The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel

by Rahul Bhattacharya

  ‘But nobody asking us for a permit.’

  He sucked his teeth. ‘Jus do it nah, man.’ He added proudly, ‘Look, I make it a nice thick paper so it carry the govament style. You unstan what we doing, right, pardner?’

  ‘Of course, man, I come from India.’

  ‘Good. Make it in a nice handwriting. Cas it’s a nice thick paper you got there. The handwriting got to match it.’

  I formulated the thing in my head. Baby tapped his fingers with impatience. I wrote.

  Your Excellency,

  As per our understanding with the government of Guyana, the Flora and Fauna Department of the Government of India has deputed a scientific observer to study the botanical and zoological specimen in the Kaieteur National Park. Kindly extend him the necessary access for fieldwork so that our nations may learn from each other and raise their positions in the world of science.

  Thanking you,

  Purana Purush

  Director, F&F Dept.

  Govt. of India

  I handed it to Baby. He glanced at it dismissively.

  ‘Well, it could be a lil more fancy. You cyan add a lil cyurls or something? Put a signature too.’

  I felt like an underappreciated secretary.

  ‘What about the letter, you like that?’

  ‘Read it nuh, man.’

  I read it aloud.

  ‘Well, is alright.’

  I added curls. I signed it.

  I handed back the paper for approval. Without further comment he reached into his bag and bunged a rubber stamp on it.

  It was a seal. Office of the President.

  ‘But it says Guyana.’

  ‘Rest yourself, brother. Watch.’

  He took a little sweat off his brow and sprinkled it on the paper. He lightly touched his finger on the stamp.

  ‘You cyan see now what it say. We tell the man the thing get wet up in the boat.’

  Rummaging through his bag once more he produced another item from the Office of the President, this one an overly folded letterhead.

  ‘Put a permission pon it from de big man. For all two o we.’

  I wrote.

  To Whom It May Concern,

  Kindly permit the bearer of this application and his guide entry to the Kaieteur National Park for purposes of scientific observation. There is to be no removing of any specimen.

  That is an order,

  President of Guyana

  Armed with these documents Baby rose with the menace of a diplomat to locate a man named Travis. I followed him.

  Travis, an Amerindian, was our next boatman, and his reaction to Baby’s documents was a perfectly angelic rejection. Them thing don’t matter, he said, without the receipt from Carl Balgobin. Travis worked for Carl Balgobin; and Carl Balgobin, somehow, had the monopoly on this particular boat-leg. We got an order from the president, Baby argued in pally tones, erroneously referring to Carl Balgobin as Bal Carlgobin. Don’t matter, said Travis, who had the advantage of being completely devoid of expression. The boat belonged to Carl Balgobin. Carl Balgobin paid his salary. Only Carl Balgobin could authorise it; rather could have authorised it. It was surprising the Office of the President did not tell us this. This line of conversation continued for a few minutes till, somewhat abruptly, the elaborate scheme seemed to degenerate into straightforward bribery.

  Travis quoted an official price of 12,000 Guyanese dollars per person: he would make a receipt and give it to Carl Balgobin later. Even at two hundred Guyanese to a US dollar, this felt stiff. Baby made no effort to negotiate. Travis added two gallons of fuel to be purchased at an outrageous price, because the boat burned eight times more fuel going upstream. Here Baby took him away to the side to talk. Passive in the heat, I returned to the bar, where the lady was still lying on the counter, but now on her back. She began to cuss down Carl Balgobin. Thereafter she cussed down the government. Transport was the job of the government, but the government had made Carl Balgobin the blasted government. She called Carl Balgobin an antiman; in fact she referred to him as she. ‘I know she skunt good-good, fockin badmind skunt. I stop wuk for she mudderskunt, an she cry now “do me this nuh, do me dah nuh.”’

  Energised by the broadside I awaited the pair neath the ripening noon. They arrived soon with a deal in which the only certain result was that I did not gain in any manner. The lady cussed out the lot of us, and with the cusses still afloat in the clearing, we beat out.

  Baby boasted that without the first show of letters we would have paid twice the amount. He put out his fist for a bump.

  We trekked twenty minutes through middling forest to the other side of the rapids. With Travis was his wife, and a small child attached to her breast. Travis himself carried a loaded warishi, a backpack made from vines and worn around the forehead with a band. He cut such a Gurkha figure it was disorienting.

  AT the monitoring station it became obvious why we needed all that fuel. Travis fetched his extended family and put them on the boat: his brother, the brother’s wife, two little girls, an infant, a dog who was slapped repeatedly and flung in like a sack of coal, and a grandfather, or possibly great-grandfather, a superb ancient man with a sagging chest behind an open shirt. He was so very old and gorgeous. He hadn’t a single tooth. He polished fishing arrows while the younger generations filled the boat. He spoke only Patamona – the Patamonas one of the nine tribes of Guyana, carrying the sinister reputation of being ‘full of kaneima’, the spirit of death. Travis and his brother spoke almost no Patamona, wore a cross, and in every outward way had been proselytised.

  We chugged up the Potaro, up and up. The river bubbled and rushed as we went higher, and the boat trod a fine line. Navigation is the artful handling of channels: too much water and the vessel might be thrown off balance, too little and it might crunch against rock. Tall, straight delineations of plateaux came into view, draped in relentless green, broken only rarely by a deviant rock face plummeting into the water. There was the quality of a carpet to the green cover, something to be touched and caressed, but closer to the eye, on the immediate banks, it was an intricate, untameable denseness. Travis’s brother attempted to guide me through it. Up high was the canopy of the great timber trees, the famous darkwoods of greenheart and purpleheart, the redmaroon bulletwood, the mora and the wallaba, so slender for their towering lengths, and so daintily tentacled at the top. Lower came the austere spears of various palm with their various fronds; lower still, though sometimes higher, fruit trees, bright-leaved and manic, wild mango, wild sapodilla. Beneath this was the absolute deranged mess of undergrowth, buttresses, roots and vine, a wildness so thick that if a man were tossed in chances are he would not hit ground.

  Miles away in a cleavage we saw a brilliant white sliver cracking open a mountain. One sensed it would come closer to sight but the river turned corners and it disappeared altogether.

  It was early afternoon when we reached Tukeit Landing. The boat was moored and hidden behind trees in the bank. Wordlessly everybody disembarked and began to walk up the rainforest. As we started to climb I felt the frisson of that great white sliver, the suddenness with which it had come and gone.

  It was dark and cool and wet, though not raining, and only occasional pinpricks of sunlight made it through. The path was strewn with sodden leaves and wild squelched fruit and branches slippery with moss and lichen and sometimes entire trunks sprinkled with blue flowers and wild orchid. The ladies scampered up in slippers with babies in their arms; the older children, also in slippers, followed them with elastic grace. From the earliest they were used to this. Travis and his brother powered up with their warishis. The ancient man slouched some, but generated slow, steady and ever-churning momentum, the dog by his side. Baby walked with casual ease. I hadn’t climbed for a few years, had forgotten its sweet pain. We climbed for three hours, perhaps more, soaked in the enclosed humidity of the forest, before the gradient began flattening. Travis and his family went off into another path; I never ever saw them again.

>   It was evening by the time we mounted the tabletop, there more or less since the world began. Here was a bare beauty. It had appeared to have rained recently. On a drenched wood post perched a wet eagle, shrugging shards of water off its feathers. The hidden sky was now revealed in a frightening expanse, a deep bright indigo, with the suggestion of a creeping, fluorescent dusk underneath. The steaming undergrowth was gone, yielding to white, sandy soil and smoothened round stones as from a prehistoric riverbed. The forest was no more, except at the edge of the plateau. We walked towards it, and as one approached it one could already feel rather than hear the sound: a frozen roar. Treading through the trees once more past little caverns in dark rock and over a small ravine we came to the brink. Across was the most hypnotic thing I ever laid my eyes on, and probably the most authoritative. Water fell, I suppose that was all there was to it. The top was a foam of thunder, the bottom a pandemonia of reactionary spray shooting up like geysers, and in between, the utter, cathartic wall of … something like an emotion, a large feeling, both stoic and ecstatic, a triumph and, to the eyes of mortals, a humiliation, a momentary reconsideration of the world.

  I sat and watched in silence. Low in the gorge lingered remnants of a dissolved rainbow. Up in the setting sky a million specks circled towards a convergence like bees to a giant hive. Thereafter they began to dive down in swoops, the dots getting quicker, shapelier as they freefell. ‘Watch,’ said Baby. They were swifts. They made for the falls, a mass deathwish, so rapturous and so graphic that one couldn’t stop looking and one couldn’t bear to look, and at the final moment of execution they slipped miraculously behind that fantastic curtain and into unfathomable space. The symphony ran for long minutes, maybe ten or fifteen.

  We went around to the head of the falls and bathed like lunatics, tempting starbai deaths ourselves.

  THE settlement of Menzies Landing was a mile or two away. The white sand and smoothened old stones gave way to coarser soil and shinny tufts of grass as we walked towards it. We saw a dead labaria in the grass. Baby claimed a labaria could sting dead a horse in full gallop on all four legs. Look who dead now, I countered. He sucked his teeth.

  Closer to the settlement there was straggling bush and patches of pineapple, the young rough fruit emerging unexpectedly in the amphitheatre of leaves; and classic Caribbean debris, rusted tin, shanks of wood, stray fronds of palm.

  The settlement had instant Rasta vibes, for the first shack one saw was painted in primary red, yellow and green; a ‘no drugs’ sign hung on the tree outside. A short way beyond was the main cluster of houses, a scattering of withered, patched-up shacks. Some were raised, and then only a couple of feet; many were not. Most were a single room, rectangular, but some seemed to be partitioned in the centre. Most used wood-boards, but there were one or two of shingles. All except the Rasta bombshell were grey-black.

  The settlement was arranged around a mango tree in a central clearing that fell on a wide path to the river. Beneath the tree a few people sat and talked. On the path itself there was a game of cricket on.

  People came and went all the time from the settlement, lives temporary as the whistling wind, so nobody reacted much to an appearance unless it was a complete stranger. The folk seemed to know Baby. Some gave him a hug or a fist-touch, some simply muttered ‘alright?’, and some did not care. They called him a manner of names, Cookup, Chase, Aubrey, and one man greeted him with ‘Baby Saw you raw you raw you raw.’ He was Labba.

  ‘And wah bout you friend here?’

  ‘The man from India.’

  ‘He walk a long way.’

  ‘Eh he. He come fuh teach Indian sexual posture to gals in the bush.’

  ‘Man be a Gooroo!’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, Labba, you know the thing.’

  ‘We got to carry the man to Chenapau. Gooroo, you seen buckgal pattacake? High and pink, like so’ – he cupped his hands together – ‘like a mound. Jus like a mound.’

  It was the final minutes of cricket. The stumps were a rusted round barrel cover propped up by a stick. A man with green eyes bowled quick with a round-arm action. Batting was a man named Nasty (because, I was told, of his face: not that it was nasty, but nasty that he showed it to others). He wore knee-length socks on hairy red legs, and a white floppy hat with a string around the chin. His sweating eyebrows were like wet charcoal smudges. He held the bat like a walking stick. In comical, traumatically un–West Indian fashion he held back the lashes, moving to the ball and pulling out at the last instant. Maybe not altogether un–West Indian: Courtney Walsh did it so. In between deliveries he patted down stones with his bat and marked his guard with a twig.

  A Rasta lay in a hammock wearing dark shades and called the play. He was Roots. Nasty evaded every last effort at his wicket almost exclusively with his stomach. ‘A whole heap of disparate disparity from Nasty there,’ Roots toasted.

  I met a few more people. The green-eyed fast bowler was Siddique, proprietor of one of the two shops, the one with the yard enclosed fastidiously with corrugated tin and barbwire. Big Leaf ran a second shop. There was the mystic Dr Red. The village elder was Mr Johnson, a compact man with Gandhi spectacles and the neatest room, his sense of order extending to the scrupulously lettered warning on the door of his pit latrine: ‘Watch for fine ants.’

  We stayed by Labba in his little partitioned sodden shack. There was a tiny front room, where we slung our hammocks, an equally small back room with a table and a wooden platform for a bed, and a shed for cooking, avoided by Labba for bees.

  At night I took a last dip in the Potaro, cool and brown in the morning at Pamela Landing, hot and foaming at the head of the falls in the evening, now red and viscous in twilight.

  I returned to the settlement. And here we stopped awhile, Baby and I, among the shops of the Siddiques and Big Leaf, among Nasty, Dacta Red, Roots and Labba and other creatures like us, alone, amiss and awander.

  5

  IT was much later, when these days peeped and flashed like hidden stars of my life, that I could summon any focus on the folk of Menzies Landing. I had little back-knowledge and naturally no foreknowledge.

  It was a coastlander’s settlement. Any Amerindians, the people of the interior, were women by marriage or passing through. The Siddiques were the only East Indians. Mr Siddique himself with his green eyes seemed to be of mixed blood, and his son had taken an Amerindian wife from Chenapau. She was a beautiful short girl with long black hair and sad eyes. She sat in doorways breastfeeding and seldom spoke. She looked twenty-four but was sixteen. Labba said it was because she was unhappy, having left the tribal village, and feeling here an outsider. If she chose to go back it would be hard. She would be made to do the dirty work. Labba had been in the bush for thirty years, and at this spot for eighteen, so I took his word for it at the time. But after a while I was sceptical of anything he said about Amerindians. He was contemptuous of how they ate big-belly animal, drank river water without letting the sediment settle, used poison-plants for fishing though it was banned. When he castigated Brazilians, in taut statements that rang like headlines – ‘Brazilian miners invadin Guyana’, ‘Brazilian pirates lickin out Guyanese mineral’ – then too it was the Amerindians who were disdained. ‘Brazilian come and fuck buckman wife, and buckman just skin he teeth.’ Afterwards I thought to connect this with a historical animosity – Amerindians had been used to hunt down runaway African slaves. Eventually I came around to thinking that the contempt was perhaps not so particular after all. It was the uniform, universal contempt for indigenous peoples everywhere.

  The folk at Menzies Landing were black, or more often red, like the mystic Dr Red, whom no less an authority than Mr Johnson considered an intellectual. In the direct Guyanese way a red person was a direct visual thing. It implied mixed blood and, obviously, a certain redness of skin. Black and Portuguese could be red. Black and Amerindian could be red. East Indian and Portuguese could be red. If the outcome was red then a ‘clear skin’ dougla might come to be called red.


  Dr Red was a red man with a red beard. It crept wispily down his chin till the wisps gathered into an unexpected plait far superior to the sum of its strands. He had a good amount of putagee and plenty buck, he said. Yet his true last name, Wong, was Chinese, and he claimed ancestorship from a rich and famous European prospector. He liked to play up the European blood, yet when he told his stories, in slow hypnotic baritones that could stretch to half an hour clean, it was clear he carried the Amerindian flag.

  Consider the story he told about Bones.

  ‘He was my friend, Bones. A blackman. One time me and Bones limin, drinking Heineken. Bones point to a buck gal and say he wan to fuck she. Now Amerindian girls, you don’t court them. You don’t hold they hands and tell them they got eyes like moon and lips like rose and them kind of thing. You take their hand and go away and fuck them. It’s a rape in a kind of way. Bones raped a lot of buck girls. When he want to rape this girl, as a buckman I tell he to fuck off. He throw me some punches. I bang my head on the table and I pass out for the night. The next mornin I find a trouble. Bones gone at night to the girl’s home and try to rape her. He knock aside the child. The child get hurt. The girl husband Victor, he try to stop him. Bones chop him. Victor go to get some people, he come back with six people. They come with cutlass, 22-inch. They chop Bones thirty-two times. Bones get put in the hospital. I hear all this in the morning. I hear it quietly. I gather me thought. I say nothing. I say, Okay. I take my axe. I take off the blade, conceal it within my clothing. I go to the hospital. Is just like one room. I tell the nurse, Nurse, please leave us alone as he is my pardner and we have a private matter to discuss. I take out me blade and attach it and I begin to chop and thrash Bones. I lash him in all respects. I almost kill him. I go to the police and ask them to escort me. They charge me for aggravated assault with intention to injure. I get let off – cause I represent myself. I’s always be able to represent myself, never get convicted. That is because, you see, I have a spiritual belief within myself. I make remedies. My bones be hard and clean. My inner might is very clear.’