The Sly Company of People Who Care

by Rahul Bhattacharya

  And then bam, it’s back! ‘Blackman is like an alligator. They just done eat from you hand and they want to bite you hand. You got to fight fire with fire. You know how they treat them in South Africa? That was the right thing to do.’

  Hatred, disillusionment have permeated the Singh household. It isn’t race alone. A young Singh, a soft-spoken, likeable girl, a former volunteer for the big Diwali motorcade on the La Bonne Intention community grounds, has concluded that Guyana does not deserve to be a country. Nothing is done properly here. No matter what you say about them, white man know how to maintain thing. Best to give it back to the UK, or let USA take it over, as though both countries are actively bidding for the honour. In any event, she is out of here asap, like her sister before her. At present she can express her disgust in minor ways, by, say, supporting not just the Indian team in cricket, but any team against West Indies. What is race is race, what isn’t race, that’s race too.

  Fear and anxiety govern every move of the Singhs. They knew the assassinated minister. They have family who had their business burnt, acquaintances who have been robbed and terrorised, killed. It may very well happen to them. Chores in town are never done by oneself. They are never performed simultaneously, but sequentially, so that nobody is ever alone, even if it means somebody waiting in the car hour upon hour.

  The maid at the Singh household is Melissa, a ‘thick, red gal’ of admirable loyalty, though not above the odd petty filch. In the house she carries the contamination of the low. The Singhs do not let her handle food; though unlike in India, she is permitted to sit on chairs and have a cup of coffee with the missus – indeed, the casualness of the relationship would scandalise people in the geographical India. Melissa has a smiling face, a busy, pleasant air, and altogether not unattractive looks. Mr Singh calls her ‘ugly duckling’. She laughs every time he says this. And Melissa, red and not black, will herself find a way to loudly berate ‘them stupid black people’ at every available opportunity.

  Mr Singh runs a prosperous immigration agency (it was he, a friend of a cricket administrator, who had advised me on my visa). He has recently started exporting pepper sauce and curry powder. He is doing better than ever before. The property has too much on it, refrigerators, televisions, SUVs, cash, jewellery. Every new acquisition is a source of greater anxiety. The health problems are piling up for Mr Singh: breathing problems, ‘black eye’, blood sugar – ‘this bloodsugar something eh, too low and you got a problem, too high and you get a next set of problem.’

  And it emerges that this man, proud of proclaiming he is Kshatriya, a warrior, who will refuse to bow down before the blackman, ‘Fire with fire. I can show blackman AK, make him smell AK,’ is in fact a frighten likkle kitty! He cannot bear being alone, and on those occasions when circumstances have conspired to such an end, he will shut every door and window and fester inside with his fears. He is massaged every day with various lotions to keep his skin soft and fair it up as much as possible. He is contemplating emigrating, to UK, Canada, USA, anywhere, but never to India, no: ‘They does treat we like we is blackman.’

  CONSIDER too Akingbade, who goes by this single epithet, Yoruba for ‘brave one who wears the crown’. As we walk down the line on East Coast Demerara, not many miles from the home of the Singhs, old friends call out to him as Charles. ‘Can I help it if certain ignorant specimens insist on calling me by my slave name?’

  Mr Singh I had chanced on, but Akingbade I sought out. I tell him so. I had read his letters to the editor. Mr Singh called him a propagandist.

  He is a heavyset, slow, tentative man, grey facial hair, in worndown mocassins, crushed black denim and a bright green dashiki. His hair is in a fro, his spectacles are thick and black, the styles of his hero, Walter Rodney, the great intellectual and activist assassinated during the reign of the dictator. But Akingbade has long departed from Rodney’s non-racial agitation. He aligns himself with the party thought responsible for the death of his one-time hero. It is the ultimate indictment of Guyana.

  There is much that is inspiring in Akingbade’s African pride, the reclaiming of the name, the garment, his interest in old African cultures – the medicinal remedies, the soirées, the drumming sessions. But it has come in this instance with a blindness.

  He cannot refer to Five for Freedom as criminals. They are exactly what the name says, freedom fighters. To him the crime spree was not a crime spree but an ‘armed African resistance’, a just response to police and state repression. The murders, abductions, arson, sexual violations against an ethnic community – it is not revolting, it is revolution. ‘A necessary and inevitable corrective.’

  He points out that African petty criminals are executed or jailed but the drug barons, architects of the narco economy, are allowed to roam free. ‘Twenty-five metric tonnes of cocaine pass through the country every year. They have not made a seizure greater than ten kilos. They are apprehending the mules, the cargos are sailing through. The pickpocket is caught. The dons are safe, building their empires on blood money.

  ‘Resistance,’ he says, making his thick hands into fists. ‘Resistance by any means.’

  He considers me not adversarially, but cautiously. He cannot be candid with me as the Indians are (who not only assume I’m on their side but that I have come specifically to bear witness to their persecution). So when talk turns to the black academic who put out the extraordinary thesis that an aim of supplanted Hinduism on these shores was the extermination of the black race, he does not argue in its favour. Yet he cannot bring himself to condemn it. Instead his admonishment is reserved for the ethnic relations commission which had the publication banned. ‘It is systemic. It is systemic.’

  Anything could be inverted, corrupted.

  I thought of something I had seen in one of the Five for Freedom handbills. The escapees, it said, would ‘fight for the African-Guyanese nation just as the sea bandits Walter Raleigh, Francis Drake and Henry Morgan had fought for England and been honoured by the queen’.

  And I thought, going back to the music, of a Tosh song, Here Comes the Judge. In the special way of reggae it is able to confront tragedy with a mix of rage and humour. Tosh plays the judge, and this judge ‘have no mercy’. One by one he calls the names of the mighty explorers and privateers who pillaged the Caribbean, among them Francis Drake and Henry Morgan. Each answers in a splendidly exaggerated English accent, ‘yeh-es sir’. They are made to plead guilty to six counts, from robbing and raping Africa to teaching black people to hate themselves. But we were forced, protest the invaders in their accents. Contempt!, pronounces the judge, and orders their hanging by the tongue.

  What it had come to! Without irony, Africanists looking to Drake and Morgan for inspiration.

  Walking down the line from Akingbade’s village, Bachelor’s Adventure, we reached Buxton. It was an old, proud community, named after an abolitionist, the second of the cooperative villages freedmen had formed a century and a half before. Over the years it had supplied Guyana with some of its most enlightened minds.

  It was here the jailbreakers had been sheltered. Following a big bust there would be a lime in the village, food and drinks for all. The perpetrators were kings of the limes. Youthmen saw the flash, the respect in this. Then came the implosion. Petty disputes began to be settled by the gun. The reluctant were dealt with; families, their houses burnt, were forced to flee. The very name Buxton became synonymous with terror. Eventually the army set up a base in the village and remained a presence, a community imprisoned by its madness.

  We stopped at a crossroads. The asphalt road ran parallel to the coast, a road which was routinely dug up to slow the entry of police vehicles and halt passenger vehicles to plunder – the road to avoid which Indians who could afford it flew rather than drove, professing the desire to ‘piss pon Buxton’ as they went over.

  Perpendicular to the asphalt a red mud track went deep into the village, till the backlands, where initially the criminals and then the army had set up their camps
.

  At the crossroads itself was an abandoned rumshop and general store, low and white, its walls covered in half-hearted graffiti, full with youth idling flush in the middle of a weekday, lying on tables barechested, chatting, playing cards, smoking weed.

  They would be ‘glad fuh work,’ they said, ‘but nobody going touch we cause we from Buxton.’ Among them was a young policeman who had quit the force after the spate of police executions. He was doing nothing much now. Another had a brother who had been shot dead by the armed forces. The friend of one was named recently in a high-profile murder. His mother refused him legal representation. ‘He made his choices. He lived his life,’ she said. The boy was twenty-one.

  And there among the blacklisted youth on an idle corner in Buxton, or in the racial hothouse of the Singhs, things were bared with a bitter simplicity. A section of society was disillusioned with the state so they turned to crime. The state’s response was to suppress the movement with more crime. Every act of crime further ruptured the division. Every rupture delivered new folkheroes, demigods, Five for Freedom versus Phantom, Blackie and his heirs versus Roger Khan and his cohorts, each thing seeded from something before, and that from something before, going back to the time the Africans and the Indians were put down brutally on the foreshore of South America.

  Beneath the everydayness this was the Guyana I had stepped into. How innocent Baby was in all this! I thought of him, of Menzies Landing, lives blowing in and out, the world turning, up to its tricks.

  PART THREE

  1

  BUTCHER the barber – for he was once the former, an antecedence apparent in his blade work – Butcher was pleased when I told him I’d moved houses to Sheriff Street. ‘Nuff fairos on Sheriff Street.’

  Butcher liked talking about women arguably more than the next banna, in particular declaring that, ‘I doesn’t have a race conscience about any gal – as long as she have clear skin.’ So when Butcher said fairos he meant hookers not queers. There were some of the latter too on Sheriff Street, like the chubby orange-haired man in the blue flatshop with his painted black eyebrows thick like two fingers. That man was a delight, cussing customers for style, thrilling them as he did. The queen of the Sheriff Street fairos, however, was a queer, a transvestite once Salman and now Misha. She reigned at the other flatshop, below the short-time. She was fine like a reed, tall, with a fabulous sprinkle of glitter over a face that was thin, bony, cruel. Her stubble was green, her voice throaty. Men were served drinks by the two female hookers, an Indian and an African, each of ordinary appeal – but their souls were lost to proud, thin Misha, surrounded already by hungrier men. They stared at her, enchanted. Neutralised by spirit they went upstairs with one of the other girls and got lashed off for three grand or boned for seven.

  This was the street, the Georgetown strip: fairos, nightclubs, rumshops, cookshops, taxi companies and restaurants, mostly Chinese, interspersed with regular Guyanese homes. A sad little strip. Its obscenities were small; its excesses were nothing. There were no streetlights. The odd neon glowed as a failed reminder. Herons and egrets visited the lily and styrofoam in the trenches. Donkey carts, dray carts, horse carts, and sometimes horses devoid of carts plied up and down the strip; so too the bling bling; so too big snorting trucks, for Sheriff Street was a thoroughfare between the slim perpendicular highways along the Atlantic and the Demerara. Wild eddo with their wild heart-shaped leaves gushed forth from the margins. And how does anyone explain to anyone, let alone to Mr Bhombal, that you love this place because look, here is eddo growing wild by the trenches on the nightstrip?

  THOUGH my move from Kitty came soon after the Joint Services call, that had nothing do with it. They had arrived at 5 a.m., thumping with menace on the wooden wall. I was so certain it was a dream I may have poked the first soldier to check if he was real. He responded with admirable restraint, seeing how he had AK and thing at his disposal. He was very polite – ‘Excuse the boots,’ he said before entering. Behind him were a dozen armed ranks in camouflage, except for a dainty man in civvies, a specialist searcher. That man stuck his hands up with impeccable courtesy to indicate that he had nothing which could be planted. It was an important gesture. The chief of police himself had been implicated in a sting by Roger Khan, issuing the stitch-up instruction, ‘Put drugs pon she.’

  They searched every tenement, to a variety of reactions. Uncle Lance denounced them in his gravelly morning voice; Kwesi’s mother, frightened her son had been up to something, sat quiet on the bench with dignity; Hassa never woke up – and when they kicked open the door word was he continued sleeping. Conversation about the raid ran hot for days afterwards. Kwesi’s mother was not alone in worrying that Kwesi must have made trouble. Some identified a shifty chap from Pike Street as the ‘cochore’, the informer, who had tried to out Kwesi. Kwesi’s alleged crimes ran from ganja trafficking to falling in with the Agricola gang. But the boy was legal.

  Nobody ever found out what the raid was for. Or so I thought. Afterwards Uncle Lance told me that ‘certain members, and I will not call their names’, believed that it was I who was being investigated. For cocaine.

  But the raid was a pleasant enough adventure. It was the small things which were accumulating. The noise from downstairs, the quarrels seeping up through the boards, the wailing children and yelping pups over the tin. The bed was breaking, the floor was rotting, the stove had to be tilted in a manner of angles before being lit. Mosquitoes devoured me with an ecstasy that crossed the last boundaries of perversion: once they ate my nipple. It happens suddenly that man loses the forbearance to hold together the small things.

  There was more to it, I think. I had in that place begun to feel myself painted into a corner. As I’d started as a watcher and listener, that had become my role. This disturbed me. Lancy could luxuriate in his environment, sitting in his vest, launching broadsides, napping humidly. Kwesi could seek fake jewellery, mend the odd wire, launch daily a bid for a girl, a perfect logic to his days. Rabindranauth Latchman, recently relieved of his wife, could play sugardaddy in the sportsbar. About my own place I had begun to feel depressed.

  How sorry to think that here where Africans, Indians, Portuguese and Chinese had arrived and turned themselves into one thing or another, had sired between them entire new racial specimen, a place where a munshi could turn ratcatcher and vice versa, where vulgarity was the lens to life, I had allowed myself to remain myself.

  My first instinct was to think of travel. My eyes scanned the large Guyana wall map procured from the Lands and Surveys Commission. Leaf-vein streaks of blue ran through it like electricity. Past the rivers to the west the dotted border gave tantalisingly to the curve of letters, prolonged and syllabic, Venezuela; for now I decided to simply move houses.

  It was about halfway through the year. Amid rambles in the countryside, I rifled through the classifieds, newspaper days of Roger Khan.

  On my final day in Kitty I rose at the same hour that the ranks had come. It was raining. Through the grille at the back the raining morning looked so wet and beautiful. Things were purplish silver. Two kiskadees tangled yellow on the zinc beneath the whitey tree. The leaves of the welder’s breadfruit tree made shapes in the wind. In the other yard fowl-cock went off like a cavalcade of sirens.

  Goodbye alyou.

  ODDLY I became good friends with Uncle Lance after I moved. I spotted him one day from the balcony, proceeding up Sheriff Street with short bumping steps. He was in trousers, shirt, shoes and a cap. It was the first time I had seen him in anything other than boxers, vest and rubber slippers. Just like that a man is made anew. Till that instance it had never occurred to me that Uncle Lance was a person of the wider world, that he may have a back story, or family, that he might have errands to run, that he could be seen passing on a road. To see Uncle Lance that day was in some way to see him for the first time. I invited him up for a bounce of rum.

  How different he was! I had never before considered Uncle Lance’s age. It was his temp
er rather than his age that one absorbed – the flamboyance, wit, wisdom. It had the effect of what people call evergreen. But now he felt distinctly deciduous; dry, but for the sweat on his face. The sweat did not trickle. It lodged in his wrinkles, which were deep rather than many, bringing emphasis to them. His chin, a small, rounded piece, was baggier than I had noticed before, as though a blob of air had leaked into it. When he took off his cap, his hair, wet with sweat and combed back, had formed itself into thin bands through which shone scalp. He was breathing hard. He looked old.

  He talked so differently too! I had not heard Uncle speak in a low voice ever. He attracted the ears of anybody in the vicinity; indeed, it was anybody in the vicinity he was addressing. People congregated around him when he made jokes or lambasted the government; they continued a little longer hanging clothes on the fence or draining rice-water in the yard. So it was a shock to hear Uncle Lance say something as prosaic as, ‘Nice place you got here.’

  It was a nice place. I had got a deal on it because the landlady, who had migrated and operated via a handyman, had that keenest of Guyanese convictions: that Guyanese are not to be trusted. She only let out to foreigners. But the house was neither upscale nor quiet nor large enough for foreigners. It had lain empty a long time. And still, because the previous tenants were foreigners, it was a home furnished down to a toaster.

  We stood in the thick balcony breeze, five-year and coconut in hand, watching Sheriff Street. Neither of us said anything.

  Below, a tattered man who passed every day at this hour rummaged through the rubbish bin. He found remnants of fried bangamary and plantain chips from the fish shop. He went along his way.