The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel

by Rahul Bhattacharya

  The mutilation had occurred at Kamarang, near where Guyana met Brazil and Venezuela. The western regions, Mazaruni and Cuyuni, there was more action there. More diamond and much more gold. The dredges were bigger, the settlements were bigger. There were prostitutes, murders, robberies. ‘Up here nice, up here quiet,’ Menzies folk liked to say.

  It had been years since the last killings. They talked about notorious Linden ‘Blackie’ London. He was a former army man who turned into a bandit of preposterous daring and became a national figure. He came up to Kaieteur to reform. Here he killed again, plunged into the river to escape, returning thereafter to his life of banditry. A few years on Blackie died. His denouement was spectacular. It came shortly after a massive heist in Georgetown. They cornered him in a hotel room. Blackie fought on, keeping police and army at bay for, depending on who told you, anywhere between twelve and thirty hours. When the building went up in flames he agreed to surrender. He promised to talk about a lot of things, expose the government. He emerged unarmed only to be riddled with bullets. Half of Georgetown and the coast, they said, turned up for his public funeral. His coffin was draped in the national flag.

  The very last killing at the settlement was Watusi’s. For that man there was no sympathy. Dr Red described him as a serial killer. Some porknockers had owed him money. When they returned from the backdam they didn’t tell Watusi they’d come back. He went into their room with two guns and opened fire. One man survived, as he held up a plate against the bullet and fainted. Afterwards Watusi tried to kill another man, whose brother then killed Watusi. Nobody wanted to touch him. He was left under a tree. The ants ate him.

  IN full bloom there could be as many as fifty people in the settlement, babies included, but at most times there were unlikely to be more than twenty. When it began the settlement was a base for balata bleeders, of whom Mr Menzies was a pioneer. But too many of those bulletwoods were felled rather than tapped; the supply dwindled; the bleeders left, and only porknockers remained. They porknocked in the forest around Kaieteur – illegally, as it happened, rebelling against the government order that prohibited all mining in the national park. It was impossible to monitor porknockers. And they carried on porknocking.

  There was the simplest economy of barter and credit. Porknockers would spend weeks or months in the forest hunting for ‘mineral’ before returning to the settlement. Here they would contemplate a trip to the coast to sell the bounty and drink of wine and women, but they rarely did go. After they’d repaid the shopkeepers with diamond and gold against which they’d taken supplies, there wouldn’t be much left. They limed in the settlement till mood or necessity took them back into the forest. Despite the idea of town, its thrills and vices that they talked up all the time, I sensed many of them didn’t actually like town. They were institutionalised by the bush, its freedoms and compulsions, the smallness of the community, the eternity of its surrounds. It was the shopkeepers who routinely went to the coast to trade.

  At times I could scarcely believe a settlement like this, so little and rudimentary, existed beside the wonder that was Kaieteur. Anywhere else Kaieteur would have been a hive of tourists, the largest singledrop falls in the world, five times the height of Niagara, and so much greater than the statistic. But this was Guyana. Nobody touch she. There might be one plane a day, sometimes two, sometimes none – and a plane carried nine passengers. It would come in at about noon. A small guest-house had been built by the airstrip, but the tourists rarely stayed. They would take a guided walk for an hour or two, then fly right back.

  The days started early and the time was all ours. It rained often, in thrilling bursts, rain running down shingles in ecstatic bumps, the entire settlement, the shacks, the mango tree, pixelating in sheets of water. We went walking on the plateau, usually in threes or fours, most often it was Baby and me with Labba or Roots or both. We collected smooth stones from the creek and stroked them and placed them on our foreheads while lying on the airstrip. We laughed at the little scuttling planes when they couldn’t land in the clouds.

  There was a brilliant strangeness to the tepui, the word for plateaux like this with their own ecosytems nourished by the constant fine spray of the Kaieteur. The phenomenon of the tank bromeliad, for instance – the marvel was that it had every appearance of a potted plant, except that it was so garrulously outsize. The largest ones were two or three times as tall as I. The minuscule golden frog that lived within its leaves I could never spot. But I often saw the orange cock-of-the-rock. Such a funny bird! He was a startling orange neckless mohawk. He sat in the trees hamming it up to attract mates and nested in sheer rock face. The golden frog, the cock-of-the-rock, they were endemic species, special to the small area around the falls.

  It was the ranger’s son who let me in on these secrets, allowing me a look at a photocopied set of notes for a bounce of rum. He was a young, handsome lad, keen on dancing. He was planning to write and direct a movie in which he would star as Kaie who had plunged down the cliff to save his tribe, the Patamona, from the Caribs, and left the waterfall in his wake.

  Everybody in the bush was a hero in a small way, and they thought of themselves as heroes in much bigger ways. They walked golden on the tabletop. They thought they could do anything, turn flimstar, fly fighter jet, fuck the greatest women, open casino in Brazil. They boasted without irony, in amusing, endearing ways. They spoke about real aspirations in humble tones. Labba said he could catch butterflies and sell them in town. He could chop the tree that obstructed a view of the falls for two grand. He could make warishis and sell them for eight grand. He could dig up a lil pond for tourist and dam it with rocks, start a pool parlour too, and then there might be a long, detailed debate on whether a pool table could be folded so as to fit in the tiny Islander planes.

  We slow-watched Kaieteur for hours from various points. The mist was horizontal in the morning and vertical at night and in between times was the revelation. The shorter rainy season, anyway strong only on the coast, was meant to have finished. But this year was different, Labba said, because the white man and his policies and his gluttonies were mashing up worlclimate. Earlier you didn’t need the calendar because you had the weather. This year the light rainy season had been so long and hard that it had rained more than in even the heavy months. We were in the first days of February and it still continued. The water in the river was the highest he had seen in his eighteen years, and the falls had never been thicker than now. You felt it could wrap the globe in its immense flowing tendrils.

  The swifts that lived in the mysterious place behind the falls were reputed to come out at dawn, but I also saw them come out an hour before noon, swooping up in unison and exploding and scattering high in the bright blue sky like pinpricked tinsel. If you lay on your stomach and crept to the edge of the overhang by the head of the falls, it was the closest you could come to feeling like the swifts. Below was the gorge, a surreal lushness. Sound rose up it like steam. The rainbow was a halo around the violence of impact. The river gathered itself after the spill, sidewound away through the forest, forever changed.

  We would lime on the mad overhang beside the sign that warned of the 741 ft drop. We’d gyaff, smoke herb, though I had nothing like their capacity. It was breathing to them. They took entire little branches, didn’t bother with cleaning, housed them loosely in paper and lit up.

  We talked about music. I felt indebted to Roots. I’d liked him very much ever since he was calling the cricket from his hammock in his dark glasses, but I felt indebted to him. It was he who let me know that it was not Abul Bakr the big man sang about in Duppy Conqueror, but a bull bucker, and it was he who explained to me ‘sipple’ from the terrific cosmic opening wail of War Ina Babylon: sipple, Jamaican for slippery, like watch your step. We agreed it was a fine name for Baby and added it to his list of names. We were on the overhang and Roots sat shirtless – they all were usually shirtless or in fishnet vests, with thin muscular bodies hard as, scarred as old school desks – Roots sat s
hirtless, legs crossed and shoulder-length dreads blown back and ganja emerging softly from his nostrils.

  He had spent some time in Jamaica and spoke highly of the vibe up there. He was down with dreadtalk. He used overstand for understand and shitstem for system. To signal agreement he said ‘ites’ and ‘seen’. He sometimes did the whole ‘I and I’ thing but more, I suspected, as performance. He considered himself a conscientious Rasta. He showed me a terrible festering gash on his finger, which, like Marley’s toe that killed him, he refused to amputate. He ate ital. He was drawn to the idea of Repatriation. ‘Yeahman, some day. Not right away but some day, some day when the vibe is right. I going fly ome … Yeahman … fly ome.’

  And high above the swifts flew. And in the benab, Dacta Red and the ranger’s son perused the Bible in order to ‘locate the solution for certain spiritual problem we run into’. Over at the settlement, Mrs Siddique, who liked it here – ‘homeside got too much them-say me-say’, a phrase that felt to me directly translated from the Hindi tu-tu main-main – Mrs Siddique stirred her pot of curry. And you could pick up all these vibrations. I cannot explain it. It was heightened vibing. I’m not even certain I realised at the time.

  ON our fourth day a group of porknockers returned to the settlement. They were seven in all, rougher than rough, steppin like razor, they could chew bullets, kick down trees. They came with great big cheer and a supply of wild meat, eager to sport like sport going out of style.

  All afternoon they curried labba, a kind of large rodent, its meat close to pig. And as white and then red rums were killed alongside the rodents, by the time the evening officially began, with people congregating beneath the mango tree, there was already a kind of latent madness in everybody’s eyes.

  We played a session of semi-drunken cricket. End of play was signalled by a firesnake, darkly orange, slithering across the pitch. Men went for it with a stick and a prong. The Siddique ladies squealed. The reptile was beaten with the stick and hoisted on the prong, a bulge pressed against the stretched skin of its stomach. Somebody tore it with a knife: a frog fell out with a bloody splatter, fully made but for severed limbs. The snake was sacked for its skin. The crappo was dispatched with a kick under the shop. It was the rudest dinner interruption I ever saw.

  People drifted into one of the two shops. The generators were switched on. An action movie was on at Big Leaf’s. I settled in Siddique’s.

  It had the special feel of a small inexplicable place in South America. Rice and flour sacks were heaped in the corners. Everything was wooden, the walls, the tables, the benches, the floor, the beams, the counter, the shelves, the windows. A Hindu Dharmic Sabha calendar was nailed on the wall, beside it an Islamic calendar of the Peter’s Hall Sunnahtul Jama Masjid, and beside that charts of snakes and frogs in the region. There was a living powis in the room as well. This is an exceptionally silly kind of turkey, jet black with a white belly. She was disconcertingly large and underbalanced. She pottered about on the beams above us. She made me terribly insecure, for she discharged droppings in unreasonable quantities and moreover was liable to sudden flapping flights, often landing on someone’s foot or thigh and nobody noticed but me.

  The Siddique daughter was minding the counter. Baby frequently expressed his admiration for her, ‘Wouldn’t mind some of that coolie hair pon my face,’ ‘the gal real come of age’. The music ran loud – soca, chutney, chutney-soca. The games began. Dominoes, but to accommodate me one of the tables moved to Rap, which was the card game I knew from my childhood as Knock Knock. A returned porknocker sponsored a bottle of five-year, and I sponsored one too. Somebody also came along with high wine. This was a cheap colourless spirit of sixty-nine per cent alcohol. If you peered into the bottle the vapour singed your eye. Spilled drops burnt holes in the wood like acid. We drank the five-year, but along with that, the loser in each game of Rap was to down a capful of high wine, two capfuls for a particular kind of loss. Also, there were these very fat joints floating about. The whole thing was doomed from the start.

  The games proceeded apace, with people gaily threatening each other, ‘I gon drunk you skunt tonight mudderskunt’. Soon the high wine capfuls were making dents in everybody. I felt the bones in my head softening. I could not escape the feeling that strangers were lifting me by the hair and dropping me for laughs. In a faraway corner bench Dr Red leant back against the wall and stared at the powis on the beams and said, ‘I would feed you, powis, I would feed you in a natural manner.’

  The wooden room grew in din. Baby began making forays to the counter to talk to the Siddique daughter, routinely breaking into his slow gold-gleaming laugh and saying, ‘Eh heh heh, that is a very ambiguous statement gal, eh heh heh. Very ambiguous.’ He said this no matter what the poor girl said or didn’t say. The elder Siddiques soon caught on, and the girl was dispatched inside. If she emerged later, it was only in the company of Mrs Siddique, putting an end to Baby’s ambiguity.

  Things within and without were aclatter. I thought racoons were chewing up the shack and began giggling. I exited Rap in order to exit high wine. I compensated with an extremely large five-year. I took a seat beside Dr Red. He showed me a British halfpenny from 1938. He stared at it a very long time. Thereafter he broke into an uncalculated monologue, looking mainly at the powis.

  ‘Right now I been celibate for about four years. When I spent two years up on the mountain top in Kurupung, when I come to the landing I kinda see that this whole … I see this AIDS, I see this different diseases, I see this people dyin, I see beautiful girls, they got the virus and I’s not a man to be so protective to be using condoms and I just say to myself this is stop for me. If I don’t get to know a girl properly inside out when I could afford not to use a condom then that’s gonna be it. I just knocked it out. Before that I’s speculate birds you know. In Kamarang I get six wives one night, and the remarkable thing is that none of them is meet eighteen. Like fourteen-eighteen. Akawaio girls. All the wannabe girls say, You give me a chile, man, Uncle Red, you my chilefadder but still you don’t love me. I say, I love you with all my heart, I love you, but I lie. So she say, You have to ask me for my fadder. So I say, No, I got to correct you because of this language barrier. She’s supposed to be saying I got to ask her father for her. So it’s more or less like a nice teaching. You got them young girls now more or less look to you like a father figure. They come an say, Uncle Red, I would like to have panty.’

  About then Labba arrived in a heavy smokeshroud of Haile. And behind him, tottering, Nasty, in long white socks! I was delighted to see him and behaved, much to his surprise, in the manner of a host. We engaged in rapturous praise of the premier batsman of the West Indies and the cosmos, Sir Prince Brian Charles Lara. He recalled an innings, I recalled another, he struck one pose, I struck another, each one shamelessly demolishing the coiling-uncoiling slithering grandeur of the great man. Nasty had the voice of a man with something like sand in his throat. When he spoke excitedly you feared for him. He told of the time he was at Bourda when India toured in ’89. ‘J. Aroon Lal and Navjoe Sidoo Sing! Oh boy. Sreekant hand bust in the previous match. It was down to J. Aroon Lal and Navjoe Sidoo Sing! Walsh flick Navjoe Sidoo Sing edge and the bossman’ – he meant Sir Emperor Vivian Richards – ‘the bossman flick up he hand and pouch the catch, just like so.’ Nasty stretched high to his right with arms thrown up. ‘I was deh, right deh behind him.’ I applauded the effort, and we downed a quick one, both believing that indeed it was Nasty’s presence right behind Sir Emperor Vivi which caused the catch. We gave praise (as well as thanks) to Sir Shree Carl Hooper, a beautiful Guyanese who moved at the crease with the softest sweetest paws and the slowest sleeping winks. Perhaps we also moaned to Sir Shree Carl, long fluttering moans drowned by the music, audible to only us. Last but not the least, we struck deep respectful impenetrable Shiv Da Chandapaul eyes-on stances with twitching brows and itchy hands and flickering tongues and bottoms upped to Unity village.

  The sound mixes in the room b
egan to make me mad. The same tired sexual soca jokes, the same badman dancehall soundclashes. Two youthmen were taking it serious. They brought out their finger guns and went poom-poom and bullet-bullet to all corners. Repeatedly they strode across the room, raising hell with their digits.

  I felt for escape. I began to crave musicality of the musical kind. Was deep urges. Horns! Keys! Upstrokes! A-ha! I left with Baby and we went to Roots, who was at Big Leaf’s, where the night was mellow and intoxicated but untouched. The movie had finished; Mr Johnson had gone home; the revellers had moved to the Siddiques. We cooked up a session. I brought my iPod. Roots had old tapes – how beautiful those tapes! – that he played on his small old portable. We took the stuff to Big Leaf’s sound system where by the grace of Jah there was a lead that could hook these to the amp.

  We gave immediate thanks via the Maytals and their great gospel-soaked romps, Toots and his mighty fraying voice rising from deep, deep within and around him other voices peeping out, hitting different planes, different meanings. With Toots it was never what he said but how he said it, hence the plainest euphoria. We surrendered to the Skatalites on Flowers for Albert, and David Murray himself appeared, and the new trombone man was no Don D, what do you expect, but he was pretty damn sweet, and McCook’s sax sang, and the trumpet sang, like ecstasy distilled from old desire as Langston Hughes said, solo segueing into solo, layered over all that upstroke, all that keeping of time, all that discipline, tremendous tight construction, enough to support an island and coming together so correctly and precisely that Baby kept calling, ‘is cooking, is cooking, let she cook, let she cook’ and then it was cooked. We inhaled and slow-nodded to Burning Spear’s heavy cutting militant incantations, the refrain springing forth from beneath that colossal opening cascade of horns and above the oldest school reverb. Roots was hard into militant reggae and he skanked in the moonshine, and we stayed in the mood a while, went to Tosh and crucial Mutabaruka, but when he started sinking into Buju I switched back to jumping fat choons.