Inescapable sadness befell Georgetown at night. There were hardly any streetlights. Crime, the fear of crime, the population in steady exodus, conspired to make a ghost after sundown. It brought with it brittleness, lonesomeness.
One evening I went to the passa-passa, a Jamaican street lime of famed vulgarity raging like fire through the Caribbean. Roused by condemnatory letters from the church, unmindful of the warning that ‘it rough out there, real rough’, alone in the lonely hot night, I headed down to watch the duttiest dances ever born by the prison which once allegedly held Baby. Werk-en-Rust the ward was called: work and rest, Dutch: another old plantation. Such brutality, such gingerbread names! But I reached too early, woefully early. I was the only person on the block not black. I walked to a melancholy corner bar, with dim fairy lights, where everybody wore a sad gold tooth and everybody well knew there’s nothing going down in this town and I scribbled things on a paper napkin with such a rising sadness that the matron at the counter tenderly asked, ‘Why you look so, babylove?’ An hour later I returned to the vulgar intersection, but it was still too early. Till I departed at half past midnight – after Warren, a one-eyed moocher had mooched off me, I fully aware of the mooching but tolerant of it – there had not been, aside from a drunk moonwalking to inevitable collapse, a single wine-down, a single batty shaken.
Narrate this to a Guyanese and you will be told, ‘Of course, they was waiting for you to leave!’
It was on another evening of nothingness, dark and streetlight-free, the dance of fireflies on patches of grass everywhere, that I went to Castellani House, a mansion turned gallery of magnificent white-wooden airiness. I had seen a notice in the paper of their monthly world-classics screening. It was Ray’s Pather Panchali.
There was a gathering of thirty or forty, almost exclusively expat and white, grabbing at any morsel of culture on offer. I had read the book as part of the school course. I remember having been moved by it, but I had forgotten it. In a beautiful scene of departure a mean-spirited lady reflects, ‘If you stay too long in a place you become petty. It has happened to me.’ It is a key realisation. It stayed with me. Perhaps that is the easy answer to why anyone leaves; it was maybe why I had left.
But more, the peasant life, the winds and the fields, the palm and fruit trees, the poverty, the slowness of the country, the buffalo ponds and water lilies, the lanterns and wicks, rain and storm, innocence found and lost, it resonated with something I’d been reading. It was Edgar Mittelholzer’s Corentyne Thunder, scored not from the library, where they didn’t stock it, but from da Silva the cobbler’s cartful of non-selling second-hands in Kitty Market. The Corentyne was a stretch on the eastern coast of Guyana, between the rivers Berbice and Corentyne; and the peasant life of the film was set in rural Bengal, not far from where had sailed the ships bringing impoverished Indian peasants to the Corentyne – people whose lives were shot with defeat, who knew that the only way was to leave, not to defeat pettiness, but to defeat defeat.
PART TWO
1
YOU leave: what wound do you leave behind?
At this moment in, say, Barabanki, Basti, Buxar, in little villages of dust that dot the vast plains of north India, cyclostyled sheets are arranged in heaps at a roadside stall. A hot dry afternoon, the edges of the sheets occasionally upturned by the hot dry breeze. A tentative young idler appears at the stall. He has come with adventure on his mind, or perhaps out of compulsion, perhaps out of the slow torment of his life. He browses the yellow and white notices, not quite sure how to react to them. One is read out to him. He could become a class IV worker in the big city, a watchman, a peon. He thinks about it, eventually buys a form for five rupees.
He makes the big journey to the city to try his luck. Having reached, and applied, he fails. But the distance travelled has been great, the effort too much, the expense too high. He falls in with a community of migrants from his state, a gang of daily-wage labourers. He works in the sun, sleeps in the cold, fortifies himself for each day’s backbreaking miseries with cheap liquor. A few years on he has saved enough to visit the village. The next visit comes after a longer gap, and the one after that longer still. In time he is forgotten. His body unable to combat everyday damage, he dies young. In the village, other youngsters have left or have died, the elders in the family have passed on, and the village is slowly remade. Does anybody remember?
In the Guyanese country – a coastal frill on either side of Georgetown – in the Guyanese country the East Indian and the Indian national look at each other. It seems an innocuous enough exchange. In fact, it is loaded. It is only here, away from town and the interior, and amid the fields of the country, that the absurd foreignness and familiarity of the interaction registers.
To the Indian national the image across him is vaguely recognisable: the dark, slightly flat, small-featured face and small-made body of the ‘purabi’. The skin is smooth, shining, the mouth mildly open, a visage on the whole enduring, durable.
Then the minor surprises start to accumulate. The East Indian has worn a cap (a fringe peeping out the front), a checked shirt from which the sleeves are ripped, and long grey shorts which were once trousers. The hairstyle, the outfit, it seems incongruous in these surroundings so evocative of peasant India – the smell of Indian food emerging from houses, more men and women just like the purabi, even the cattle herded along with the ancient hurr, hurr.
Surprise turns to disorientation when the East Indian peasant speaks up, in English, and disorientation to bewilderment as the dialect kicks in, the accent of the Guyanese country so raw and rasping that comprehension arrives minutes, sometimes months, later, with a retrospective piecing of the puzzle.
Equal shock to the East Indian when the Indian national speaks, not in the language of the Indian flims he sees, but an odd, lumbering English. Further, the Indian national does not have a name like a name in these villages. What strange mannerisms he has! What a strange India does the Indian national come from!
The mind goes back to the wound. To the East Indian the wound has been profound, in ways he knows and does not. But in the geographical India, that pitiless, unceasing land which bothers not for whom it crushes or expels, there has not been the slightest cut. The numbers have been undramatic, the impact negligible. The people have been of the unimportant kind: nobodies whom nobody remembers, nobody knows of and nobody can be asked to care.
Perhaps the exchange between the East Indian and the Indian national is a flickering recognition of this poignancy.
IT was a Cuban lady and her husband who made me think of the wound in a more tangible way. She was a psychiatrist, one of only three in the country she said, and the only one in that county. She claimed to have dealt with 7,000 patients the previous year. I didn’t believe it. Well, check the records, she said. Country Guyanese had among the highest suicide rates in the world. Every now and then a news report alerted you to this fact. Most of them were male Indians; and many hung themselves from the ceiling. (I was once asked casually by a mixed-race youth from town, ‘They love suicide in India, right?’) All manner of depressives arrived at the doctor’s door: women beaten by men, alcoholics, madmen. She offered sound socioeconomic reasons for the phenomenon. Guyana was the poorest state on the continent. It was hard to make a living. Out in the country there was little recreation besides drinking.
But afterwards, the husband, a Guyanese, told me, ‘You asked why there are so many depressed people. My wife, due respect to her, she cannot be able to see like we. I tell you why we are sad. We are sad because ever since we left India we have a hole in our hearts. Nothing can fill that hole.’ He thumped his palm on his chest – he was a big man, which made the gesture somehow more affecting. It was one of those wide open sentimental Guyanese country evenings: fry fish and rum and Lata across a night-time canefield on the Corentyne.
‘And yet, brother,’ he added, ‘we find that Indians do not consider us to be Indians.’
It was an accurate observation
. But I thought it might be patronising to tell him what I felt, which was two, perhaps conflicting, things. That, you know, you are out here where the Caribbean meets South America under these brilliant stars and you should be fucking delighted. The other was that you, brother, are more Indian than I.
The latter point revealed more about me than them. But that is how it felt. Their Indianness felt more intimate than mine. They longed for it; I had no such longing. I was wearied by it, and in fact in flight from it. They had the power to imagine their India, never having to grapple with it.
The idea extended itself from India of the mind to India of the soil. Their forebears had worked the land in India, and they came here across the oceans and worked the land. I saw a romantic continuity in this. The idea of the land suggested to me a special intimacy. You worked the land; you understood seasons, seed and grain, the wind and the rain, birds and animals and insects. And with that you had an intuitive and precise understanding of the people and society which evolved around the land. I felt they carried this intimacy with them in their blood and their veins from the soil of India to the soil of Guyana.
And their land here was so very beautiful. Much of this was not because of the land but the sky. In the forest, beneath the immenseness of the dripping vegetation, one did not register the incredible low lie of the Guyanese sky. But on the coast the sky felt as close as the ground and as flat. The horizons were immaculate and distant. You felt bare on the face of the world. The scale was such that the blind starkness of noon rather than dawn or dusk did it best justice.
The fields in the eastern country were mainly sugarcane. They had a blessed symmetry, canals and paths at right angles to one another and the fields engraved in perfect strips. Men in longboots bent at the waist, cut the crop; others gathered and loaded it into iron punts. Oxen sometimes pulled these iron punts on the canal, towards an industrial-age factory that loomed in the distance, still looking like a thing of wonder as it must have done a hundred years ago, then so futuristic, now so anachronistic.
The western country was more rice paddy. The crop was short and you could see across sweeping expanses of field broken only by lines of palm. Depending on the time of the year the fields could be dry or lush or submerged in brown water that mirrored the fallen sky, and depending on the time of the day the sun painted them in very different hues. Sometimes you could drive past fields with different varieties of seeds shied at slightly different times so that they covered the entire gradient from straw yellow to fresh green. A donkey might be loitering by the edge of the field, a bright blue saki pecking with obsessive jerks at a stray fruit. A woman might be cleaning fish by the trench, and further up the trench, a boy having his hair cut in the Indian way, sitting on his haunches, and in the backyard of the house a man might be boiling coconut shavings to make oil, and these transplanted Indian scenes stirred in me always a sense of broken wonder.
The country was dotted with the moody houses of Guyana. These houses were not as dramatic as those of Georgetown. Except for the old plantation houses, the grand ones were rarely so grand, whereas the bruck-up ones appeared merely poor or abandoned rather than disfigured by slow tragedy, though they could appear in the most surprising states of disrepair, the more elaborate or absurd the construction, it seemed, the more ruined its fate. The new concrete houses were painted pink or blue or green – neither pastel nor primary, but kind of failed bright colours. Inside, the Indian aesthetic was intact in its predilection for dark tapestries and too many cabinets. The balconies were often balustraded, and there hung in them lovely hammocks, an assimilation from Amerindians. I had read that the front balcony was more an Indian preference, but passing through a village I could never tell if it was an African village or an Indian village from the architecture alone.
Most of the living got done in the unwalled space below the house, the bottomhouse. Here were more hammocks, tables and benches for evening limes, children’s toys and cycles. The front yard would be aspill with flowering plants, hibiscus and frangipani and marigold and little jump-up-and-kiss, and maybe the odd low fruit bush, cherry, lime. Many Hindu households mounted jhandis, flags, on bamboo sticks, red, yellow, white – you would not find such a thick concentration of jhandis in any part of India – and sometimes the richer houses could have a short concrete mandir by the entrance.
What riches in the backyard! Everything grew in those little lots: shrubby pigeonpeas, low, leafy bhaji, purple boulanger, rows of squash on trellis, yam and sweet potato, aloe for skin and tulsi for prayer, and mango and coconut for the soul, and maybe a fowl coop too and fluorescent Polly squawking in her cage. The more enterprising working class families could live almost entirely off their backyard, off the magic of the land.
EVERYTHING starts with the land, and for so long I did not pay attention to this. This land of agricultural wonder, where you could spit into the earth and sprout a stalk, a grove, was once worthless swamp. Nothing grew on it but mangrove and mosquito. For centuries the Amerindian tribes had settled inland, and with good reason. The water was fresh. Fruit, palm and animals were aplenty. When the European invaders arrived, their first trading posts too were upriver, and there too were their first efforts at making plantations.
The danger of the coast was that it lay below sea level so the threat of flood was constant. In the enthusiastic conquests of rival invaders it was historical happenstance that the Dutch consolidated their hold over this particular malarial piece of New World coast. But not happenstance that they made a success of it. The mother country was like this; they knew how to master it.
The Dutch technique was to dig polders: to enclose swamp land, drain it, and reclaim it. It was a complex system, requiring a precise regulation of sea water in the front and swamp water at the back. It needed an extensive network of dams, canals and kokers – the sluice gates which, conveying the ideas of the elemental challenge of a low-lying land and a community meeting point, came to be an enduring Guyanese symbol, celebrated in paintings and poems.
The kokers, the canals – the charm of this unusual national architecture, pleasant and only casually intriguing at first – were the first clues to understanding the land and the settlement of the land; to understanding, for instance, that all the earth required for this colossal project would not move by itself.
It was a terrible amount of earth to move, estimated afterwards to be about one hundred million tonnes. It wasn’t about to be moved by the invaders. The upriver Amerindians proved too slippery and combative to be enslaved and anyhow were not available in sufficient numbers. As with elsewhere in the New World, slaves were imported from Africa for the task. There were no machines, of course. The slaves used bare hands and shovel, excavating the enormous polders, building thousands of miles of mud dams, digging the vast grids of trenches and canals – in short, creating the plantations on which they would then lead the life of slavery.
The brutality of this life was so total that it defies comprehension. Slaves were shipped across sometime in the middle of the seventeenth century – nobody knows exactly when and where from, but at any rate, as Booker T. Washington observed of his birth, it must have happened at some point and some place. We know who brought them, the Dutch West India Company, to whom Africans sold Africans for cloth and weapons and utensils, and we know how. They came dying, festering like slabs of meat, so much so that sharks began to follow the trail of blood from slaveships, changing their ocean migratory routes of centuries old. Upon arrival the slaves were stripped naked for examination and sold to planters. Care was taken to separate family, friends, tribes, anything that might provide a community. Thereafter they were worked worse, it is said, than beasts of burden: animals were scarcer. For this they received no wages and paltry rations. They were tortured at the merest excuse. They were whipped to tens, hundreds, and up to a thousand lashes though few bodies still remained alive. The whips were pickled in brine or chilli. Their body parts could be mutilated. They had no rights of any kind: not to family, to l
anguage, to names, to faith, to social order. Obliteration. When horror is of such a scale, it begins to feel like fantasy, and fantasy is the easier to digest.
European powers played out their games and their wars; slavery continued. The colonies of Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice came to be united under the British; slavery continued. And when at last it was abolished it 1834, it was not really abolished.
There were to be four years of ‘apprenticeship’. This cute term meant more slavery, but now limited to seven-and-a-half hours a day. It was only after these hours of slavery that apprentices were entitled to wages. Apprenticeship was not instituted for the slaves; it was for the planters. Abolition was inconvenient business. The planters needed time to make new arrangements. The slaves were never paid reparations: the planters were! Millions of pounds to the planters, not a cent to the slaves!
At the end of apprenticeship the emancipated slaves began to leave the plantations. Full of hope, they set about trying to settle the land, an aspiration not as simple as it sounds. They owned no property and had no right to any. The land belonged to the crown or to the planters. To keep the freedmen on the plantations they made it impossible, at first, for the Africans to buy land. Yet with the sugar industry in recession, with slave-produced American cotton more viable in the international market, and now a shortage in labour, many plantations had sunk or were sinking.
The Sly Company of People Who Care Page 10
