man, was provoked to such a degree by somebody that he threatened them and scared the shit out of them.

  The Venezuelan couples piped down after the threat. They lay atop tables, giggling, being lovesome in the cold. The night blew bitter and teary.

  When the cold got into my bones I went to the Bedford. I was hoping for room in the hatchback, but the Wapishana youth and the furniture had filled it up.

  I climbed into the cabin. Here dangled Moonsammy. His trick was to tie the hammock around the roof, suspending himself in an arc above the seat. The chill was here too but it was windless. There was the smell of stale sweat. I slithered on to the seat, under his hammock, twisting, one leg splayed on the floor so my groin did not make contact with his sagging posterior.

  I closed my eyes. I could not sleep. The proximity was killing me. Imagine how her ass would have dipped low into the hammock, how imperceptibly narrow and hot would be the space between her curve and my groin.

  Janet. Janine. I could feel her hair roll over and tickle my arms. I could see her in very tight focus, between brow and lower lip, the cleft on her nose. I sensed her heavy breath in my ear.

  I fell into a fever. In cold awake sweats I dreamt it was her, and till the time the Bedford ejected me
on Sheriff Street, a round twenty-four hours on the road, I lived in a delirious wet daze, not a single flicker of thought if not sexual, sensual, worth the price of admission.

  5

  WE are on the road west from Georgetown, over the pontoon bridge on the Demerara. We are skirting along the pastoral ocean, timorous goats, absolute sky, the paddy between sow and reap. We are on the mouth of the Essequibo, twenty-two miles wide, brown waves cleaving open the continental head of dull mangrove. We are crossing by boat, faces sheeted with polin against the spray, breaks at river islands big as Caribbean republics, and beyond a sawmill on the water the lazy shady stelling at Supenaam.

  The Essequibo coast, thirty-five miles along rice fields and awara palm, their orange fruit glowing like lozenges in the dark fronds, until the stelling at Charity – which stelling is the stink of river commerce, of comings and goings, booze on the waterfront, sacks of fruit and drying trulli leaves – which stelling has once, in inimitable Guyanese fashion, untethered itself and sailed down the Pomeroon whole like a raft.

  We are on the Pomeroon, downriver, past Nauth’s floating fuel station, past the perfect pleasure of the riverine villages, shooting out between mounds into the Atlantic. We are bumping parallel to the shore, the spray now saline, singeing the hot skin. The continent is re-entered from the slender slit that is the Moruka. The boat wends through forest. The high trees drop off to walls of mokamoka bush, wild and arrowshaped. The mokamoka recede to savannah of bisibisi, thick, reedish, bright green there, burnt yellow elsewhere, exposed till the big water rains down to reclaim its space. Warraus, Arawaks, Christian Missions, whitewood churches, ité, clear, gleaming air. The river the only road. The untoothed aged to children pink of cheek jumping into woodskins natural as hopping on to a bicycle and skimming over glassy trails of water.

  We are in a house on stilts amid profusion. In its immediate circumference seven type of palm, stray coffee bush, cocoa, fruits called Fat Pork, called Civil Orange, called Big Mummy, grapefruit devastated by swarms of Acoushi ants. Barbeque chicken and cassava bread, drunken midnight rowing, singing. In a pre-dawn mist I pay accidental obeisance. High on vodka and Fly, I make a false step and sink into swamp. I try to climb out but my slippers come off. Afraid that the mud will close over them, I go armpit deep with my hands, fetching a slipper at a time, hauling up a leg after another, batty high in the mist, face kissing swamp.