The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel

by Rahul Bhattacharya

  ‘It got to be something that make you choose Guyana,’ she persisted. She rested her fingers on my forearm:

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I came here a few years ago. I felt something that time. Sometimes you want to follow it …’

  I congratulated myself on the directness.

  ‘What you come for the first time?’

  ‘For the cricket. I used to report on cricket.’

  ‘For truth? I love cricket! But West Indies gone to the dogs. You see how Gayle and Sarwan liming in the mound after they lose—Cha! I don’t buy it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t buy it at all. You didn’t come here just so.’

  ‘You want to go away just so.’

  ‘That make sense though. I trying to go to some place develop. You didn’t like it in India?’

  ‘I was thinking of something while waiting for you. A little before I decide to come out to Guyana I was at the airport, getting off the plane. To take you to the terminal they got the bus, right. So I’m trying to get on the bus. But Indians just not moving from the door! There’s empty space in the middle of the bus, but everyone jammed up against the door. They want to be the first to rush out of the bus when it stop. I ask people to move inside. Everybody refuse. They want you to fight your way through them and get to the centre. I get so pissed off that I walk away.’

  ‘So then?’

  ‘Is not like at Timehri where you can get off the plane and walk to the terminal. You not allowed to. I start to walk towards the terminal. The security guys come after me.’

  ‘Then what happen?’

  ‘They arrest me!’

  She giggled.

  ‘They put you in the prison?’

  ‘They keep me in a room for two hours.’

  ‘So then what happen?’

  ‘I give the man a raise. He said they could book me under anti-terrorism laws.’

  ‘How much you pay?’

  ‘Five hundred. Rupees. Say twenty-five hundred Guyanese.’

  ‘Cha! No wonder you leave, man. You could get off with fifteen hundred dollar here.’

  ‘There you go. So you better stay in Guyana.’

  ‘I still not buyin it.’

  She pressed her finger to my forearm again.

  ‘You didn’t come to Guyana because they arrest you in the airport. I think it got to do with a girl. You chase up a girl?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I knew it. You find her?’

  ‘I think so.’

  I let our hands touch, almost clasp. She was unsure.

  We talked a little longer.

  ‘I got to go now,’ she said eventually.

  I had felt it coming.

  ‘Well,’ I said casually, ‘if you come to town, I’m on Sheriff, just past the fish shop. Is the house over the studio.’

  ‘Every time you must leave me an address?’

  ‘You left me one too.’

  She got off the bleachers, smiling.

  She kissed me, a cruel flashing kiss. Her breasts flecked my rib. She pulled away with a smile.

  ‘If you coming back, get me the phone, right.’

  And she turned and left. I watched her easy sway. Her great frizz fell till the tip of her shoulder blades. My eyes followed her ass. I could watch myself staring. You got to tell the big man you enjai you life, Baby’s words.

  I ran up after her.

  ‘Listen, I wanted to ask you something.’

  She stopped, delicate, her hand to her eyes.

  ‘I have to return to India soon. I want to travel. Maybe I’ll never get to come back ever.’

  ‘So you want to carry me?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Is where you wan carry me?’

  ‘I was thinking Venezuela.’

  ‘Uh huh, we going to make house there?’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  She blurted a high laugh, taunting, taunted, I could not discern.

  ‘What do I get?’ she said.

  ‘What do I get?’

  ‘You getting me.’

  ‘You getting Old Year’s holidays.’

  We stood under the burning white country roof. I waited.

  ‘Is joke you making.’

  ‘No, promise.’

  ‘You gon treat me good?’

  ‘Like a prize bird.’

  ‘You stupid, you know.’

  ‘So?’

  She looked at me quietly, pores breathing.

  6

  THERE came a moment after the packing, after the dash for tickets and visas and amid the great shine and rain of romance to come, when I could have sold my soul to cancel. There wasn’t anything especially dramatic about it. It was the confluence of a number of small things. The man with the music cart rolled by with Eric Donaldson’s reggae version of Come A Little Bit Closer. A bright blue butterfly floated in from the balcony and spread itself on the ceiling. A truck passed on Sheriff and rumbled foundations so that the Guyana map blew off the wooden wall and fell softly to the floor. At that instant it felt utterly wrong to be leaving in my last days, and I was seized with the panic of having discovered an enormous mistake.

  Thankfully it was only a moment. The cravings for sweet sinnery on the move, for her crumpled mane blown into my eyes, for vast broad-brush motion, the anticipatory thrill of roads to be taken, borders to be crossed, faces to be seen, bars of music to be absorbed, they reinstated themselves. It was December in Georgetown. You could feel in the humid air a search for renewal. Pork was doused in vinegar, ginger roots were left to ferment, fruit was forgotten in rum. Houses of every religious persuasion were made over. There were jingles on the radio, sales in the newspapers and limes in the yards.

  These were the days between rendezvous and departure. They were busy days, wrought with logistics of travel – no direct flights to Venezuela – of commissions sought in view of forthcoming expenses and completed in a haze. We hardly saw each other. Once for paperwork, followed by the seawall. One date, surprisingly traditional, to the cinema, if either Rainbow Raani or the Strand qualified for the term. Another time she came to Sheriff and investigated it with jumpy energy for signs of another woman, the hooks behind the bathroom door, the toiletries by the basin. Satisfied, she teased, gave nothing. I wished the most vivid shamelessness upon us.

  On the holy morning she arrived bearing a hunk of black cake and ginger beer. Her hair was wild from the breeze, her face intensified by the wildness. Her ribbed top was sequinned, jeans with studs at the pockets.

  ‘Merry Christmas.’

  There was something absurdly picnic-like about the cake and ginger beer. They seemed to open a new dimension, a companionship. Each was so high that we were a little tipsy on the way to the airport. Any awkwardness was overcome by it. It heightened her electric touch. Her hand sometimes grazed my crotch. We stayed in the moment, talked of the things before our eyes. Sometimes she called me hon.

  At the airport she and a boy, a questionnaire-wielding surveyor from the statistics bureau, spoke for an hour of their itch to leave the country. He’d been at the airport for two months, and he saw how it worked, with gals in particular. ‘Is like a movie. They goin out poor. They comin back rich.’ While the discussion proceeded, her hand resting lightly on my thigh throughout, I took note of a tiny little scam: the free government pamphlets stacked on the racks, I remembered Baby had been trying to sell those along with cherries by the big market.

  We flew from the timbers of the continent. Below, the Demerara purged its phenomenal mud into the Atlantic, which gave unto pristine Caribbean waters – it happened abruptly, not in a straight line but in lurid undulations, like crayon hills against a crayon sky. We watched the window, bit lobes, clung together and watched everything. A part of me marvelled that this had been made to happen, the calculated recklessness, the majestic confidence.

  Trinidad, with its memories from my cricket tour. Petite Trinidad, its gingerbread cottages and winding hill roads, pee trickles
they called rivers, fields they called savannahs, oil-dollars Trinidad and its mean seascape of pointed cranes and its sad sweeping bright malls, Trinidad where beneath the revels of mas and headlines of crime people were secretly serious and cradled first- or at least second-world concerns in their bosoms.

  She’d been brought here once when she was six. As we drove to the city, she observed, ‘I like here.’ She added decisively, ‘If I had to choose I would prefer Barbados.’

  At last we were in Woodbrook.

  What I can remember of the lovenest is that it was how a lovenest ought to be, with real memories buried in its paint and nails. A garage room with a door to the driveway where cars would have pulled in so many times, so many times with squirreled lovers in a rush or in quarrel. Here they must have lain in chrysalis. The window opened to a lawn. Through it they must have watched rain fall, fireflies die, heard frogs sing.

  The floor was carpeted. There was a ceiling fan. On the bed a mosquito net was already pulled down.

  It was the first time we were in a bedroom together. That, the creak of the fan, the net like a meshed boudoir, it brought on a magnetic formality.

  ‘Want some rum?’

  ‘That could work.’

  I opened the ten-year from duty free. From the proprietor’s kitchen I brought lime and ice. In the warm room with the hot rum the ice felt like a cold silver spoon on the neck.

  ‘More ice?’

  ‘More rum.’

  We were the nervous flirts of a date. Our talks were like rabbits in gentle pursuit. We spoke with faces close enough to feel breath, resistance a hot tickle.

  The room felt small with the bags on the floor. She decided to settle them in the wardrobe. She opened it, scanning the mess of pillows and sheets inside. I looked over her shoulder, pressed towards her. She held her position in acquiescence. My nose and lips were inside the blown curls of her hair. She put her hands up against the frames of the door, backing her bottom into me. I held her at the love handles. We contoured tighter into one another, rubbing, now kissing. Her lips were heavier than they looked, she liked to linger and pull with them.

  We stood there kissing a long time.

  ‘Mosquito bitin,’ she whispered finally.

  ‘Let’s go into the net.’

  She gave me a slap on my chest. ‘You bad.’

  ‘It’ll be more comfortable there. Or we could spray Shoo and smell like Shoo.’

  ‘You bad,’ she said again, smiling.

  She lifted the net and led me inside by the finger.

  The mattress was foam. We stood on our knees, chests pressed. Our kisses, slow and feathery so far, grew deep and desperate. She had a frank sexual smell. Her skin was moist, breathing. We kissed till our mouths were numb. I felt her crawling nails. My hands ran down her arched back, her stupendous bottom. At some point she entered my boxers – and emitted a startled yelp.

  ‘Oh lord! It must have crablouse in here!’

  She clutched in her hand a shock of pubes. She looked petrified.

  I studied the growth as she released it.

  ‘You hear of the kamasutra?’ I asked after a moment’s consideration.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It say there that the pubes suppose to tickle the lips.’

  ‘Cha! You think you a Gooroo?’

  ‘I’m telling you.’

  ‘Man, look at it.’

  She made to clutch them again, then withdrew her fingers with a fright.

  ‘How long since you had a girl, man.’

  The moment was beyond coyness.

  ‘It heightens the pleasure. Make you stretch to de ceiling.’

  ‘I ain’t goin nowhere near that nest.’ She sat back on her heels.

  ‘So how do you like it?’

  ‘Clean.’

  ‘How clean?’

  ‘Clean clean. To the bone.’

  ‘Alright, clean it.’

  She stared at me with a defiant smile.

  I said nothing.

  ‘Alright.’

  She left me for her bag.

  Over the white lace she drew the drapes, shutting the floating dust beams of the sun, the dark splash of almond leaves. It was black. She switched on the reading lamp. She was down to her chocolate underwear.

  ‘Lie back, right,’ she said, touching my shoulders. ‘Close your eyes, and no sudden movement.’

  I lay back, afraid. I could not keep my eyes fully closed. She was bent over, cleavage brown and beautiful in the bulb haze. Her gaze was fixed in concentration. Her hair was tied in a bun. I saw her magnified as though in a collage, the shape of her curling nostrils, the shadow of her chin, the cavern of her armpit, the big beads on her neck.

  I was throbbing.

  ‘I’m scared,’ I started to say.

  ‘Shh … Close you eyes.’

  It was excruciating. I received her smell and her fingers. She massaged with her free hand as she trimmed, sometimes stopping one or the other, sometimes letting go a little laugh. Infinite submission. I felt on drugs, not a narcotic, a medical drug, like the intense psychedelia of an anaesthetic before it kicks in. In the creaking swirl of slow clip-clops I was spent full on a rubble of soaked shavings. In those half-hallucinations we stayed, ten minutes, thirty, an hour, I couldn’t tell.

  The texture of that time, the clopping, the creaking, and the embarrassment of the growth, it would return to me often, sometimes with killing self-consciousness, other times with the pure energy of a vine bursting through brick.

  BUT it was, actually, an evening of emptiness. Port of Spain was closed. In the evening the proprietors had us over for their gettogether. They were an elderly light-skinned couple, a French name on the man and Chinese eyes on the lady, who spoke in severe Trinidad singsong – you could oscillate like a pendulum on their sentences. It was a sombre gathering, though, seven or eight people. Other than the kittens, we were the only ones below fifty-five. There was rum punch, mincemeat pastilles, Christmas cake and baked ham from the previous night’s feast. I learnt here that she didn’t eat wrenk. Wrenk was a flexible term covering a gamut of impurities. In her case wrenk was pork, beef, shellfish and wildmeat.

  Conversation was local and middle-aged, who’d bought Christmas linen and blinds from where. I was languid. We were quiet. We had little conversation of our own, or a way of being with each other in company. In the course of the bourgeois talk, always one person speaking at a time, sentences flanked by ellipses, a retired bureaucrat remarked, ‘Boy, the servant class has gotten so Guyanese, I find children using Guyanese as a cussword.’ He added jovially, ‘Guyanese have a real fowl-thief mentality, boy!’ Charming, boy.

  Afterwards we walked about downtown on strung-out hamstrings, hoping against local judgement to find a lime. The desertion was absolute. Our footsteps echoed on tar. On a corner we came upon two prostitutes in Santa caps. They soored us. At the Queen’s Park Savannah there was a lone drunk coconut man in an orange truck. There we bought two medium jelly, and sat on a bench, more or less quiet.

  That was the last thing we ate.

  Now, past three o’clock on Boxing Day, on a much delayed ferry, crossing the steely Gulf of Paria, we were starving. We had been up since four, the dawn hours given to the mechanisms of getting accustomed to swollen faces, ridiculous hair, the newness of habits, words uttered in minor stress, a mystery gone.

  The comfort of familiarity came much after, with hunger and deprivation. On the ferry with hands clasped we thought of the wrenkest things we could eat. Crappo, camoudi, the tatou they were roasting at Kurupukari when I was on the way down to Lethem to see her. Manatee, she said. I sucked my teeth. Macaw, I said. She bit my arm.

  A Trini man helped kill time by making constant ethnographic incisions. He observed that ‘them working-class black people drown real easy, eh’. When someone drank from a bottle without it touching their mouths he berated them for ‘drinking like a Hindoo’. He boasted that his little girl could ‘sing like an American – while smiling’.
He put her up for display, and she indeed sang while smiling Rohini the lady prisoner’s song she’d picked up at the Prisoners Calypso contest.

  But how can there be a message without a mess?

  And how can there be a testimony without a test?

  Next time I’m on a plane

  I’m on vacation, not trafficking cocaine

  At last Venezuela appeared in the form of distant mountains, as I imagined all new land must do from the sea. As we drew closer Venezuela was hundreds of grey pelicans on a pier of identical colour.

  Stepping out on to the cement of Venezuela it was apparent: we were alone now. The red-bereted soldiers who searched our bags didn’t speak a word of English. Neither did the Pam Grierish mulatta immigration officers. Fellow passengers had made off quickly. Her Spanish was limited to a dozen words, including Si and Da me mas gasolina!, and still a greater range than mine.

  We were on the edge of a very small, second-rate town called Guiria. Struggling, trying to appear confident, I surrendered us to a stammering stranger who offered to help. The opportunity of alien circumstances is that the first inkling of a breakthrough can send the spirit soaring. The stammerer was an angel. He spoke English. For nothing but fleeting friendship he helped us change money (at a pharmacy, naturally), guided us to a restaurant to rescue our dying bodies, through the meal himself refusing to eat, and thereafter saw us into a shared taxi.

  These Venezuelan automobiles. Stripped to metal, devoid of handles, cavities for dashboard compartments, semi-exposed spring for seats, imparting a final effect not bruck-up but the opposite, shells conceived so far ahead of their time that they had degenerated to this while mankind developed something commensurate to their potential. In one such fabulous contraption we made off into Venezuela. I wished to have her nuzzling me but she was in the backseat with Carolina. ‘I love communication,’ Carolina had declared early on. She was mother to a geerl she sent to Trinidad to study English. English was everything in the world today. Jan and she fell into involved discussions and I, in the front seat, gave my neck a rest and the driver, a black man in a cap, sighed, the resigned sigh of a man who knows that women will now chat.