The Sly Company of People Who Care

by Rahul Bhattacharya

  Outside was rolling savannah. We thrummed through the vibe of Latin America. Breastfeeding mothers sat in coloured doorways, walls of bright running colour, no relation between one and the next. Villages in pastel orange and lemon, men in coloured vests sitting on low, coloured walls. There was such a sophistication to every colour, the subtle aestheticism refined over centuries. It was evening, and the rightness of the moment and our actions was indisputable.

  We reached Carupano after dark. The driver took us from hotel to hotel, they were full or unaffordable or characterless – I had ambition in those early days. At last he snapped out of his resignation with a series of baritone gesticulations and left us on the waterfront.

  We walked with our bags and guidebook. Anabel was full. Some doors away the peeled and shredded Anabel Karol was giving out cheap rooms. Took it, on account of our weariness, the location and especially the yellow walls. In fact, took three rooms in succession. The first two were stale to the point of nausea, the third marginally superior. The sheets were filthy, the floor filmed with grime, the air-conditioner given to emit nuts, screws, bits of plastic and coils of wire. The windows opened into a covered courtyard, with no prospect of natural air or light in the morning. A slobbish man in a yellow vest seemed not to see the room we did. Jan gestured to him for a broom: he brought it and slobbered off.

  A frail lady on a walker appeared. She had no teeth and luminous white hair. Her veins were thick as her thin arms. She was undoubtedly a centurion. When she saw Jan with the broom she began to cry. It shamed her to see it. She spoke gently in Spanish and walked away.

  She herself was Anabel Karol. She once ran the place with love and devotion, the kindest guest house in the continent. The yellowvested son and his fat wife had ruined the great lady’s work. How did I know? Of course I did. In a foreign land you can know everything, don’t even have to ask. I attempted to entertain my partner with these interpretations as I dusted out the pillow covers.

  But an air of squalor had descended on our first Venezuelan night. The smell, the suffocation persisted. It was a mood that could not be defeated, only allowed to pass. The last two days were feeling coldly factual: a non-Christmas, a day of hunger, now a rancid hole. Mopping the bathroom, her hair tied, her jeans rolled up to the shin, her wet tee clinging to her skin, her brown nipples showing through two layers, she said, ‘I thought you were going to care me like a prize bird.’ She said the words without the tenderness of a grouse. It was pure ice, and only a tenth of the iceberg does show. What could I do? Conjure up a hotel?

  We went to bed in utter exhaustion, straight on our backs, not touching any, and it was just short of morning before our bodies entwined.

  IN the relief of the morning we ate stuffed empanadas and arepas at a corner stall and learnt essential words from the guidebook, comida for food, frio for cold, no entiendo Espanol for don’t understand Spanish. For a hundred thousand bolivars, we bought her a pair of ice-blue jeans.

  ‘All the ones I got getting nasty,’ she said.

  In fact, the pair she had on looked fresh.

  ‘I putting them on for you.’

  They rounded her bum beautifully, creased nowhere along her slender legs. They imparted a lustre to her sunkissed face.

  On a stone bench in the shade of a cathedral we kissed without reserve in the manner of the newly coupled in a new land. We ate cold custard on ice. At the terminal, looking at the map and bus times, the seaside town of Puerto La Cruz four hours away seemed an appropriate choice.

  With pinkies tied we boarded the bus. The vegetation, full and tropical in snatches, for the most part was scrub, thorny plants with sudden blooms of bougainvillea. We climbed. It was dry. Villages were perched on rocky outcrops. The heat was metallic and the sea shone with metallic hostility. At resorts people swam. That colour of heat on that colour of water, I knew it well from somewhere. It came to me at last, the colours of Algerian heat and water that Meursault saw, the unbearable glare. She was asleep on my shoulder.

  There was effortless success with accommodation in Puerto La Cruz. The room overlooked the sea, a humble happy room with a large spring bed. The room type was classified as ‘matrimoniale’. The presentation of this unexpected intimacy led to the tender and luxurious making of love.

  It was the first time I saw her entire nudity in clear and prolonged light of day. Her shoulders were narrower than they seemed, narrower than her hips. Her breasts were at different angles, adding depth to her cleavage, mystique. Stretchmarks on her rear, their merest hints on her lower belly. Her breath was raw from travel.

  Her pussy was cleaner than her armpits. She was warm as a lamp. She was consummate and reaching.

  We lay a long time after, bouncing softly on the springs, watching sunset creep through the wreath of holly tied on the balcony grille.

  ‘You know in Urdu the word for beloved is jaan,’ I said.

  ‘What is Urdu?’

  ‘It’s a language, a lil like Hindi.’

  ‘You could call me that. Jaan. I like it. Though it sound like you making fun of we accent. Jaan. Yeah, I like it.’

  We stood in the balcony half-dressed, I in boxers, she in my T-shirt. Those long torn sedans cranked by. The boulevard was sparking to nightlife. The neons were coming on. Couples exchanged Venezuelan hugs, lengthy and meaningful.

  But later at close quarters the boulevard revealed itself trite with lacklustre craft and trinkets. It did not prevent us getting her shell bracelets and coral anklets. The line of neon curling around the water was another deception. Not one swinging spot among them. There were Arabian restaurants, ice cream parlours, the word for which, heladeria, had the ring of extra-terrestrial significance, and here in the land of Chavez, McDonald’s and Domino’s.

  We ate mediocre food. The evening carried the weight of the sea. We walked back with ice lollies from the heladeria. After so long, a companion at all moments, a comfort as well as pressure.

  In the room I lay on the bed and read. She washed in the bathroom and settled herself before the mirror.

  ‘What you readin?’ she asked, fiddling with the curls of her hair.

  ‘In a free state.’

  ‘Is a love story?’

  ‘No, no love.’

  ‘What is it about?’ she asked a minute later.

  ‘Displacement, kind of, colonialism, people in different places.’

  She went into the bathroom and returned with her toilet pouch.

  ‘Who write it?’

  ‘Naipaul.’

  ‘He from India?’ she asked after another minute.

  The interruptions of idle questions irritated me.

  ‘Trini.’

  ‘They bright, you know. It carry information on Trinidad?’

  ‘Africa mainly.’

  It seemed to have satisfied her. She got absorbed with some spots on her forehead.

  ‘You ever had a black girl, hon?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You never say nothing, you know, never answer with answer.’

  ‘How do I know where you going with this.’

  ‘Well, I just sayin that they put so much chemical in they hair, is always smelling chemical chemical. I had a friend and I tell she this and she stop talking to me.’

  ‘What did you expect!’

  ‘I ain’t making racial. I just tell her she don’t need to do this. God make everybody a certain way. You got to accept that. But she take it the wrong way.’

  I returned to the book.

  ‘You got black people in India?’

  It was no use: I put it away.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Wha! Is sheer East Indian living there?’

  ‘I guess you could say that.’

  She stretched her dark legs on the bed and worked crabwood oil into them. It was produced by a branch of the family. She carried it around in a Viva flavoured-water bottle.

  ‘Hon, you hear how the country-country cooliegals speak?’

  ‘Yeah.’
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  Her toes touched mine. She was in shorts. The line of muscle on her thigh had now a rich brown shine.

  ‘And them young blackgirls in town?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You find I speak better than them?’

  ‘Like more standard English? Yeah, I notice that.’

  ‘Is because I make the effort. I find if you got to go away, you got to speak right English. I watch the American shows. Is not so difficult, you know.’

  ‘Well, meh taak hard creolese, gal.’

  She looked at me attractively.

  ‘Nah vex meh, man, is blows you settin up fuh.’

  ‘Nah eye pass me, gal. You mout getting plenty talks these days.’

  ‘Me cane you rass till it tun purple like jamoon.’

  ‘Me go fetch me cutlass jus now.’

  ‘Now you getting too coolie for me.’

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, she applied oil to her nails. She rose to the mirror.

  I contemplated reaching for the book.

  ‘I study up till CSEC. You?’

  ‘How old do you sit CSEC at?’

  ‘Like sixteen or so.’

  ‘I do a bachelor’s degree. But it’s not much use.’

  ‘You know, my mother, she always make it a point to talk good English when I was young. So that is why I appreciate what Carolina was saying yesterday. Making sure she “geerl” learn good English. She remind me of my mother. I going to learn my boy good.’

  ‘How you know he going to be a boy?’

  ‘I would know, man. He going to turn four next year.’

  ‘What you mean?’

  ‘He going to turn four. What that must mean?’

  ‘Who going to turn four?’

  ‘The baby.’

  ‘Which baby?’

  ‘My baby.’

  ‘You got a baby?’

  She spun around.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What you mean! Where is he!’

  ‘He by mummy, I tell you so.’

  ‘You never said anything about your baby.’

  She walked to the edge of the bed, staring intently.

  ‘I told you. I told you nuff time.’

  ‘Like when!’

  ‘Like at Shanta’s after we get the visa.’

  She was burning with a fierce kind of integrity.

  I turned my gaze. I had a very imprecise sense of her family. The cousins, the aunts and uncles, the many locations. It wasn’t perhaps her family. I had always been inattentive to families. Growing up, I was the only one not well-versed with the extensive nomenclature for Indian relatives, the only one ignorant of a particular relative’s connection with another. It was part of my isolation. I thought back to the afternoon at Shanta’s. Sour dripping off dhalpuris, footsie … it seemed vaguely familiar, like something one might have been told in school.

  ‘What did you tell me?’

  ‘I told you the baby by mummy.’

  ‘I thought you meant you mummy baby, not you own.’

  ‘Well, you never ask anything after. At first you got all these questions jumpin out of you.’

  ‘How am I to think to ask that? Like, let me check, does she have a baby?’

  ‘Why? What the arse so strange about that? Besides, I ask you about you family so many times and you never say nothing about them.’

  She returned to the mirror. It wasn’t an intemperate withdrawal. There was something casually triumphant in it.

  There was silence.

  ‘But you only twenty-one.’

  She looked at me in the mirror.

  ‘And you said I looked twenty-five.’

  ‘I meant it in a good way.’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘So you had him when you were seventeen?’

  ‘Like you study maths good.’

  ‘Where the father?’

  ‘He deh.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘All over the place, fockin skunt.’

  ‘Where’s he live?’

  ‘More in town now.’

  ‘What does he do?’

  ‘Me en know really. Some kind of exporting business. He never tell me details. He turn big.’

  ‘He look after you?’

  ‘He give me a little house there on the coast, near to mummy. But he fist get tight, man. Anytime I ask him he give me a lil t’ing and say he done give me the house already. If I row with him, he tell me something like, “When you got hand in tiger mout, girl, you gat fuh pat the head.”’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Goldy Persaud. Well, his right name Devkumar but everybody’s call him Goldy.’

  ‘And the boy?’

  ‘Brian.’

  ‘And—’

  ‘And stop! Questions!’

  It broke the tension.

  ‘We call him Awara,’ she said, coming over, resting her hands on my folded knees. ‘He like awara bad.’

  ‘You know, awara in Hindi means vagabond.’

  ‘Vagabond, cha! That is a lot of words you learn me today. My Hindi going to get better than you creolese.’

  She reached for her purse, handed me two pictures.

  Three months old in the first, cradled in the arms of his mother – so delicate, so teenage! – with long wispy hair, a tight pout, big brown puppy eyes looking with longing at the one who held him. Three years old in the second, in vest and sneakers, a football by his feet, the eyes no longer a child’s eyes, hair falling on the forehead in the Guyanese fringe.

  ‘He growing up quick. He look smart.’

  ‘Yeah. He the best. He love playing.’

  I handed her the photographs.

  ‘Guess what,’ she said. ‘I still got your perfume on my neck. I like it. Is sexy.’

  She slipped in beside me, crumpling on her side. I put out the light. The broken sedans rattled and hummed.

  Soon her eyes were serenely closed. Her lips were still orange from the helado. Her mouth, never fully closed at sleep, afterglowed like spent coal. A mother. But I saw her now like a child as I had never before. Outside our matrimonial balcony the moon was low and yellow. I stared at it. Idly I urged it to fall further, into the round of the holly wreath on the grille, but it never sunk so low.

  7

  THE bliss of the city is when it awakens – not the dawn hours haunted by the middle-aged shedding fat or burnt out adolescents returning home, but a little after, when the cleaning machines have brushed away yesterday’s evidence and the fresh day is falling crisp as golden wafers, when reasonable people with reasonable habits are coming out of their holes to dot the world with their strange faces, their gestures, costumes, voices, until bit by bit, by living magic, the grand tapestry is made.

  In the backstreets shutters went up, rattling with commerce to be transacted or frittered away. Nude silver mannequins were carried into store windows. A woman pulled a rack of dresses onto the washed pavement. The angled sun hit the concrete roads and Latin American walls, extracting their carefully calibrated flavours, making a mesh of contrasts. Empanadas sizzled deep in renewed sin. Coloured pillars of jugo revved in unison, fruits with names as gorgeous as their colours, parchita, durazno, lechosa, manzana.

  An hour or two in this ambience is enough. You’ve got the nourishment you need. You’ve been doused in a particular mood, felt a particular brightness not felt before, been reassured that there are small wonders in the world, and further familiarity is liable to ruin things.

  In short, it was time for terminal. Where to go? Caraca-Caraca-Caraca, we heard a tout call. Of course, Caracas!

  The bus was a cold luxury operation, overseen by a militant hostess in uniform. She forbade the slightest parting of curtains with wags of the finger. The cabin was white with the air-conditioned breathing of luxury travellers, people who’d organised their sleeps to perfection.

  We reclined into the cold seats. Every minute the bond between beings is on the mend or on the fray. Were we closer or further since last night? Every tim
e I looked at her she was a little changed. Our lives were mixing, encroaching. We hardly spoke. It seemed we’d been together a long time.

  The wheels moved smooth and straight beneath us. I made a crack in the curtain and pressed my eye against it. A whole country out there. Sceneries were tearing by. On the run, that was the thought that came to me – I hated it. On the run – the momentum, the weight of it. It was an adult dream and nightmare. It is a thought that came to me often in my life. Each time it left me haunted.

  Running and seeking, they were sides of the same coin. I had run from a serious education, then from cricket reporting. From the expectation to ‘settle down’ I had run. And eventually I had run from India. Had I? Running or seeking? What were my duties, to whom? It stayed on me like dampness.

  Beside me she was creating a pattern of holes on paper with a toothpick. She was so immersed in it. She was raging with concentration. ‘Cha,’ she exclaimed softly whenever the automobile thwarted her piercings. She must have made a hundred pricks. Was she running? Away from something or into something?

  I was feeling brittle. The part of me that had marvelled at the perpetration of this affair suffered under my own unhelpful scrutiny. I had broken in a proper way the auto-restrictions of Indian life, but I was not sure if I had shrugged off its reflexive guilt.

  I went to take a leak. For a while I sat motionless on the WC in the phonebooth toilet. It was warm here. Alone, I felt stronger. From the window the day was parched and flat, blank with scope. Two mighty and distinct anthems sang in my head, Dekker’s Israelites ( … like Bonnie and Clyde), and Thunder Road from the Boss. Back in the seat I pulled them up on the pod, heard them over and over. They soothed me, deceived me into mild heroism. As in sport so in art, so in life – heroism, trite or tragic, to the rescue. Everything which can be glorious is worthwhile.

  Thunder Road led to the first fight, the more sinister because it was required to be conducted in whispers. I told her lyrics, including the one about ain’t a beauty. It was, of course, ill-advised. She could not fathom why I’d tell her that she ain’t a beauty and is just alright. I wasn’t really saying that, I said, it was just that the song reminded me of us on the road. She countered by saying that I had specifically told her the lines in my head, which were ain’t no beauty. Don’t take it so, I said, it’s just that it comes at a crucial point of the song, gathering till this moment and busting open after, and in the live versions the crowd sang these lines and it was about the exciting thought of escaping with her and that was what I was focusing on. But why would I think of the song if I didn’t think she ain’t no beauty, that don’t make sense. I kept dripping fraudulent rose and syrup on the incandescent yet charred romanticism of that gigantic creation. She was running hot now. ‘Yuh skunt cyan wait two minute before breaking every night in you Miss No Beauty.’