The Sly Company of People Who Care

by Rahul Bhattacharya

  Ask him which of these was true and he’d reply, ‘How you mean, Gooroo, all two is true.’

  I knew this much about Baby. Also that he was a ‘Nonpractising Fundamentalist Eighth Day Adventurist’.

  Of me he knew less.

  Our entire knockabout adventure was born of a kind of bravado. Perhaps we saw something in each other that we recognised; but it was bravado that propelled us. After being twice scamped I went looking for him in that same street by the big market. I found him sitting by a barrow of cherries, pretending to sell. ‘Come nuh, sweetheart, lemme be the godfather,’ he called out to a pregnant girl as she walked by. ‘I only givin out stepfather,’ she winked back. He dragged you involuntarily into that sort of play. I told him that I’d caught up with Magistrate Van Cooten after all. He remembered the case: he thought the crime vicious but had good words for the conduct of the criminal. Baby kept responding with ‘eh he’, looking interested and downpressed, staring into the cherries. Finally, he asked, ‘So the magistrate tell yuh this at Le Repentir cemetery or Bourda cemetery?’

  We talked old reggae again. Reggae was the key for reggae is a brotherhood. Once you’ve imbibed the upstroke of ska, the zen of bass, the roots of reggae, repetitions like body pulse, words like fire, like ice, it becomes a kind of possession – music like a gravity, as Burning Spear said. For a while you turn tone-deaf to everything else. The symmetries and the concerns of other music, they feel unenlightened to the genius of this simplicity. So our understanding was at this crucial level.

  I asked him about porknocking and the interior, and he told me stories. I said he should let me know when he’s going in next. Sure, he said. Let’s go soon, I said. Alright pardner, why not catch me back here two days, he said by way of putting it off. My paperwork was finished, I had itchy feet. I proposed we buy supplies the next morning and leave. This was bravado. He didn’t expect it would happen. It did.

  My only condition was that we go overland – it was cheaper to fly. I would pick up the fare and the supplies. In this, of course, he had a subsidised trip and I have no doubt he scamped me a little here, a little there. Yet, if anything, I was the more dependent. The expertise was all his. On the river I had been an encumbrance, and perhaps elsewhere too. He’d taken me deep into the heart of something. In sum, I felt, I probably owed him. Under the umbrella of bravado it was difficult to see the truth of things.

  I reflected on the Foulis affair in many ways. It occurred to me that had there been no near-murder I would have looked at things differently. A plain theft – it was possible to bathe the incident in a scampish light.

  ‘ … So Baby vex now after the man hand he a couple of piece of fine-fine stone like sand. So he gone now in the middle of the night to the man gravel, flick on he tarch, jam up the tarch by he neck, howler monkey making noise, all kind of jumbie floating about but Baby focus! Is diamond he t’iefin in moonlight! …’

  It didn’t feel that way, though. The raised cutlass, the trembling man beneath, it had heightened one’s sense of judgement. Yet the first was an act of instant madness, the second a calculated deceit and perhaps the more depraved.

  When I played him back in my mind, which was often and in a variety of moods, the reel finished at the finish, with him waving diagonally on the tepui, distorted and shameless, and over the end credits Tony the guide demonstrating his hair over the maga dog riddim in the laser blaze of the parallel sun.

  I RETURNED to Kitty exhausted. I could not shake off the pall of lingering inspection, introspection that had enveloped me. My motion had ceased. To stop is to sink. Yet I did not feel sunk so much as afloat, which with its attendant lack of drama was the more frustrating.

  Physically I felt drained. Cooking and washing and all the things of everyday living felt like too much to do. Rather than recovering vigour I felt more depleted with the passing days. Effort made me vomit.

  It took me a week to find out that I had a low-grade dengue fever. Its chief effect was listlessness. The temperature subsided in some days, but the passivity remained. I felt bloodless. There was nothing to do, I was told, but rest, hydrate, pop pills and wait for my mosquito-ravaged platelets to regenerate.

  The illness brought on a period of emptiness I hadn’t felt since ma and papa died. They were good, decent people, rooted in their efforts, never taking the car when a bus could do, never a bus when they could walk. Ma had died from infirmity, and papa afterwards from sadness really. My childhood memories of sickness were glorious – skipped school, whiled-away pampered days. Ever since ma I associated sickness with the weight of a sad house, a strange, unregistering kind of grief lost in the suffocation of relatives.

  It is not nice to be sick alone. I wished I could sleep through the period. I didn’t call home. I dropped a short jaunty email to my three older siblings telling them of the wonderful trip into the rainforest and a plan to approach National Geographic with a feature. ‘Hopefully they will say yes and you can show it to the relatives when they come home! Love.’ I didn’t want to worry them with the illness. And to speak it would have been admission of a misjudgement. I didn’t want to give them that.

  For a fortnight I lived on Gatorade, coconut water, pineapple, French cashew, sapodilla – chikoo – and tinned Van Camp’s Pork and Beans, bought from the appropriately named Survival supermarket. The beans I ate with sweet tennis rolls, which with butter could be a little like Bombay’s bun maska. There was one especially trying aspect to this period. Little crappos would find their way into the house. I was tormented by them. When in panic I feared they, like fluttering pigeons, were liable to do anything. I had seen Guyanese swoop them up like a fallen peanut and fling them out the window. I couldn’t bring myself to it. If they were on the floor, I had a technique worked out for them. I covered them with a bucket and dragged them across to the door. But more often they were wont to get into the sink. I spent hours in distress, staring at them, cursing them. Tapping around them with a stick would worsen the situation: they would hop about among the washed utensils.

  One day I willed myself to grab the thing. It took a great deal of psyching myself, and then with my hand encased in a polythene bag. He’s small, I told myself, he’s small. After pulling out a dozen times, I snatched it. I felt it pulse in my hand as I ran towards the back door and let go of it. It caught the grille on the way out, fizzed across the air, rotating like a wild Ferris, and crashed into the water tank below the whitey tree. It stayed still a few seconds, and then I saw it hop away. I knew I had damaged it. I felt a dishonour I cannot explain.

  In a few weeks my energies began to restore. I became acquainted with the new developments in the building. Kwesi Braithwaite, fake diamond on his ear, Kangol on his head, had recently taken to booming loud RnB (Beyonce, Ne-Yo, T-Pain, I’m ’n Luv (Wit a Stripper)). The nuisance was one thing. The practical implication was for the power bill that was on a single meter shared by the six tenements using a formula. The formula was a mathematical miracle. I understood it had led to uprisings in the past, and though nobody understood how it worked, they always returned to it. The formula could not be changed to accommodate the ‘laalessness of one body or two body’. And some days later, Rabindranauth Latchman from Latchman’s Hardware came to bust Kwesi tail for t’iefin a lead from his shop.

  Otherwise it seemed like life, old life. And two months of life had never felt older to me. On the weekend Hassa still brought home a set of black whiskery hassar in a bucket from a trench by the national park, cheerily thumped them dead on their heads with the back of his knife and curried them, dousing the building in flavour. The cashiers were still busty. Uncle Lance could still be spotted on the bench studying, say, a booklet on Duncan’s Signals, or a Jehovah’s Witness report on world population.

  I didn’t lime much with Lancy and friends. I spent time in the sweet breeze discovered at the back of the house, at the top of the back stairs, reading, snoozing, watching the yard over the tin. It was a spare lot with high grass at the edges and a
small neat house on stilts in a corner. The yard held just the single tree, a great breadfruit tree with luminous leaves which pointed and curled. In a shed, bigger than the house, a braided welder worked. He worked alone to the radio, at whichever hour of the morning or night he liked, and from afar it felt that he was at one with his work. Beside the simplicity of his self-made shack, under the ornamental majesty of the breadfruit tree, to watch him spend his days, building, mending, was a solace.

  The exact moment of recovery was when I inexpertly pierced the top of a coconut. I had found the tenderest spot. The knife went straight through. It had been in the fridge. The chilled water gushed into my face, my eyes, like fizz from a soda bottle. I was stunned. Then I laughed. I hadn’t felt that alive in a long time.

  Outside, Georgetown shimmered in the heat in between the rains. In the months which followed I began to tramp about again, in town, and up and down the coast. Often I found myself in the stray countryside, hosted by generous acquaintances, some freshly made, some from the cricket tour, and some entire strangers, for I had walked all the way from India.

  The mood was very different now. One escapes one’s life, for however long, seeking adventure – I think of the Hindi word dheel. This is what kite-flyers in Bombay shouted when they wanted the spooler to let loose the thread. I could not fly a kite, as unnavigable to me as chopsticks, but I liked giving dheel, and I liked very much the thought of dheel. So one escapes one’s life seeking adventure, and with enough dheel and some luck, that happens. But the thread is anchored. You can only go so far. The impulse must change. Instead of adventure one seeks understanding. It comes with a heaviness. The only way to be exempt is to resolutely not ponder, but I was given to pondering.

  It struck me forcefully there wasn’t much to do. The loneliness of acknowledging this can be difficult. I began to walk less, take the bus more. In sun or rain it was the more practical thing to do, but I know I did it to counter loneliness. I liked the minibuses. I liked how there were no stops. You could flag one down where you wanted and you got off where you wanted, bellowing a specific instruction above the roar of music: ‘over the bridge’ or ‘when you turn’ or ‘corner’, or with absolute precision, ‘by the blue rubbish bin’. There was a packed, peopled sexuality to the bus. They played the vulgarest soca and duttiest dancehall. Nasty stuff. Sweat, smells, sounds, hair, skirts, fingernails, tapping feet, there was a hot tropical charge to it.

  But where to go? A stop here, a stop there, a meal here, a conversation there, humid lethargy, slow ruin. And I was liable to absorb the slow ruin. For instance, at that hallmark of the tropical colony, the botanical gardens. The famed old collection had dwindled and now there were mainly unlabelled palm. No brass band played on Sundays anymore, the old timers rued. In the abutting zoo, the lioness appeared eager to be put out of her misery. The birds were gorgeous, fluorescent toucans and macaws, the absurdly large harpy eagles who clawed at chunks of meat the size of a human face, but hardly anybody came to look at them.

  Loneliness it was that led me to two or three little affairs so full of tacky fraudulence that I escaped them before they could develop. Never mind.

  I found nourishment in the shaded cool of the national library. Georgetown was where a bookshop was a stationery shop, and of the three actual bookshops, one was about to shut down. The library too was in decline, you could tell by the paucity of new books. People tended to use it for siestas. Sun-sapped souls would come in at lunch hour, put down a stack of magazines by the foot of the chair and sleep. I myself fell into a few good ones there. It was the most peaceful spot in town, a small table with four low, steeply reclined chairs set around it. Beside this was a beautiful big jalousie door and beyond that a lush yard in which the serrated shadows of plantain and banana leaves swayed like passing thoughts, and sometimes if it rained the drops pinged in through the slats. One remembers little things about places. And of the library I remember the hand-me-down colonial bureaucratic militancy with which a membership query could be entertained only on a Tuesday or a Thursday morning – people were not exactly ramming down the door to get in – though a question on any other matter was permitted; I remember how immaculately one of the ladies at the counter balanced her pregnancy against her stilettos; I remember the disgruntled vibe of the ageing security guard at the gate with the baton at her waist, how, though she made as if to be further disgruntled, only the clamour of schoolchildren at 3.30 could ever revive her.

  I remember, gratefully, the reading. In particular from the too-small Caribbeana section which wrenched me outwards to a necessary distance from the world I had flung myself into headlong with no preparation. Here came comprehension.

  You could encounter entertaining comments in the books. Naipaul was a favourite target. His Finding the Centre bore the pencil dismissal on the title page: ‘This man has a Psychosis. Its name is Self loathing.’ Puzzlement at one of the denser Wilson Harrises was expressed with a succinct, ‘What the man write?’ The single Roy Heath was untouched.

  Once I found a curious paean to the Dutch civilising mission. It was a four-page fine-print pamphlet, organised in sections, composed by an apparent descendant. It extolled the courage of the pioneers – ‘who risked life and limb for the sake of the generations to come’. It lamented the passing of the Dutch Reformed Church – ‘which had given the people moral organisation for prosperity’. It praised the Dutch efforts in building Georgetown which, though established by the French in their brief period of ascendancy as Longchamps, went for a while by the name of Stabroek, for the Lord of Stabroek, chief of the Dutch West India Company. The enterprise of the Dutch West India Company itself was honoured with its own subsection. Here the first three words had been struck out by a blotted, once garish, purple nib. They had been replaced by a single word: SLY. In the margin a sentence had been started, they think like they care – and abandoned there due to excessive blotting.

  Coming out from the shade and knowledge of the library back into the sensory streets, or vice versa, was a source of anxiety for me, reconciling the two. To pass time I sometimes slipped into the perspiring Magistrate’s Court where Baby had once fooled me. In the papers one read about murders between brothers, between couples, over a game of dominoes, a stray glance. There were all manner of sensational cases, gruesome ones, murders by hot oil or broken bottles. The matters I walked in on were usually trivial, somebody not paying their childmother for upkeep, a catfight between ladies resulting in a burnt forearm for one, fowl stolen from a neighbour’s yard. Surreal was the juxtaposition of these Guyanese transgressions and the Guyanese talk of the transgressors (‘she ah lie like a dog, is she who jook me fust’: the forearm-burner) against the taught British manner of the court. The lawyers, some thin and greasy, some with large ears who spoke beautifully, all of them in Guyana carrying the reputation of failed doctors, they said things like ‘of course, your worship, of course’. And your worship herself used phrases such as ‘very well, then’, and might call upon somebody with the words, ‘Mr Nazeer Abeed Ally, on the night of January 21, 2006, at the southern end of East Street, Alberttown, a muskmelon projected by you damaged the windshield of a white-colour Nissan, vehicle licence plate PJJ 2121, belonging to one Mr Vincent Totaram. How do you plead?’ It was a play, a movie set.

  Now and then I stopped at a rumshop and scrap metal shop on Robb Street. Joshua’s it was called, though Joshua Rahamatullah himself was dead. I would be spoilt with sweets by the ladies who ran it. Mittai and parsad, generic terms in India which here referred to specific items, and gulgulas, which in India I knew as gulab jamun, and stupendously fatty Fat Tops, which I didn’t know from anywhere – cornmeal and coconut milk and raisin, vanilla-sweetened and baked. It was uncertain times at Joshua’s. The government was talking of banning scrap metal exports. People were thieving metal all over the place, from cables in the power company yard, from iron punts in the sugar estates. Citizens were getting electrocuted because the earthing systems from electricity poles had
been stolen. Outlawing the business was no solution, felt the Joshua’s folk. It was like banning jewellery cause people t’iefin gold. All the government had to do was monitor the utilities because the trafficking was done from within. We would drink to scrap metal. And then I would be off, alone again.

  I watched the amazing houses of Georgetown, and sometimes their mere memories, burnt-down patches, a shock of grass overcoming cinder and charred beams. Since I’d come here last I could tell how many more concrete homes had been built, with a peculiar front of painted convex cement brick like a cheap weave. The wooden houses were each an individual creation, some as grand and white and tiered as a wedding cake, some rotten and ruminating. The living ones, their white old timbers gleamed and their forest green zincs glinted. They had unexpected gables and sometimes little towers, they had series of Demerara shutters that could be propped up, intricate latticework on bargeboards, papery walls which transmitted every whispering breath. It’s the dead ones I was drawn to most. The ones which leaned and sagged, whose wood had lost every colour, where vines crept round pipes and spurted out of windows, whose doors had long lost the strength to open let alone guard. Whole states of being were in their single image. In this they were like the finest reggae, which could lay proverb upon bass upon melody and catch the mood, the meaning of so much in a single music frame.

  Sometimes in the evenings I went running on the seawall, not unlike Bombay’s Marine Drive, and one always could find Indian nationals on their Indian-national walks. This tended to depress me. I caught snatches of their conversations as I went by, beset with the superior sorrow of being here.

  I did briefly get friendly with a Sindhi shopowner, a dandyish, articulate supremacist by the name of Mr Mansukhani. He had begun his career by going to Ethiopia and starting a successful variety shop there. Then in a stroke of bad luck the famines had come. He sought opportunity in other parts of the world. He arrived in Guyana in the late eighties when the time was right. The dictator had died. Imports were allowed again. Anything you put up in a shop people were desperate to buy. And so he had stayed. He preferred Ethiopia. ‘They are not like other Africans. The people are not bad-looking, you’ll be surprised, fine noses, good complexion. The blacks in the Americas, they’ve become really lazy. At least in Africa they’re getting fucked over.’ And the East Indians? ‘Mutated Biharis, imagine that.’ He doubted if Guyana ought to be a country. ‘Coolies and slaves celebrating getting buggered.’ Whenever possible, he’d head out to the islands, for, from Montego Bay to Martinique, the community of Sindhi traders was everywhere, and between his travels and my gallivants in the country, we later never met. We’d run out of things to say anyhow.