The Sly Company of People Who Care

by Rahul Bhattacharya

  Ramotar Seven Curry and I settled in the living room. The television was on. Several ladies, including Mrs Jagroop, and a bunch of children of varying ages reclined before the screen. It was on C.N. Sharma’s Channel 6. A Hindi movie was starting, Zehreela Insaan.

  It began with a young lad running a baby snake through a village. He is stopped by a schoolmaster who marvels that while others raise puppies and kittens this boy is raising the child of a snake. The boy is a terrible menace, throwing stones at the water pots on the heads of ladies and so forth. Masterji takes the boy home where Masterni has made him gaajar ka halwa. ‘Gaajar ka halwa – wah!’ exclaims the boy, spreading his hands.

  The frame froze here, subtitled, with the boy’s hands spread and mouth open, one of many such frozen frames in the title sequence.

  Mrs Jagroop wondered about gaajar ka halwa.

  Carrot, I told them.

  ‘But what is halwa?’

  ‘Is like sirnee. Muslim does make halwa in Trinidad. Carrot … hm … sound interesting,’ another lady offered.

  Mrs Jagroop was more forthright. ‘Is how you could put carrot in dah, man. Me would nah ever try such a thing.’

  After one of the freeze-frames the picture failed to recover. At first one thought the director was prolonging the pleasure of the effect. But slowly the screen was assaulted by dots and dashes, crackling with beeps and static, the film disappearing behind it like grass under snow. Some minutes later the dialogue – ‘You can take the poison out of a snake, but beware my poison,’ delivered by a young man – was replaced by the chatter of the network’s technical persons. Finally everything went blank. And then they put on some old Sharma programming.

  A living legend was Sharma, a smalltime politician with an immensely popular channel featuring mainly himself. Elections were expected in a few months, and Sharma was warming to the task. There he was, beloved hero with his white agitating hair, in a promo set to the ridiculous tune, ‘Let Justice Be For One and All’. It was a montage of visuals: Sharma wading through a flood, marching through a field, coursing up a river, thrusting a microphone before the face of a crying girl.

  ‘We wan justice, Mr Sharma,’ a black lady said to him, displaying for him the wretchedness of her shingled shack. Sharma yanked the door. It collapsed. He was triumphant. ‘See what the goverment doing about aaldis.’ He pointed to the choked trench by the house. ‘Look at that, Mr President, sheer garbage, sheer nastiness. And that is condom floating pon the trench. I hope Mr President is watching.’

  This inflamed Mrs Jagroop. ‘Is the president who put condom there?’ She turned to me.

  ‘You see how much encouragement blackpeople them get because of jokey mout like Sharma? The man so stupid he don’t know how to say the word becaas. He call it becaize. Yes, he say becaize for becaas.’

  She flipped the channel with the decisiveness of a vote.

  A black man in a black vest and white pants appeared before a fluorescent orange and green wallpaper adorned with bronchi, oesophagi and other tubes. Throughout the wallpaper shook; after several unsuccessful adjustments it was removed altogether.

  The man demonstrated a sitting position that prevented prostate cancer.

  ‘Cabblers in India sit in this position and ninety-eight per cent of them nah got prostrate cancer. That means, brothers, only two per cent cabbler in India got prostrate cancer.’

  ‘Truth?’ Mrs Jagroop asked me.

  ‘It is possible. It is possible. Sometimes you cannot trust statistics about cobblers though.’

  ‘Tha’is exactly what I’m saying. Especially when it come from blackman. How the hell e could know statistics of India?’

  The channel was flipped back to Sharma.

  The activism had given way to Guyana’s most-watched programme: Death Announcements.

  Death Announcements was a mesmerising affair. A mug shot would appear, a suitably oppressed picture of the dead, accompanied by a song, a bhajan, My Heart Will Go On, Suhaani Raat. Text would scroll alongside with the Sunrise and Sunset dates of the individual, with a brief eulogy and a list of relatives and friends categorised, down to, say, ‘Uncle-in-law of’.

  ‘Leff it there, leff it there,’ urged the other lady. ‘I miss de t’ing on Friday. I hear they put out a t’ing for, ahm, wuh e name, Nandlall, Nandlall wife granmudder.’

  The scrolls ran slow and sad. People had died in Middlesex, in Vryheid’s Lust, in Parfait Harmonie.

  All of a sudden Ramotar Seven Curry, benignly sipping his beer so far, announced this is a weddin day, it ain’t a day for watching the dead.

  We took plastic chairs out to the veranda. We put our feet up against the low wall and drank. We talked about wedding things. Ramotar Seven Curry spoke rapturously about groups of women rolling the belna in symphony on cooking night, the beauty, the harmony of it; he spoke of how naughtily the Lucknie (lokani dai!) might be placed between bride and groom on the first night. I’d been reading too, I said, and I loved and admired how they took the ship and crossed the sea and bam! everything overturned! Women, so scarce among the coolies, able to in certain cases, able to take dowry! Castes marrying each other! Brahmins conducting weddings for chamars! A historian called the process Chamarisation, and I went on in this manner, when a loud voice—

  ‘The man you been reading is a jackarse.’

  We turned towards a bearded gent with formidable eyes and rings, his fingers clasped before his chin.

  ‘A jackarse,’ he repeated.

  I was taken aback.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘What you are saying, basically, is that we have forgotten our social organisation, which is the most ancient and scientific organisation the world has seen.’

  ‘What I am saying is that hierarchy matters less here. I can see that without a book. It’s a good thing. Like at the wedding, rich and poor people hang out together, drink and chat. India is, you know, paralysed by hierarchy.’

  ‘But what you say is insulting to us as Guyanese and Hindus. You have to understand. They killed our language. They made us bury our dead like them. They made us go to mandir on Sunday like them. Made us get maar’d on Sunday like them. But our culture, our religion, our order, has survived.’

  ‘That is not what I’m—’

  Things might have gone anywhere from here; but Ramotar Seven Curry introduced us. The man was a rice-mill owner and a pandit, though not a smalltime performing pandit. He was an important member of the Guyana Hindu Dharmic Sabha. We spoke about rice seasons and the price of rice nowadays.

  The drinking continued. No break was permissible. Someone or the other came by and topped you up. I could not keep up with the goliaths. As dusk began to descend over Canal no. 1, and though the sandflies had begun to bite, I fell asleep in the chair.

  I opened my eyes to Ramotar Seven Curry’s urgings – he had an effortlessly loud delivery, rumbling up from his vat – ‘Raise up, raise up, next place got to attend.’

  He praised me for sleeping so soundly while sitting.

  ‘This is nothing,’ I said. ‘My grandmother knew how to sleep standing.’

  ‘Long-time fellas had a lot of skills, you know. Many many skills and techniques that you don’t see now. I would like, railly an truly, to reintroduce some of these techniques for the younger generation. The younger fellas must realise it. Say if you granmudder could teach youth them to sleep standing, that is a skill for life. Not just for work or play, but for life.’

  People got into vehicles and drove over to Canal no. 2, ten or fifteen minutes away. This was a Muslim wedding, the boy’s side lime, the McDooms – from Makhdoom I guessed. I ate beef curry and rice and dhal and baiganee. Ramotar Seven Curry did not eat the beef. We took shots by the gate and proceeded back to Canal no. 1, to the boy’s side lime of the wedding we had attended in the morning.

  By now things were no longer distinguishable. The scene seemed the same; a canal by a thin mud road, a high wedding house, balloons, streamers, a Banks tent over
the yard, dancing in the front yard, food in the backyard. Further the same people appeared to be dancing at both the Canal no. 1 and the Canal no. 2 houses.

  People wore striped T-shirts with caps. They wore long shorts and half-buttoned shirts. Some were in glittery suits. Women wore sleeveless tops with long skirts or frocks or dresses with low necks. Some wore loose spaghetti-strap chiffon dresses.

  The house rattled with the Bhojpuri orchestration of socachutney. To the ear chutney had the quality of a racket, a particular kind of clanging racket. I say this as pure description. Here came the harmonium, tassa and synthesised beats of the new hit Mor Tor. Lawa milaye, sakhi lawa milaye, from the old ceremony song: the exchange of rice grains before a wedding, Mor and Tor, mine and yours, mixing together. Give me yours, I’ll give you mine. Ask a youth what he thinks Mor Tor means, and he will point to his thrusting groin: ‘Is like motor, know what I saying?’

  The dancing picked up. The main thing about East Indian dancing was to twirl your hands. You could be putting on a heavy winedown, you could be shuffling on your toes, but so long as the wrists were cocked and the hands were twirling and the fingers were making designs it bore the stamp of an Indian dance.

  Ramotar Seven Curry was in his element, peaking through long years of experience at the right time of the night. He cracked loud jokes. One minute he was dancing with a stranger’s nani, next moment with another’s toddler.

  He encouraged me to dance with a young girl with long lustrous hair in a red crepe dress and black stilettos, and we did and she asked if there was any chance I could introduce her some day to the actor Arjun Rampal. Of course, I said, I writin a film for him next, would you like a part too? Well, only if it across him. Soon she left with her family. It was only weddings she was allowed to attend.

  I looked around for Ramotar Seven Curry. I could see his blurring shape in the crowd.

  A youthman staggered up to me. He handed me a drink. I took it.

  ‘You know how much Banks I could drink?’

  What a riddle! I applied my mind thoroughly.

  Searching through my experiences it occurred to me that I had been five months in Guyana. It stunned me. I had arrived in the wet season. A supposedly dry season had gone; another wet season had begun. It was June. My intonations were changing. My hair was cut different. I had gotten accustomed to knocking about doing nothing.

  ‘Like you thinking hard, buddeh.’

  I reapplied myself to the task.

  I recalled that I had seen three men in Berbice wash down four cases of Banks. That made thirty-two each. To be safe, I added a few to the number.

  ‘Thirty-nine.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Forty-seven?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Eighty-one!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How much then?’

  ‘Hanesly? Countless.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He went off and returned with two fresh bottles. He clicked the caps open with his teeth.

  ‘Watch.’

  He finished the first in two gulps, flung the bottle by a tulsi plant at the fence, repeated the feat with the next, and began to exchange fist bumps with me.

  Another man came over and said, ‘Ei, brudder, Seven Kori he tell me you waak from India. Fuh trut?’

  ‘Trut.’

  ‘Trut! Shake me hand, brudder. We’s have the same blood you know. Blood I taakin bout.’

  He pushed aside the youthman, put his arm around me and whisked me off towards the paling.

  ‘Is one favour I ga fuh ask you, buddeh.’

  ‘You ask, man.’

  ‘Me wan a beautiful wife from India.’

  ‘But you got so much beautiful girls right here in Canal.’

  ‘Abidese ah love gals from India. Aishwaarya, Raani. Me gat a lil condition, buddeh. Nobody must knock am already. Me ga fuh be the furst to knock am. I thank you, brudder frum India, for this favour. Like Hanuman you gah fuh kerry the message an fetch she.’

  Before discussions could proceed further we were distracted by an emotional dispute just outside the gate. We went to see. The quarrel was at a critical juncture. The question was whether one man had chucked the other or not. A chuck was a kind of shove with terribly humiliating implications. Both men, one in a half-unbuttoned shirt and a moustache, and another with dilated almost-crying eyes, knew how pivotal this question was. The pendulum of honour swayed delicately.

  ‘Danny, you know me since when, man, and you chuck me?’ said the man with the almost-crying eyes.

  ‘I chuck you? I chuck you?’

  ‘You chuck me, Danny. Is chuck you chuck me.’

  Suck-teeth. ‘If I chucked you, you rass be drownin in the canal behine dey.’ Suck-teeth, suck-teeth, suck-teeth.

  ‘I goin bust yo fockin head, Danny, if you chuck me again.’

  ‘Is chuck I chucked you? You call that chuck!’

  Voices rose. The congregation egged on a fight. Suck-teeth rent the air. It appeared that something dramatic might occur when—

  ‘Nuh row, nuh row, nuh row,’ Ramotar Seven Curry burst through the gates with arms open.

  Even though he was an extremely short man with extremely short arms, he managed to embrace the quarrelling men and jam them up against each other.

  He said many things that I could not catch. But the result was that the rowing men shook hands. The gathering dissipated, a little disappointed. Ramotar Seven Curry beamed.

  ‘See what it about?’ he told me. ‘People in there dancin and fetin. Out here there a little misunderstanding take place. But it’s a wedding night, and one of those fellas got to realise that and say, “man, it be so-and-so pickney wedding night, and we must not be going on so.” It’s a union time. Fellas got to realise that in the family there will be some fighting. But railly an truly, is not how you fall out but how you come together, right, that is what is family.’

  Ramotar Seven Curry shone with sweat and coconut oil that streamed down his forehead and on to his thick cheeks. Above us the stars were out in huge numbers. They failed to reflect in the long dark canals. For no apparent reason we began to walk down the muddy road along the canal, passing dark trees and frail houses darkened by the exodus to the wedding house.

  A star broke and fell into the canal; it dissolved into the black water.

  A little bat slammed against Ramotar Seven Curry’s chest and dropped dead.

  ‘Now look how that bat fool heself,’ he chuckled. He picked up the creature and laid it by the side of the road, tenderly spreading its wings.

  ‘I could tell you one fact about myself,’ he said.

  Unusually, he waited to be prompted.

  ‘Go for it, man, Seven Kori.’

  ‘There was a time they would call me Dig Dutty. Ramotar Dig Dutty. Was me alone among sheer gals going for the gal functions. They singing and dancing, you know the long-time wedding songs they got, real sexual. Plenty sugarcake gals.’

  He looked embarrassed. I prompted him again.

  ‘What happen then, Seven Kori?’

  ‘You could imagine how much dutty I dig! You understand, right? Eh he. Of course, I was a young fella then. When a fella young, he looks at the world in a very very different way. But the beautiful aspect of a wedding is that the bai grow up. He change. So after my own wedding I request everybody, “hear nuh everyone, it’s time you give me a more respectable call name.”

  ‘Cause I believe in this institution of marriage, man. Railly an truly, we getting reckless, man, in this society. Even the Indians. Not only that, I will say even the Hindus. That is what concern me. All this thing about reputed wife and thing. In long-time days the white man never accept Indian ceremony. Nobody register and that is how you get the concept of reputed. But, railly an truly, why do we need repute today? That is what I ask people. Is it a good repute or a nasty repute?

  ‘We learning the wrong things, man, we adapting to blackman principles. You find Indian girls now going with blackman too. Is the men to
o who got to share the blame. Yes! The fellas got to own up for letting she slip away … Well, comin back to my story, since that time they change it from Ramotar Dig Dutty to Ramotar Seven Curry.’

  We must have walked a mile or more along the canal. Our styrofoam cups had run dry.

  In the distance a pair of white lights shot through the heavy muddy dark. We hitched a ride back to the wedding house with a family whose own weddings Ramotar Seven Curry had once graced.

  3

  LIFE in the country was slow, but upon reflection a fair amount happened in those days. There was a period, for instance, when I returned to the Corentyne, and here to my great regret I missed a grand bank heist by no more than ten minutes.

  Very early that morning I had left for the canefields with Moses Moonsee the ratcatcher. Now a name like that breaks open the past straight away. As we hurtled in the truck through the fraying dark, I thought of the forebear of Moses Moonsee, a lettered munshi, a Mughal clerk, who had fled to a distant continent to do manual labour, and whose eventual progeny caught rats. One sees what one wants to see. As Roald Dahl’s ratcatcher looked like a rat, so Moses the ratcatcher looked to me pure munshi. I gave him spectacles when he had none. He wore an old pair of jeans, yet those legs appeared to me cross-legged and housed in a dhoti. The object in his hands was a 22-inch, but it was to me a tall register.

  Perhaps too it was the hallucinatory hour before dayclean, damp, diffuse, with scattered flares of psychedelia, given to invert thoughts.

  As suddenly as dusk turns to night by the equator, so dawn turns to day in a snap. And as we bumped along the trail into the backdam the world had turned yellow-blue, cruel and dazzling.

  The cutters and loaders and chainboys and the rest of the cast glistened in the morning. Moonsee set about his task, loading a can of spray on his back and walking through rows of burnt canestalk. It was only once the cane had been burnt for cutting that the rough charred stalks betrayed the harshness beneath the order – why the masters preferred coolies with horns on the base of their fingers. Amid the sweating scything work was the animation that made labour a social place. A drunk worker vomited with practised clarity. ‘Watch, you liver faal out,’ somebody cautioned. A man came clumping from afar holding up an enormous camoudi. ‘The man scarch! The man scarch! But the man nah dead!’ The reptile was placed on the ground. It was nine or ten feet long, thick, part burnt, part ash, part golden-green, twitching. Moonsee himself arrived with a set of dead rats, laying them out in incremental sizes. ‘Watch, abi get a family heye.’ He jabbed each in the chest with his 22-inch. ‘Dah daddy, dah mammy, dah pickney, dah nex pickney.’