The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel

by Rahul Bhattacharya

  Final hustles took place. ‘Gal, put the child pon you leg nuh?’ ‘How much child I could put pon me leg, I ga one ahready.’ ‘You gon pay for the second child?’ ‘Like you ain’t ever was a child’ – till a crisp old black man with a startling British accent elocutioned, ‘Are you waiting for two hundred more people?’ It was the accent which did it; and with hoarse cries of ‘leh we go, leh we go, leh we go’ from the meaty conductor, Sita Sita burst out of the blocks.

  Dancehall on the stereo, no sweetness, empty hard riddims thudding in the bones, sleaze, mood of the streets, fake rudeness, men talking their vulgar minds. But now came a lady, Macka Diamond in a champion collaboration with Blacker. It was splendid comic deejaying, a mock squeal, a serious lament, sex and gender. She made complaints and Blacker counselled her. Bun him! Bun him: cheat back on him. Baby decoded the stuff for me. My affection for new dancehall was limited, but the good ’uns were the good ’uns.

  We pounded out of the decaying perimeter of GT and past the clustering villages whose sequence of names from Agricola to Land of Canaan would come to trip off my tongue. We made a great number of stops. At any point someone was liable to yell, ‘Mash the brake!’ or ‘Jam it to the side!’ Someone wanted to pick up a roti and fishpie from M&M’s by the harbour bridge, someone to drop off a PVC pipe by his aunty in Friendship, and at Garden of Eden people chipped in to buy a case of grenades – the small XM five-year rums.

  The grenades began to detonate quick. Already vistas were opening up. The Demerara peeped in, peeped out. By the road women in floppy hats sold pine and pawpaw. Grandfathers cycled in the sun. And look how those fascinating houses went by, high and stilted and tearing, with their bruck-up families inside the yard, the childfather made off somewhere and the young mammy with her belly big again. We passed mandirs tiered like pagodas, and the sickly new cricket stadium the government of Indian nationals was constructing. Car shells grew out of the mud, shot through with razorgrass. We whizzed by a dozen dead kokers – sluice gates, fallen sentries. Run-over dogs were ground into the asphalt. We turned perpendicular at Soesdyke where the sign said ‘Brazil’: infinite promise.

  Mounting exhilaration on the highway, thin, miraged, built on white sand – the illusion that it might begin to wobble (we were also on grenades). Enormous sandpits appeared by the sides, big enough to swallow whole villages, and then it was low and rising bush, saturated by creeks of cool black water veining off the Demerara. The driver lit a ciggy, took calls on his phone, shifted gears and manipulated the wheel all at once, invincibility writ large upon his face, drawing appreciation. ‘Skills, bai, skills, dah is skills!’ His possible father beamed. ‘Full de clock, bai, full de clock.’ Upon Baby’s encouragement, the candidate’s sidekick cussed out batty-boy politicians and delighted the bus.

  The town of Linden arrived, its air sprinkled fine with bauxite dust. But bauxite was in shambles, and Linden a sullen reflection. Baby sympathised with the situation. ‘Guyana having hardtime. Worlprice of bauxite low, worlprice of sugar low, worlprice of timber low. Is only diamond and gold which could do the job.’

  A short way beyond Linden, after the asphalt turned briefly to loose gravel, then to stark red laterite, we were in the interior – that moody Guyanese abstraction. The interior is not fixed by topography. It could be savannah, swamp, jungle, plateau. It could begin anywhere. You just know, just as we knew now by the freshening scent of forest that rose in great walls around us.

  There were deep, wide pools of water in the mud, and Sita Sita coursed through or swerved past them, cutting wicked shapes in the trail. ‘Skills, bai, skills!’ Things glistened outside. The clouds came out. The wind smelled of herb, of growth.

  At 58 Miles we stopped for a very late lunch at a sudden shack with an extensive menu, deer curry included. The late start, the stops on the way, and now the slackness over lunch raised the vital Guyanese fear among some passengers that ‘darkness gon ketch we’. The candidate and his sidekick went to the latrine to ‘shed a tear’, that is, urinate, but it was suspected that they had gone to ‘post a letter’, that is, defecate. The large accusing lady, sombre in between, bellowed, ‘How them going to stop racial when they cyan stop theyself?’

  And so when the vehicle was stopped again for inspection at Mabura, it did not go down well at all.

  Something about Sita Sita did not appear entirely innocent. The soldiers declared that every man and his bag would be searched. The van was emptied. The candidate went into the checkpost to have a word with the seniors.

  It began raining energetically, the kind of afternoon rainforest shower one read about in school. People ran to a shelter. The soldiers waited for the cloud to spend itself – but with every passing minute they felt the pressure of darkness ketching we. Somewhere deep down they knew that with their guns and their boots they were no match for the lady now heckling them with ‘yuh got goadie’, that is, swollen testes. Eventually two young ranks fled into the rain and clambered on to the roof to rifle through the bags.

  An older soldier eyed the passengers, considering me suspiciously.

  ‘He speak English?’ he asked, not addressing me, curiously, but Baby.

  ‘Reasonayble. Not good-good.’

  ‘What age he got?’

  ‘The man say he be twenty-six. Me not sure he meet that much though.’

  ‘What he does do?’

  ‘The man from India. Govamen send the man to study botanical specimen, y’know, butterfly and thing.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘The man say they en got butterfly an crappo an thing in India nice like heye.’

  Crapaud: the French too had been here.

  The ranks climbed down from the roof.

  The cloudburst finished.

  We were off again. We turned sharp west, no longer on the trail to Brazil – another dream, another time. We climbed, and curved along drenched curves, and on one particular curve the conductor let me know that this here was the longest curve in the country, just as he had told me of the longest pontoon bridge in the world on the Demerara.

  We were down to the last of the grenades.

  People took hungry gulps and, led by Baby, made raucous claims that bounced in the bus and the forest beyond.

  ‘ … Nah talk skunt, bai. If Da Vinci code true for true, how come other religion en take advantage of the findings to increase they following? …’

  ‘ … Don’t tell me about Selassie I, bigbai, you wan know about Selassie I, me tell you bout Selassie I …’

  ‘ … I tell you, banna, the more you make woman work for they rights, the more vicious they going to become …’

  The forest deepened and lengthened. There were beautiful flooded scenes at Mango Landing, river and bush and forest tugging at each other. The top of a shack poked out of the water like a dead hand. And here our run was finished. Sita Sita ejected us peremptorily, turned, and squelched away whence she had come.

  Passengers took off their shoes and waded through the weeds and bush in the opaque brown water to the motorboat and made the crossing in batches.

  Two jeeps waited on the other side. We took the one which bore the sticker: ‘The Lord sends no bird without a branch.’ Amsterdam was its proprietor. He had got the sticker custom-made in Florida. He was a tough man who believed in sacrifice, prayer and the holy purity of the bush. There was a hole through the consciousness of the nation today. He took the wheel and sped off as if to rectify the situation.

  It was after-rain cool and faintly misty. Somewhere beyond the trees and the faint mist the sun fell towards horizontal. The air tingled with wet scents. We were moving closer to the essence of things. Places were called Tiger Creek and Eagle Hill.

  A man tapped me.

  ‘Guyana the most beautiful country in the world.’

  I nodded in agreement.

  ‘The interior, it got a lot of history behine it. For example, it have a place called monkey mountain in the Pakaraimas. It got a lot of rocks, plenty plenty small rocks,
shape like monkey. They claim it was a mountain with a lot of monkey. And the monkey turn to rock. So it got a lot of history behine it.

  ‘You cyan see Guyana in one life, you know,’ he continued. ‘You could see all of it – but not in one life. Too beautiful and too big fuh see in one life.’

  As one feared, there was an interjection.

  ‘How much country you seen, buddeh?’

  ‘Don’t tell me stupidness, bai. You jus know, right. Some islands and islets in Essequibo, right, they as big as England.’

  ‘Guyana as big as England.’

  ‘Well, as big as UK, you ever hear of UK?’

  ‘I hear they as big like Barbados.’

  ‘Bai, me batty bigger than Barbados.’

  ‘And you fine.’

  When they said fine in Guyana, they meant thin.

  ‘Gimme a touch, banna. Bajan does be driving BMW an thing but they stupid bad. You hear the one about Everard an Everton?

  ‘So Everard tell Everton about Neil Armstrong. Everton ask, Who, the same Armstrongs from St. Andrew’s parish? No, boy, say Everard, the Armstrong fella who climb the moon. So next time they go climb the sun, Everton ask. Boy, Everton, is too hot up there. Hear what Everton say: so why they cyan go at night?’

  ‘That’s Bajan.’

  At Mahdia an old black man with black hair and a grey moustache approached the jeep – it was the grey moustache rather than the black hair that looked artificial. ‘Ya’al must know me.’ No, everyone said, with unexpected enthusiasm. ‘But ya’al must seen me pon the TV!’ No, everyone repeated, emphatically again. ‘Ya’al suppose to recognise me from the TV. Me daughter qualify for Miss Guyana last year.’ He gyaffed with Amsterdam for a while. But his hurt was palpable. He did not so much as look at us again.

  Mahdia had the feel of the cusp of things, frontier to the interiormost interior. Girls wore Brazilian yellow and some had copper hair and copper skin. Some were Brazilian by nationality, some by aspiration, some daughters of miners, some their mistresses, which term included mistresses, wives and reputed wives. The main street was pure red mud, and from it rose a cenotaph, short, white and pointed, as if it had perforated its way out of the earth rather than been stuck into it. Baby said it was the centre point of Guyana.

  ‘And when the Lord make the world and he take out all he gift and shower them down, the gift of mineral fall down heye, right pon that spot. All round you got El Dorado.’

  He went off somewhere and returned with a branch of genip and two mangoes, and he showed me how to squeeze and suck out the mango from a single slit in the skin.

  We watched the sun go down on Mahdia. Everybody had dispersed, the large lady, the bird man, the presidential candidate and the sidekick, from whom Baby had acquired a set of party bandannas and flyers to distribute in the forest, and of the Sita Sita travellers only Baby, I and a small, nondescript man, practically faceless, continued with Amsterdam.

  Darkness caught we well and proper on the nine miles of twisting, turning mud till Pamela Landing.

  We rushed to the riverbank to check for the boat. It had long since left.

  Amsterdam had a little shop here, supplying the dredges in the area, run by a girl people seemed to be calling Fatgirl. A thing was what it was in Guyana. As a coolieman was a coolieman, as a man with one arm was Onehand, as the elephantiasis-afflicted was Bigfoot, so a thin man was Fineman and a fat girl was Fatgirl.

  Fatgirl had shining eyes and a fabulous swaying backside. She wore short red hair and a sleeveless red tee and when we caught sight of her, she was hammering a nail into a chipped board on her counter. Baby, jumping exuberant by now, broke into a grinning song.

  ‘Hammerin a wah de young girl want …’

  She looked at him with a half smile. She resumed the hammering and jumped songs.

  ‘Empty barrel mek the most noise.’

  ‘You ent seen me barrel yet,’ Baby protested.

  Fatgirl finished hammering and went inside. Baby called out behind her for some water.

  ‘First time I hear man ask woman for water,’ she called back.

  Amsterdam came to the counter, cutting short the conversation. He offered us the night in the shed. We accepted.

  The shed was a wooden frame covered with blue tarpaulin. Beneath the polin we slung up our hammocks. They were thin rollable camouflage hammocks, pierced with ease by wind and mosquito. We finished the rest of the mango and genip and ate some vanilla biscuits we’d brought from town.

  At the shop, in community spirit, Fatgirl showed a movie for whoever gathered. ‘Some movie got nice slogan,’ Baby declared, and thereafter for the benefit of Fatgirl did repeated impressions of an alleged Denzel dialogue: ‘Forgiveness is between them and God – I’m here to arrange the meeting.’

  I fell asleep, on the bench, then in the hammock.

  I remember next when at a late and raining hour of the night Baby got up to check if our bags were getting wet. He flashed a light in my face.

  ‘Alright?’

  ‘Cold.’

  ‘But you pullin punts, soldier. Serious punts.’

  I went back to sleep.

  THERE was evangelical fervour at dayclean, to use the beautiful Guyanese for dawn. The first stirrings of morning were in the air when the sound system, a six-pack of speakers, each the size of a child, erupted with praise. Amsterdam was well into his day. He had risen at 3.30 to put diesel into the generator – we were interior enough that there was no electricity anymore. Bathed, breakfasted, in very dark glasses looking somewhat like Ray Charles he prepared for his first pick-ups. ‘You need sacrifice,’ he boomed, revved his jeep for a few minutes, and made off into the forest. Guyana need more patriot like that, Baby muttered.

  We lay in our hammocks. The music ran out shortly after Amsterdam’s departure. Baby filled the silence humming a Beenie Man gospel. A wisp of a cloud floated by. To lie beside the cloud in the perfect dewy dayclean was something like bliss.

  I cannot say if anything had occurred between Baby and Fatgirl at night, but she was exceptionally sweet on him. Our breakfast was complimentary, saltfish fried up with onion and garlic and tomato, along with tumblers of coffee. Guyana used to grow its own coffee – indeed, the first plantations were coffee, and in parts you could still find the bush – but the fashion now was global instant taken with powdered milk, the final concoction white and brown clumps in warm water. He also charmed a bottle of cola from her. No small deal: things were already twice the price of town.

  We walked down the slope to the bank. No boat. The morning water was cool and muddy. We waited in a wooden riverside booth. We leant back and said nothing.

  A wee naked lad came by. He was Fatgirl’s son. He gifted me a cherry. I ate it. It was a wiri pepper. I ran ablaze to the river. He ran off deliriously to tell his ma.

  We idled. We walked into the forest, towards the sound of a dredge. Studying three or four men hosing down enormous slopes of red mud, Baby hissed without provocation, ‘fockin slaves’.

  Back by the Potaro a few others were now waiting as well. It was killingly idyllic: slow white foam adrift on drowsy water, the suggestion of the river opening out beyond, the wood booth on the slope of the bank. Every now and then the calm was broken by a miner hollering a desperate roger on Fatgirl’s radiophone.

  At last a small wooden motorboat by the name of Edwin arrived.

  WE went west on the South American river, a little north and a little south, but due west. On either side vegetation exploded up in all shades of green, trees at all kinds of heights, leaves in all manner of shapes, and sometimes we saw a flashing toucan or a macaw or a floating blue butterfly. We passed pontoon water dredges, tinny industrial works I could not fathom. Our halts were at places such as Two Mouth.

  Throughout I maintained awed silences, beginning to attract attention.

  ‘He does talk English?’ a man asked Baby.

  ‘Reasonayble. Not good-good.’

  ‘What he does do?’

&n
bsp; ‘The man from India. He learn them girls kamasutra. Sexual posture-making, you hear about the thing?’

  ‘Dah wuh you call job, bai! What he doing here?’

  ‘He sent fuh learn it to gals in the bush.’

  ‘Wuh he name?’

  ‘We’s just call him Gooroo.’

  As I stared at the terrain, so the man stared at me.

  Two hours on we came upon an unsurpassable bit of rapids, glinting like rippled sheets of steel in the sun. We got off.

  In a forest clearing, upon the counter of a marvellous Rasta bar an Amerindian lady lay on her belly, short, plump, aggressive. She wagged her legs over her bum as she spoke, and emitted constant cusses which accumulated over her head like a squall.

  We settled at a table. Baby went into the bush and brought back a blob of sticky sap on a leaf. From his bag he pulled out the candidate’s flyers. He spread sap on two of them, tenderly working it with his pinky towards the edges. He pasted them together with the printed sides facing each other, and carefully ironed it with his hands. He lifted it in the air and considered his work from several angles.

  I assumed he was entertaining himself while we waited for our next boat, whenever that was. It was hence a surprise when he handed me the glued sheaf.

  ‘Make the application here.’

  ‘What application?’

  ‘Make it like from the govament of India. Like you got to come to Kaieteur National Park for doing the study of certain specimen like plant and crappo and them kinda thing.’

  ‘But why!’

  ‘They start a rule that you need a permit if you going by overland route. Not by plane, if you take a plane you don’t need no permit. Only overland. You see how stupid the govament?’