The Sly Company of People Who Care

by Rahul Bhattacharya

  As I walked in the heat, I was taken back to the hot walks in the early days. Everything, in fact, the ministry, the paperwork, was reminiscent of the early days. I considered going down to the street by the big market where Baby hung out. I discarded the thought. What would be the point?

  I walked instead till German’s at the top of New Market Street and there I ate raisin rice with bora pork.

  Afterwards, when I returned home, having walked foolishly once more, and switched on the standing fan and lay down in the safety of my mosquito net, I felt choked by circles – that I had gone in circles, was still going in circles, and this was not supposed to be part of the plan.

  WE left after dark. The Bedford was a magnificent clunking lump of metal with 15,000 pounds in its tray, primarily vats of petrol. De Jesus looked large, red and freshly bathed. Topless Anand Moonsammy, sporting a green beret, drove the truck. ‘How yuh do, Panjabi?’ he said to me by way of curious greeting. He had mammoth Steve Buscemi eyes that did well to stay on his face.

  ‘Is sheer Panjabi building the cricket stadium, you know. I meet them one time. They open up they head wrap and long out they hair and listen to they jump-up music.’

  ‘Bhangra?’

  ‘Eh he. Sheer Panjabi. Me a Madras, though.’

  And for a while thereafter he told me about being a Madras, how they were going strong with worship of Kali, how blackpeople and them were close-close for they themselves were black and had kinky hair and ate beef and pork. We discussed the genesis of Moonsammy, probably derived from Munuswamy, and talked of Sonny Moonsammy, a tremendously dashing batsman I’d heard about from many an old-timer on the Corentyne. And from there we spoke of cricket, and thereafter numerous other topics, such as the Bedford, and automobiles in general – until I wrecked his mood by mentioning Uncle Lance’s theory of running cars on bush rum.

  ‘You hear that, Jesus,’ he snapped, ‘you see why Guyanese get reputation for chupidness? Is because some people determined to be chupid. Bush rum evaporate too quickly. A chupid man tell this man that it use for fuel. If me nah know that bush rum evaporate too quickly, me would tell a next man. Just so all Guyanese come out looking chupid.’

  As Moonsammy spoke no more, sucking his teeth hard and shifting gears with a previously absent harshness, it was de Jesus all the way till Linden.

  And de Jesus told tales of the supernatural. There was a man everyone knew had Kaneima. De Jesus once saw him go to a pond where nobody had ever caught a single fish and return with a string of lukanani. Another time the same man went into some bushes and came back as an anteater. Whenever I laughed during these stories, de Jesus pointed out my absurdity – ‘the man laughing!’ – to Moonsammy, who stared furiously ahead with his basketball pupils. De Jesus kept em coming. Of Ole Higue – that is, aged supernatural ladies who shed their skin and become balls of fire – he narrated the incident when a ball of fire accompanied the truck for thirty miles one night. Another time a girl in the family told people she’d seen Ole Higue outside the window and guess what – the next day her thigh was covered with blue marks. At Linden he told of the time when, outside this same stall where we were now stopped for a snack, he’d come face to face with a very black man, a very ugly man. Rain had fallen hard; de Jesus had made for the shed but the man had disappeared, no trace of him, and there was nowhere he could have gone. The man was a jumbie.

  Soon after we hit the laterite trail de Jesus began snoring. I stared at the headlit mud, the red so bright in the lights, the trail so cratered, but not wet as it was the last time. I thought more of that time, of Baby and the birdman and the candidate, who’d put up a respectable show in elections after all, and splinters of spoken words and lived scenes carouselled by; and the feeling of being on a carousel, the circularity, it returned to me as we rumbled down the chilly, herby forest. We hurtled past the intersection where we had once turned towards Mahdia, where soldiers had been told I’d come for butterfly, where there had once been such a burst of rain. We pressed down towards the sensation of Brazil.

  THE first blots of morning were in the night sky when we arrived at Kurupukari on the Essequibo. De Jesus looked beatific with fulfilled slumber, Moonsammy looked deranged from his eyepopping concentration.

  We waited on the wood benches of a shack. The trees were frilled with wisps of grey cloud that melted softly, discernibly into dayclean. Behind the shack, three Amerindians roasted a tatou – armadillo. A tiny tawny kitten fought off three rowdy dogs and held her own. A monkey in a cage watched with interest, letting out sharp cries. We drank tumblers of milkpowdery coffee.

  At six o’clock the pontoon opened for business. The Bedford clanged slowly on to the iron, joined by a ruined red sedan, a 4×4 and a dozen pedestrians. The pontoon motored off, drifting across the river. The water was an olive green, a shade I had not seen in Guyanese water before. There was a great and hungry tranquillity in the air. Though people chatted, and the 4×4 blasted Natural Black’s Nice It Nice, the river swallowed everything.

  Over on the other side the red sedan, peopled by two youngsters and a girl with a tattooed dagger plunging towards her anus, failed to get going. As de Jesus was a good man we hitched it to the labouring Bedford. We ploughed through the high forest till the ranger’s cabin at the head of the reserve. People did things to spark the vehicle but it was dead as scrap. While they played with it, I read the boards on the ranger’s lodge, telling of the four main timbers of the reserve, the greenheart, wallaba, mora and kabakali. I fell asleep.

  IT was only the first sighting of the savannah, hours later, that aroused me to the special ecstasy of a journey. So fucking sudden! There we were in the trapped heat of the conserved rainforest and its trapped bird twitters, Moonsammy mate-calling the greenheart bird, de Jesus sleeping at high volume, when sheer as cliff the forest finished and there was savannah. It was the Rupununi and I don’t know what that meant but it said everything.

  We paused at the forest’s abrupt edge. The mud trail snaked through naked grassland in a dry, killing run. Things were hot, flat and infinite. The only undulations were ant hills or sandpaper trees. In the distance noncommittal shapes of mountains fluctuated in a haze. Otherwise the lines of sky and earth spread towards perpetuity.

  We chugged through the dryness, though there were occasional swampy bits. In the mind’s eye there were buzzards and rancheros. The sky was a brilliant blue, the air was yellow. The trail was red, the savannah was straw-brown rather than green, and the first sight of any other colour came hours later at an unexpected restaurant in Annai, where on the back of a parked pick-up a fresh head of cow glistened in a pool of fluorescent crimson.

  Beside it the hillock, meant to be dotted with flowers, was bare. I suggested to de Jesus we run up it, but on account of the flowers’ absence as much as the heat, the proposal was rejected. Instead he lay down and honked hard in a benab while Moonsammy went into the village to bone a lil wife he’d made there.

  It was twenty hours on the road when we pulled into Lethem. Lethem was pure sand paths and people cycling about. Moonsammy was pleased: in the old days, whose treachery grew with every narration, it could take five days in the wet season. You had to fell trees and make bridges. We were in another continent – for it was now the continent proper and the coast was a frill that floated in confusion. The houses were flat and brick. We went to one such, de Jesus’s people, with a large yard of flambouyant trees currently out of flower, laden avocado trees, tangerine bushes beneath which were such surprises as minute turtles and a bottle of Johnnie Walker. The bottle had a few pegs left. We squeezed tangerine into it and sipped it while Clarence and Suzette, who lived in this fine yard and ran a fine little shop in the front, talked of Lethem. People of Lethem were people of the Rupununi, a mix of Amerindians, Portuguese and white settlers. Being people of the Rupununi was the only thing that meant anything to them, and Guyana and Brazil were simply ideas on either side. There were plans for the town. A library was being constructed; the first bank
had just opened. Crime had arrived, three break-ins in the last two months, and though this was mentioned with regret, it hinted at progress.

  Sundown and the tingle of Brazil were getting closer. Clarence dropped us to the speedboat on the bank of the Takutu, a slim brown river one could swim across had one the leisure.

  The sun was dying … and we going Brazil!

  We cruised along the river for five minutes before the crossing was made, by a massive bridge that Brazil was constructing.

  We stepped off … into Brazil!

  I saw the lemon yellow painted on a low, round flagstone.

  Brasil.

  We drank Nova Schin, Brazilian beer, watery after Banks, but sold by a Brazilian woman under a Brazilian mango tree, and it felt pretty swell.

  De Jesus pointed to the Policia Federal station up the slope. It was a formidable edifice of white concrete and glass. Guyana had not even a watchie and a shack. Guyanese were allowed to stamp in at the checkpost, but my passport was Indian. Hence, my only option was to pass for a Brazilian. But things were tight at the checkpost. There had been an incident a few days ago. The head of a water company had been abducted; afterwards his body was found in a culvert. They suspected that the killers had escaped into Guyana.

  Knocking back a second tin, de Jesus considered the vehicles making the crossing. There was a minivan, filled with fake Nikes and the like. Sometimes they were busted but mostly they were allowed in because Georgetown was so much closer than any of Brazil’s ports. The other vehicle, a jeep, was Ricardo’s. De Jesus knew the federals but not as well as Ricardo. The plan was to get into Ricardo’s car, I in the back, and they wouldn’t think to ask for documentation.

  At the checkpost the conversation was long and in Portuguese and made me a trifle insecure. It was dark when we pulled out of the station, on to: beautifully paved tarmac! Manicured bush in the median! Streetlights!

  We glided twenty minutes to the village of Bonfim. I was dropped off at a yellow posada on the outskirts. De Jesus said he’d come back for me.

  My room was a 12x12 furnace with a chair, a standing fan and nothing else. The bed was a mattress mounted on a concrete plinth, slowly releasing the heat of the day. The toilet paper was thin and fell apart at touch.

  I sat in the doorway looking into the open prairie night. A woman in a Brasil vest and big orange hair appeared from down the corridor and said something I didn’t understand. I wanted to make love to her at once. However, a bald man drove in and they began speaking and thereafter the bald man left. Then two youths came in and they all drove off together laughing.

  I read the book I’d borrowed from Clarence and Suzette, an old imperialist travel account of these parts by Evelyn Waugh. An hour later de Jesus arrived on a bicycle, left it in the room, and we walked towards the village. There was a white horse on a dark patch of grass. Men without shirts sat with ease on benches under the wonderful streetlights. Young children of all colours cycled oblivious of night.

  We ate pizza at a brightly painted brick wall. Across, children were doing: dodge ’em cars! Young girls were playing football versus young boys on an indoor pitch with lights. In the socialist way it was free. It was going on ten. ‘Watch,’ said de Jesus, ‘watch how the youth spending out their energy. They gon go home and sleep now instead of doing crime.’

  We ate soursop ice cream, we kicked pebbles. We walked the long way home and de Jesus made off on his bicycle into the free streetlit village of Bonfim, looking very much like a ball on a pin, and I slept my first night in Brazil.

  My concrete box faced east. Soon after dawn hellish tongues darted in through the curtainless windows and licked the flesh. There was nobody at the reception, no scope for ice, coffee, water. At seven sharp de Jesus arrived on his bicycle to fetch me for breakfast.

  In the morning Bonfim had the feel of a mad empty prairie town. The revelations of the evening had run their course. On this open road, in the malevolent sun, with smouldering grass and that suspicious unmoving white horse, it was a place of the mind. There was incest in those brick and concrete homes, stick-ups in the closed cafes, tatous waiting for the dust to die.

  We walked a long time in the savannah heat, strolling the cycle, till we reached a flathouse of gentle blue on a street of brutal red sand. We ate a stellar breakfast of fried eggs and calabresa, seasoned sausages, a single one of which, as I found when I took a frozen pack back to Sheriff Street, when fried with onion and married-man pork constituted a whole meal. In the background a Portuguese soap opera played, watched by members of a family whose relationships to one another I couldn’t quite work out. They spoke both Portuguese and creolese, the latter with a whole different accent so that it was really not creolese any more. As I too had picked up some creolese I reflected I too must sound as ridiculous.

  We settled in the veranda with Brazilian coffee which was strong and real. At the faintest sigh of air the sand blew and people spent their days sweeping it out. Our benefactor, elderly Aunty Mimi, spoke lovely, measured English with immaculate pauses and cadences. She talked softly and wisely and watching her sit there, considering the sand from behind her spectacles, I felt she knew everything. She did not have to say much to capture big themes. Bonfim, and even the city of Boa Vista a couple of hours away, they used to be nothing, and she summed up the contrast in development by invoking a mere four words: ‘When Georgetown was Georgetown … ’

  I went off to discover the backyard, which yielded the excellent psidium, a fruit not wholly unlike guava I suppose, and hinting at an even greater jam. I was joined in these pursuits by a goldenbrown child with long dark curls, nude but for an underwear of Brasil yellow. We had lengthy stream of consciousness conversations where he spoke in Portuguese and I responded with an assortment of sounds and faces. He dragged a baby palm frond from across the yard and slapped me with it. He jumped into my lap and whispered and shouted in my ears. There was no more beautiful and vibrant child in the world, and we were happy for at least an hour.

  At last de Jesus emerged from the house. Resting his tree-trunk calves on a stump, he looked at me with his green eyes and said in the manner of an emperor:

  ‘So you step into Brazil as you did wish.’

  ‘Yes. Thanks, bro.’

  ‘The truck not going for a couple of days. You wan go back Lethem or check out Boa Vista?’

  ‘Check out Boa Vista!’

  ‘Licks gonna share if they catch we.’

  ‘What could happen?’

  ‘They could put you in jail.’

  ‘Leh we go.’

  At the bus terminal de Jesus spotted a federal. We hurried out of there and headed for a shared taxi. The road was smooth, straight, wide and without challenge of any sort. Every ten minutes we might pass a bus. A woman beside me did sudoku without once needing to look up. The driver appeared to be asleep. He had the reddest face I ever saw; beside him de Jesus looked positively bleached. The land remained flat, but the vegetation thickened with manicole and ité and every now and then we saw big black and white birds which de Jesus said were called niggercups.

  Alighting at Boa Vista, de Jesus gave me a fist bump and said: ‘Boa Vista!’, to which I said: ‘Boa Vista!’ We took a lotacao into the city and walked to a hotel.

  A clean governmental vibe had the hotel. There was socialism in the flask of coffee at the reception from which any passer-by could help himself to a plastic cup. At the rear was a pool, where we lounged with Nova Schins to Portuguese pop driven by accordion. When we headed out, plucking fruit from low-hanging berry trees, it was to the meat that awaited at the churrascaria.

  Every part of cow and pig was barbecued and racked upon iron rods, and waiters swished them through the large hall with the martial splendour of samurais. Now came a man with ribs, now with tongue, now with the rump, now with pure fat. Brazilians pointed with humid elegance to a portion of the rod and with equal elegance the waiter sliced a piece on to a separate meat plate. People had poetic noses, troubled brown eyes
. There were black people and white people and mostly all the in-between shades. De Jesus said ‘it have no Indo-Guyanese and Afro-Guyanese and that kind of thinking here,’ and I said, of course, for it would have to be Indo-Brazilian and Afro-Brazilian even if it came to it. He grunted placidly, which he did when amused. The eaters were graceful and their gluttony casual. They drank a litre of soda with their meal. De Jesus himself threw down two and a half litres of Brazilian Fanta which had real chunks of orange in it, and boasted that when he was a young man he needed five litres of liquid with each meal and another five in between meals. No wonder you move to the land of many waters, I said, eliciting another placid grunt. He heaped his plate with crystals of farine without which no meal for him was a meal. I stayed clear of it. It wore out my enamel.

  We took a lotacao and beat about what appeared to be the city centre. There were snackettes with high barstools upon which men sat and read newspapers in serenity. Others sat in the tree-shaded squares playing chess and dominoes, the latter without the Caribbean noise and, de Jesus said, with different rules too. Women had flaming yellow perms, braids made up in buns, oval bellybuttons. Golden arms. The shops were numerous and first-world. There were enormous watermelons in huge supermarkets, hip gaming cafes into which mohawks entered. The scale of the city was large, its avenues broad, its conception European, and afterwards I found out it had been modelled on Paris.

  In the evening we walked along a main promenade, and here, enclosed in worthy fences and under floodlights were: a concrete football pitch, a sand football pitch, a handball pitch, a basketball court, a tennis court. And a go-kart circuit. And mud-bike tracks! Everything except the last two was free, and indeed socialism was carried to such lengths that the medals podium was built to not three but five places.