The Sly Company of People Who Care

by Rahul Bhattacharya

  He began to walk even as I descended the stairs. We walked a few minutes, over the stink canal to Drury Lane.

  ‘So here you got a little bird-racing going on, right by you,’ Uncle Lance said. He had remembered an old conversation from Kitty. On the grass embankment vendors sold seeds from damply spread sacks. Men stood around by the trench with cages. In them dark shadows of towa-towas and fire-reds flickered and danced. There were parked cars, a clean Sunday vibe. People stood in gyaffin formations, and gyaffin specked the Sunday air.

  ‘Nobody gamblin today,’ he said. ‘That is good, chap, cause let me tell you, gamblin is worse addiction than sweet woman. I learn it the hard way.’

  There was going to be no race, that was clear. It left me mildly puzzled as to why we were here. He climbed on to the boot of a car and gave himself a lethargic morning-stretch against the windscreen.

  There was a newspaper beside him. I browsed through it.

  Man Shortchanges Prostitute, Gets Severely Beaten

  Two Children Were Riding a Pregnant Donkey and Lashing It

  Cocaine in Cabbage: Mother of Three Remanded

  The short item about a pandit accused of larceny I read out to Uncle Lance.

  He gurgled like a child.

  ‘You ever seen pandit in action?’ he asked, quivering with laugh.

  ‘I been to weddings.’

  ‘That ain’t pandit, bai. That is just like clerk. Me show you what is pandit.’

  To my surprise he beckoned me into the car, still quivering, and we sputtered down Sheriff Street, past the back of the botanical gardens, past the rumshop that declared upfront that Malcolm X is a leader not a follower, and the giant lampshade which was the Church of the Transfiguration, through the tall palm of Le Repentir Cemetery and out on to the East Bank Highway.

  A short way out of Georgetown, aback a canefield, amid a cluster of jhandis beside a tangle of palmyra, he brought the car to a juddering halt.

  The mandir was in a covered yard, lined with waist-high idols. Inside this perimeter of idols a quartet of musicians struck up an uptempo bhajan. A pair of men played the dholak and the harmonium. A young girl went at a dhantal, a tall metal rod clanged with a piece of iron shaped like a horseshoe, an instrument developed in indenture as far as I could tell. Bhajan sunavo, baidyanath, a lady in a gaudy salwar kameez sang, O baba, puja karo baidyanath.

  Pandit was in his chambers. A group of people stood at the door, watching him at work. And from the door one got a close view of Pandit, a man with a harelip, white hair, broken teeth and fleshy breasts peeking through a Hawaiian shirt. He sat at a desk and considered the matter before him.

  The case was of a young boy dying of asthma. It was presented by three generations of ladies, possibly a grandma, ma and sister. Pandit began by making inquiries about the family and the property – a process in which he frequently closed his eyes, feigned anger and on occasion looked downright violated. The matter of the property he pursued further, its dimensions, its division, the strain on the family over the division, how the boundaries were aligned, which tree on which boundary. As he received the answers, his earthen face turned scarlet, his eyes shuttered tight, his breasts trembled and one cowered at the prospect of the final eruption. But he kept sustaining the build-up, going often to the terrifying brink but not beyond. One time he blew out two candles in a huff. Another time with an unexpected shout he summoned fresh cloves via a woman with bright lipstick and enormous cleavage, all the while keeping his eyes shut. Opening them at last, he created something on a notepad with abandon. It was the property.

  ‘Piece ah land they fightin fah. It causin all this destruction, this scatteration.’

  ‘Do sumthin nuh, Pandit,’ the sister pleaded, with the liberty of the young.

  ‘The thing gone too deep,’ Pandit replied.

  ‘Come nuh, Pandit,’ the mother joined in.

  The grandmother looked on with stoic fatalism.

  Pandit raised his voice.

  ‘The evil spirit going round-round round-round and it settle right here’ – he stabbed the pencil into the pad – ‘right here pun the eastern boundary, pun the noni tree.’

  He fixed his gaze, one by one, on each of the ladies.

  ‘The spirit weigh pun the bai. It press down pun he till he cyan breathe—’ he put his hands around his own neck and made large asphyxiating sounds, ‘and the same spirit going to kill alyou.’

  Silence.

  ‘Is true,’ the grandmother said at last. ‘He granfadder go dah way too.’

  Pandit adjusted his harelip into a pout; then, leaning forward, he delivered the blow.

  ‘The bai not goin fuh live. Me nah do it.’

  More silence, followed by the twinkle of tears. The situation deteriorated rapidly thereafter. I couldn’t tell exactly what was going on, but it felt fatal. Minutes later, when all seemed lost and it felt like the boy was already dead and the mother had let her forehead drop against the wooden table – that is when Pandit administered the turnaround.

  He would consider assisting. If the boy was still alive they were to return with barley, turmeric, and fifteen thousand in cash the next day.

  ‘Wha I like bout Pandit is he honest deh,’ the relieved mother said as they exited the chamber.

  ‘When pandit seh it he mean it,’ the sister concurred.

  ‘Trut. He not a man fuh give false hope. Da’is a thing to respeck in today daynage.’

  It was so massively Naipaulian that for long afterwards I suspected it was an elaborate wind-up, and the joke deh pon me.

  That afternoon, dispensing a slow rub to his dhal-belly, Uncle Lance not so much said as dictated the aphorism, ‘Bai, in Guyana it have pandit and it have bandit and sometimes it hard to tell the two apart.’

  Ever since, Uncle Lance and I called each other Pandit and Bandit, each using either name for the other.

  I LEARNT of Uncle Lance that he once had a wife who fled with a lover to the United States, that he had a son who worked there ‘programming computer’, and that he himself once ran a plasticwares shop in Kitty Market and thereafter a three-car taxi service – ‘such a roaring success that I could enjoy me a early retirement’. The last of these facts had a practical bearing on us.

  For there came a period that we devoted our Sundays to cookery. These days began with Uncle Lance appearing in a shaky white Toyota AT 192, one of his old taxis hired out to a friend through the week. With three short blows he’d announce his arrival at half past five. Off we’d go in the drizzling dayclean. He would lean suspiciously on the steering wheel as he drove, squinting at the windshield as if alarmed to find a world beyond it. He never ever pushed the needle beyond a hair’s breadth of 30 mph, an aspect I called attention to frequently.

  ‘You ain’t see me drive, Pandit. I could reach GT to Kwakwani in one hundred minutes. You know Kwakwani? You cyan know is where! You only bin here a couple of days! Is sheer bush. One hundred minutes, Georgetown to Kwakwani. O my foot heavy, O it made from lead. But you ga think for the fool on the road, right. That is what an upstart like you don’t un’stand.’

  ‘Nobody on the road, Lancelot.’

  ‘There was a time we had nice zebra crossing, right. They would paint am steady. Could see them stripes from a mile, eh, shining pon the road. The stripes now vanish, the zebra done exstink.’

  ‘Nobody on the road!’

  ‘Jackarses them does take an angle into the crossing. You not allowed that. You got to start one side of the crossing and walk over it till you reach other side. Now people cuttin in from any part of the road, causin one bundle of confusion and jumpin on the stripes, “look I’s pon the zebra.”’ Suck-teeth.

  By six a.m. the wharf at Meadow Bank was already crowded. Riches were everywhere, smell of river, stink of fish, blood in the morning. Alive in the drizzle, filthy-footed, we’d hustle with zeal. It was serious fare, no jokey trench fish, no hassar and hourie and patwa. Here were shark and trout, ten kilo gilbakas and their pricey hea
ds, whiskery catfish and highwata fish, mounds of shrimp and bangamary and packoos, their tails twitching behind stupidy flat heads like the fronts of woebegone school shoes. One watched the skinning of the packoo with sorrow. It was so honest and foolish. When a cutlass was introduced into its mouth, it would bite and not let go. The skinners were vicious. They stood at wooden platforms and let rip at the creatures, splotching customers with scales and entrails. It was an unfathomable violence, such a contrast to India, where men with moustaches sat tranquil on their hasiyas making meditative incisions as if in penance.

  On the way back we would stop at the Sunday market in La Penitence. Here, shopping, chomping on a pink guava or a cassava ball, Lancy might break into a calypso, and it had to be said he did well for a voice like his. He knew all the folk songs, the shantos and calypsos, the Bill Rogers and Dave Martins.

  At Sheriff the session would begin. We might make a herb and pepper batter for the shark or the banga and lash her with tennis rolls and Hot West Indian sauce. The catfish we might curry with raw mango. I might impress him with my breakthrough invention of pumpkin with karaila and butterfish (in the same pot). Lancy was an expert chopper, saying a chinee gal taught him, and he could do two onions in the time I did one. His stance at the stove was a hand on hip, a heavy lean back, eyebrows arched, a man bemused.

  Over cooking and eating we encountered the connections and disconnections with India. Every now and then Uncle Lance would pull out a remembered term from his youth, for instance, bartan manjey, to wash dishes, a verb morphed into a noun. There were words he knew which meant nothing to me. Like sanay, to mix and eat with the fingers. This bewildered him. No less than the fact that I had never eaten a dhalpuri before Guyana.

  There was good reason for this. I had never lived, only travelled in the Gangetic plains from where the coolies were drawn. My contact with its peasantry was so limited, I knew so little about them, and Bombay Hindi was so different from the dialects of the eastern plains. It took me a while to work out that the Guyanese verb ‘chunkay the dhal’ – dhal to rhyme with shawl – derived from chaunk, for tadka. Equally it amazed Uncle Lance that we didn’t use curry powder in India, without which no curry in Guyana qualified as one.

  One day, a good three months before Christmas, we thought to make the putagee Christmas dish of garlic pork.

  We drove out to Mon Repos on the coast looking for fresh pig. The capped ladies giggled with Caribbean punning, ‘Me ain’t givin out me pork. Hear nuh, Anusha, the bai does wan pork, you givin out you pork?’ Anusha giggled, we all giggled, and she supplied us two fatty pounds.

  At home we washed and lowered the pig into a transparent bowl. We threw in bruised cloves of garlic. We deleafed the fine leaves of thyme from its stalks and sprinkled them in with holy abandon. We halved the firebomb peppers and threw those in with final fingerfuls of salt. We covered the pig with vinegar and fastened a cellophane over the top. It was to be left like this for three weeks. Our pig, she would breathe in every last rumour of flavour.

  The bowl we placed on a doily – such a furnished house! – on the central table. No matter what, I could not stop staring at it. Lancelot too eyed it heavily. Every other sentence contained the words ‘gyalic poke, Bandit, gyalic poke’. After two hours we decided to fry one piece ‘jus fuh see’. An hour later a quarter of the bowl was done. Three weeks on, two pieces remained. Damn fine pieces though.

  In this manner, in between rambles, assignments and long days in the country, I became Sunday friends with Uncle Lance, and through him I met many people in this easy, informal world.

  From the vantage of the Sheriff balcony, standing red rum on ice, we watched people. He would divide passing citizens into two categories.

  The first type were ‘Western Union people. Them does live pon remittance like leech. You hear that biggest industry in Guyana sugar. I say no! Is Western Union!’

  The second type were ‘visa queue people. Them just come from cuttin a round of the embassy or they going fuh cut a round. Is in their eyes, Pandit, focus pon the eyes!’

  He held each in equal contempt. He could never be a Western Union man, a blasted parasite. As for the second, he thought of himself as a modern man, and ‘the Caribbean man is a madern man, right, a mix of culture’. And so this was the reason that he’d never leave here, never cut a round of the embassy: he did not want to leave modernness to go to backwardness.

  Often he would point out someone and start a story about them.

  ‘That man there, he got the longest dong in Guyana.’

  ‘How you can be sure, Pandit?’

  ‘Every single lady of the night refuse the man. The moment he pull down he pant, they frighten.’

  Another time he identified a chickenfucker.

  ‘Chickenfucker?’

  ‘Eh he.’

  Once he regaled me with stories of a man who had more girl problems than anyone. He lived in the Kitty house that I’d lived in. He liked country gals because he could feel like a bossman around them. One such girl he reduced to tears once by asking for a blowjob. ‘Is wah job me got to do now? Wash job meh done finish, cook job meh done finish, clean job meh done finish, wha’is this blow job?’ Another girlfriend would bite him and beat him and threaten to take her own life. Often Uncle Lance was awoken at night to shouts of ‘ketch she, Lancy, ketch she,’ as the girl took position at the window.

  It was possible, of course, that Uncle Lance was spinning yarns. But when we saw Kevin pass again an hour later, he confirmed the stories. He supplied one from the previous evening. A girlfriend found a condom in his bed. ‘Hear what I tell she. I tell she I was tryin it on. Oh boy.’

  Like Kevin, people frequently came upstairs for a bounce, sometimes with friends and cousins, taking a call from somebody, inviting them over too. As a result our limes grew manifold; and it triggered in me at sudden moments the strange but satisfying sensation that I was now living here.

  As Guyanese of all ages and genders cooked and enjoyed it, the open kitchen raged with activity. A number of pots were sparked at once, here a corn soup with dumpling, there a fish stew with okra. The range had an oven, and a trout might bake in it, heaped with eschalot and thyme and fresh juice from La Penitence, the starburst of five finger or the sour of passionfruit. A chicken might go in massaged with jerk and washed with pristine coconut milk. Sticks of cassava might be roasted on the flame and smothered with butter, people, foremost among them Lance Banarsee, fighting over the ‘bun-bun’, the charred bits. The wind blew through all the open half-doors but the flames never outed.

  Afternoons ran on to evenings and nights, cackling and narrating, arriving and departing, old stalwarts, sporty lads, vibrant university girls and all in between, finishing eventually in a great drunken fornicating winedown somewhere – or else at Big Market Big Mamma’s. She was a colossal loving lady, Big Market Big Mamma, shining black in a loose T-shirt, a head wrap and a long flowing skirt, a face that wanted to feed the world and make it a happier place. She was Mama Creole. All the movements of the new world met in her. Chowmein from the Chinese; metemgee from the Africans; pepperpot from the Amerindians; roti and curry from the Indians; baked chicken from the Europeans; the menu dripping off her tongue like honey when you asked, ‘Wah you gat fuh me tonight, Big Mamma?’

  Sometimes there were trips to somebody’s cousin’s friend’s plot of land by the black-water creeks off the highway, trips that killed me with nostalgia even while I lived them, driving aback a pickup, silvery rain pelting bare backs, leaves dancing on the mud trail, branches snapping back onto faces, puddles like lakes forded in the sinking vehicle, bushcook and red rum and drenched cricket, jamoon splattered purple upon the wet soil – the remarkable freedom of a forgotten and irrelevant place on earth.

  But Uncle Lance himself retreated. Said he’d been up those highways too many times.

  3

  WHEN the lull came around again I turned to de Jesus. I had met him at one of the limes. He was a Brazilian and a Guy
anese, and like most such people he had bright red skin, green-brown cat eyes and enormous red calves shaped like frozen whole chicken. He came from a family of old money and influence, though he himself, incongruous to his physical giantitude, was but a thin limb of the tree. Yet it was a branch still connected, and de Jesus had people everywhere, on the coast, on the border, both the Guyanese side and the Brazilian side, as well as in several cities of that immense country. His business was to transport goods between Georgetown and the border. It was a long, rough journey, but de Jesus’s Bedford went up and down every month and de Jesus himself on it every now and then.

  ‘Any time you want to walk shout me,’ he had told me, and when I shouted him he was leaving the following evening. This implied certain logistical challenges. For one, I would have to travel without a visa. I therefore became determined to obtain the other mandatory document, a yellow-fever certificate.

  I went down to the ministry of health to get one. There I learnt that the certificate was issued ten days after the shot. I asked the nurse if she would back-date it.

  ‘You going to make problem for me?’

  ‘No.’

  She blinked slowly.

  ‘You does go to church?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘What kind of church you doesn’t go to?’

  ‘Any, I guess. Why?’

  ‘I just like to ask.’

  She pulled a face of suppressed frustration, of what is the world coming to, wrote a bribed date on the certificate, and injected me.

  I gave her a raise and left.

  Soon after, I was struck by a doubt. Who knew what she had injected me with? What did she care? Perhaps she was out to punish, to set right. Idly I entertained the possibility that I might collapse on the embankment and pass away. I might roll into the trench, and some days later be located by a stench. Years on I might make it to the Murder and Mystery section of the Sunday paper, where unsolved crimes were reprised over a thousand chilling words.

  It was hot. Everywhere were listless people and everything felt wretchedly hot and uninteresting. It was the third week of November. Where had the last two months gone? Limes, trips, reading and writing, elaborate cooking. The year was about to clasp shut, an unforeseen situation.