The Sly Company of People Who Care

by Rahul Bhattacharya

  Some planters sold small parcels of land to freedmen, and a cluster of these became a proprietary village. Other freedmen conceived the idea, the old African idea, of the village as a collective, of and by the people. They would pool their resources together to establish cooperative villages. Each person would be entitled to an equal share of arable land, and involved in the running of the village.

  With virtually no money for their lifetime of labour, with no money in reparations, they had little purchasing power. But by selling crops during slavery, earning a coin here and a coin there during the years of apprenticeship, they had made some savings. Eighty-three freedpersons pooled these together and raised enough to buy the former cotton plantation of Northbrook (and renamed it, with the imagination of the colonised, Victoria). The money, the saved coins, still muddy after being unearthed from their hiding spots, they took across in clanging wheelbarrows to cheering in the streets.

  Buoyed by this success, the collectivist movement caught on. More struggling estates were purchased by emancipated slaves, more villages formed. The residents ran their own affairs, often with a degree of enlightenment: for instance, women had the right to stand for and vote in committee elections. In this manner was born the first civil organisation in the land, a stark contrast to the bloody plantation society. It was too improbable to last.

  With each successive purchase the planters began to raise their price; each successive village became harder to form. After the effort required to purchase land and establish villages, the Africans were on the brink of penury. Above this they were taxed. And these taxes, latterly, were channelled largely towards bringing in indentured labour – the next step in the evolution from slavery – from Portuguese Madeira, from China, from other West Indian colonies, even from Africa, but primarily from India. This too was a blow. It was felt that the supply of cheap overseas labour depressed wages for the freelance Africans. The antagonism was instant.

  There were other troubles too. The government did not provide for nor assist in drainage and dykes, the critical necessities of Guyanese coastal life. Quite the opposite. To keep the freedmen bound to the estate, planters were known to release water to flood village farmlands.

  The dream was untenable. Not long after it had begun the village movement stuttered, struggled, and finally died. African settlement of the coastal country had been partial. Some went off into the interior on gold or balata missions, and later to the bauxite works up the Demerara. Many went into Georgetown and New Amsterdam to seek town employment: they became porters, carpenters, welders, hucksters. Most of them had already become Christians. They slowly integrated with the urban white and mixed populations, took to education, and over time there emerged among them a professional class: low-level civil servants, policemen, nurses, teachers – Western, respectable, but largely a serving class.

  MEANWHILE ship upon ship of coolies from India kept coming – and kept coming steadily for almost another eighty years, by which time they outnumbered the Africans in Guyana. It is a forgotten journey; few, even in India, are now aware of it. The history was too minor compared to slavery and the Middle Passage, its damage not so epic.

  The ships sailed from Calcutta, and a few from Madras. The immigrants were drawn mainly from the peasant population in the Gangetic plains of the United Provinces – modern-day Uttar Pradesh and Bihar – and a minority from the presidencies of Bengal and Madras. They were mostly young and middle-aged, mostly male (which led to the sensation of ‘wife murders’ arising from jealousy), mostly Hindu, and mostly taken from the agricultural castes, lower castes and outcastes. The largest caste groups were the chamars, the lowly leather workers, and the ahirs, the cowherds. What was common to them was the fate they were escaping: the famines and revolts, the poverty and destitution of British India. Making their way, that is, from the mess of one end of Empire to another.

  Lured by local recruiting agents and their tales about the land of gold, they set out to cross the seas. Crossing the sea: kalapani: this was the great Hindu taboo. It came with a loss of caste, of one’s place in the social order – but also, for the wretched, a liberation. When victuals among the castes spilled and mixed on the stormy waters, when each person was treated by the white man with equal indignity, the curse of being judged by birth was lifted. From here on they could be anything.

  But arriving on the plantations in Guyana, the coolies found themselves living a kind of captive life. They were not mere coolies but ‘bound’ coolies – physically bound to the estate. Leaving the premises was not allowed unless by special permission. There were improvements, of course, from the days of slavery. But work, especially in crop season, was gruelling; wages were low; health and sanitation poor. There was a contract, yes. But the predominantly illiterate coolies knew little of its scope and its loopholes. Besides, it was the contracts themselves that were exploitative. Apathy at work would result in criminal prosecution. You could be jailed for reporting late.

  The coolies were housed in the barracks in which slaves had lived – the niggeryards. In due course fresh ‘logies’ were built, and there was relative prestige in occupying the boundyard over the niggeryard. In construction these were not very different: long narrow mud-floored barracks with partitions at every ten feet, in which space the entire family would dwell. Every tenement in the logie had a bed, beneath which the labourers assiduously collected their savings in a canister, as did Mittelholzer’s cowherd in Corentyne Thunder.

  The canister contained the dream. One day they would return to India wealthy and happy. This was the fundamental right of indenture: to be returned home at the end of five or ten years, whatever the period of contract.

  And it is this which was hurting the masters most. The expense involved in continuously repatriating ships of coolies was too high. Further, each new lot of coolies had to be trained over again. Each person who returned took his savings, and so canister by canister drained the wealth in the colony.

  Something had to be done. As ever, the first attempt was devious. To make return harder, the rules of the game were changed so that the cost of the journey would be borne in part by the coolies themselves. This was deterrent, but not enough deterrent. Coolies kept repatriating. The crown scratched its head. It then decided to dangle the big carrot: for forfeiting their right to return home, the coolies were granted land.

  Not just granted land, but the land would be made good for settlement. In an ironic progression of history, where the crown had refused to sell to the freed slaves, it now bought out struggling estates for the coolies. Unlike earlier, it also assisted with drainage and irrigation. Every person older than ten was granted an acre and a house lot, those below ten given half that, so the inducement of two or three generations. It was not all that much, but enough to break out of the bondage of indenture and start life anew. And land was land.

  The Indians went about using their land and their expertise with the land to raise their lot, coming into wealth mainly through rice farming. Unlike the enslaved, they had been allowed to maintain family, religion, language. They re-created an India, a society of landlords and peasants and cowherds, of Diwali and Phagwah, mandirs and masjids and pujas and even, for a while, panchayats. They became people of the country – agricultural people in an economy of agriculture. And there began to circulate an adage, attributed to a leader who came from India, ominous to the African ear: ‘Who owns the land owns the country.’

  Of course, the deviousness of divide-and-rulers is accompanied by the pettiness of the divided and ruled. And here was the great friction of planets thrown off their orbits into a new orbit which they must now share. At worst the Africans saw the Indians as illiterate, barefooted, clannish heathens, misers who hoarded coins under their bed, who had strange customs and rituals and wore strange uncivilised costumes, who spread dung on the walls and floors of their homes, stunted, thin-limbed and shifty-eyed. At worst the Indians saw the Africans as the condemned: ugly, black of skin, with wide noses and twisted coir f
or hair, mimics of the white masters, without a language, culture or religion of their own, frivolous, promiscuous, violent, lazy.

  What remained now was a competition of suffering. The bitterest African ideologues even today labelled Indians ‘economic migrants’ who ought not to be considered Guyanese citizens. The Africans had built the land, built everything on it, and then been oppressed under the immense weight of everything they had built. How differently the Indians looked at it. As later entrants to the colony, they were at a natural disadvantage. The white man ruled them. The black man was hostile from the start. In the beginning they were considered scab labour, and afterwards their admission into the urban society of civil services and the professions was met with resistance. Yet they had worked hard and risen. They had set up businesses.

  As the settlements had developed there was an almost striped pattern to the coastal villages. A thin highway ran along them. You whizzed by them, now an Indian village, now, less frequently, an African village. At first I could only see the raw loveliness of these villages and all in between: the coconut groves, the grazing pastures, the blackas, the cemeteries, the broad-hat sky pressing down. Afterwards I could see only the small simmering histories they contained, canals and kokers, Africans who had perished swimming out into the ocean hoping to reach Africa, Indians who had lost their way trying to find India via the interior.

  Raw, accidental, those used to be my words. How long it took me to see that everything was brought here. The land which had seemed to me so raw, was created. The crop it was cultivated for, sugarcane, sugar once so precious it was a royal dowry, was transplanted. And the society which had seemed to me so accidental was once made in the most deliberately manufactured way possible.

  2

  THERE was a particular banna whose passion was attending weddings. Anytime you like, I was told, reach Ramotar Seven Curry, he’ll carry you. Guyanese are very good about this: everyone is welcome to a wedding, and it is possible I went to more that year than in my whole life before.

  He was an extremely short man, Ramotar Seven Curry, with a belly like a perfectly formed vat. Because of the vat he could not fit into shirts for a man of his height. Consequently he wore sizes where the sleeves tipped past his elbows, and the bottom dangled till his knees where, curiously, it flared like a frock. I found a way of inquiring about this. ‘The ole lady had a habit of stretching the base when she clip it on the line,’ he said. ‘Later I turn it to me own style.’ I never ever saw him, even indoors, without a cap. From the back and the sides vines of glistening black hair burst forth with the shine and scent of coconut oil.

  ‘There was one specific weekend when I attended nine weddings,’ Ramotar Seven Curry told me. ‘Now nine weddings for one day is a big big big number when you consider the size of the population of Guyana. More people would get maar’d in those days. A long time gone now. As a matter of fact, last month I attended one of them same people’s children wedding. The fella seek me out. He make cuntact with a certain individual known to the both of us and tell him, “lissun nuh man, you remember that gentleman who does attend everybody wedding? It would be my honour for him to attend me gal’s own.” That is when, man, you feel, railly an truly, this thing worth it.’

  The Hindu wedding fete was held over a weekend. On Friday was the girls’ dye night (haldi in India) or dig dutty (dig the earth, mattkor!). Saturday was cooking night at the girl’s. Monday night was kangan, which was the greatest feast of all. Sunday was the big day, the morning ceremonies of lawa and sindoor followed by the wedding (at the girl’s), and the wedding night lime (at the boy’s).

  One Sunday Ramotar Seven Curry, though he was from Lovely Lass in West Berbice, lined up a sweep of Canal nos. 1 and 2 on the west bank of the Demerara.

  I had been to Canal limes before. The Indians of Canal are the hardest-drinking people in Guyana, by extension the Caribbean, and thus the world. Them don’t make joke! They started at noon and rolled on till the next morning. The rum was emphasised with rum chutneys on the sound system, Rum Me Brother Seh (Bring De Firewater), Rum Till I Die, More Rum For Me (Listen Mr Shankar). They had crimson eyes, loose wrinkled faces, hard vaporous breathing. Those in their thirties looked in their fifties.

  This Sunday morning Ramotar Seven Curry carried me to the house of a Chinese man in Canal no. 1 who owned a bakery, grew rice, reared pigs, and had an equal love for the Indian political party and Indian women (his wife and his side t’ing were both, he said as if to flatter me, Indian). He pumped his fists a lot and, when high, I later learnt, as a gesture of friendly harassment dug his fingers into a secret spot just under the ribs of people. It left behind a sharp pain that kicked in minutes after one had recovered from the surprise of so unexpected a poke. For an hour we lashed rum at the man’s house.

  At noon, already a little tipsy, a dozen of us proceeded to the bride’s. Nobody among us actually knew the bride (and we were from the bride’s side). But somebody had spoken to her routinely on the telephone at the work place, someone else used to buy provisions at her mother’s shop, so it was all good.

  There was a crowd outside the wedding house. The cars were decorated with streamers and flowers. The yard was covered by a large Banks Beer tent. The wedding had finished. People were drinking outside, for there was to be no alcohol inside. The music carried till the gate and some folk, such as the man in a white suit and green velvet jersey, danced in the heat.

  Somewhere inside the dulaha and dulahin met guests; for one reason or another we did not see them. This did not perturb anyone. Around the remnants of the ceremonial square, elders sat on chairs with children on their laps. A heart cut out of shiny red paper was pasted on a cloth backdrop. Across the heart the couple’s names, Clint and Roseanne, were made with green and pink streamers.

  Tassa players arrived and struck up a tremendous beat. A man sweating rum removed his shirt and began to dance around the square in his vest. He was joined by four others. The elders with children on their laps watched sleepily.

  We went back to the hot gate and killed Banks. News came in from the backdam that King had badly mutilated his eight-year-old son with a tractor. The boy had gone out to hurry King back for the wedding. ‘The man try fuh close aff the tractor and it jook forward pon the bai.’ We anxiously made for the backdam to investigate. Instead, and I don’t know how this happened, we found ourselves in the backyard, waiting to be served seven curry.

  Seven curry was the Hindu ceremony food of Guyana and, as far as I could tell, a purely Guyanese term. Not even Trinidadians used it. The meal was served in a water lily leaf, closed like an enormous funnel, so beautiful mingling was inevitable: boiled rice with spicy achar with sweet pumpkin with fibrous katahar with eddo curry with green bhaji with hot channa with garlicked dhal. Ramotar Seven Curry and I went at our leaves with intense joy, sweating into them.

  ‘So this is the thing. How you like it? You get it like so in India?’

  ‘Not this exact combination usually.’

  ‘That is surprising … That is surprising indeed.’

  A seven curry, especially when sealed with parsad, made you want to sleep within moments. The usual way to overcome this sensation was to dunk cups of koolaid and begin dancing. Or else go out and hit shots of rum and begin dancing.

  However, Ramotar Seven Curry had mastered the art of pacing himself, and he decided we must leave. It would be in our best interests to move to another house down the road and throw back and gyaff while the sun hot.

  ‘How you leave ahready man, Seven Kori,’ somebody asked as we made our way out.

  Ramotar Seven Curry rested his hand on the man’s shoulder. ‘But if we don’t leave, brother, how we gon come back?’

  Having secured this logical victory, we went on to throw back and gyaff up the road as per plan.

  We were now in the house of Mr Jagroop. It was one of Canal’s few bungalows, which in Guyana went by the direct term, flathouse. Like all country Guyanese, Mr Jagroop was happy to be hospi
table. Inside people drank spirits with coconut water. Ramotar Seven Curry popped open a Banks and I went with Johnnie Walker and coconut water, a magnificent collusion.

  From the veranda rose the clacking sound of dominoes. A group of men sat around a table, drinking and picking from bowls of channa and raw mango sprinkled with pepper sauce. I had made forays into dominoes; I could never quite crack it, but I had grown fond of its din. Tickets slapping wood, it was the sound of the Caribbean, as organic to the landscape as rusted zinc. Here was life going on, it said. I liked as well the crooked shapes the tickets made on the table and how they could trail in any direction.

  The men played as if in a trance. Their world was contained in that square of tickets, calculations, rum and channa; all ambition, all escape lay therein. Any potential disturbances were dealt with mechanically. Mr Jagroop’s little daughter arrived bawling after having been scratched with a pencil by her younger brother. Mrs Jagroop followed her, squealing, ‘I ain able with this piece of terror,’ and dropped the topless boy on daddy-lap. Nobody paid the situation mind. Once he had played his turn Daddy hung the boy by his underpants and administered three or four cut-arse – pai! cha-pai! pai! – the spanks striking a vivid rhythm with the domino tickets. The boy scrambled off bawling towards his sister, who, in a benevolent twist, began to comfort him. Some minutes later Daddy brought closure to the incident by calling out a single word. The word was: ‘Com’. The boy came. He rested the boy on his belly, slapped down a ticket, issued a torrent of whispered kisses into the boy’s ear, ‘I gon buy you the paint set tomorrow, right.’ The boy scampered away again to his sister.