The Sly Company of People Who Care

by Rahul Bhattacharya

  It was evening before we reached the dust and cheap bars of Tumeremo. We stopped here a while. The ladies and children stayed in the vehicle. She went to check out some stalls. In the failing light I sat in the doorway of a bar and tried to read. Dusk thinned. We hit the road again. We met a highway where trailers roared past us. ‘High-high vehicle,’ Andre called them. The highway would have taken us to the glorious moment where Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana trisected on the tepui of Roraima. Instead we turned off into a mud trail. It was rank dark now. At once the sensations of the interior came flooding back to me – scent of herb, give of mud, intuition of water, feeble stream of moonlight swallowed by great tangles of vegetation. And it was an interior shack that we suddenly turned into, in a little clearing by the trail, surrounded by high trees, the smell of rotting soursop.

  By the looks of it Admiral Rambo and his jeep had arrived a good while back. In a tin yard people were arranged around a bare table under a bulb pulled from the jeep battery, dangled over a beam. They were all men, Indian. Beside them was an enormous ice case, stuffed silly with both Guyanese beer and Venezuelan cerveza. Chutney on the car stereo: I Ain’t Touch De Dulahin (But She Belly Start To Swell).

  She tried to busy herself with the women and children, washing up, relieving themselves in the bush, settling down in the other arm of the tin yard, but her separation was as clear as mine from the men.

  ‘He’s here.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Those were the only words we’d spoken all day.

  I talked with a man of trimmed moustache like a line of ants. He, like me, didn’t participate in the games. ‘I ain’t a cardsman, I’m a draughtsman,’ he said often, as though I might be judging him. ‘Is good to mark time.’ He played it quite a lot at work. Security work. Decades ago he’d started out at Blairmont Estate as a chain-boy (in crop season) and a punt-tarrer (in the off season). The islands paid ten times the wages. He left Guyana. In the islands he was a victim of discrimination. He backtracked into Venezuela, and in Puerto Ordaz he was working in security. I guessed he was a watchie. He was pleased to be returning home for holidays. ‘Is the greatest country in the world. When me die, it got to be in Guyana.’ And live? ‘Nah, man, not live, die.’

  I sought lightness in Admiral Rambo. He was sweating effortlessly, sparking a serious bushcook. He had those wonderful bushman skills, of peeling potatoes in unbroken peels without ever looking at them, of chopping directly over the pot, perpetually nourishing it. It was a red peas and beef cookup he was concocting, with a bit of dhal too – a beef khichdi, in other words. Beef khichdi, what a tremendous corruption! How you like that, eh, Pandit, I said to Uncle Lance in my mind. It had been so long since I saw him. I yearned for his reassuring presence at this moment. The nearest substitute was Admiral Rambo, and I stood by him and his bouffant, chopping herb for him.

  The cookup was brilliant. The mothers arrived and filled plates for their children. She took a light helping. She didn’t meet my eye as she served herself. She ate alone, sitting on a bench under a tree at the edge of the clearing. I could see her in the dark, fastidiously sifting wrenk from rice with her plastic spoon.

  I became acutely conscious of what everybody must think of us. Our alienation felt absurd. In games of the heart, rectifying absurdity feels like the most heinous capitulation. We had thrown ourselves into sustained, wilful hurtsmanship. I wished I could rise above the situation, in one way or another. I was falling between stools. I was still stung. I was more than stung. I thought she was grossly wrong, mean, to portray things as she did. On the other hand I had nothing to offer but an attempt at passing the last hours happy. I couldn’t tell what plane she was on. With some people you know – or else you don’t. The trouble is with those with whom one treads the in-between spaces. Every fact can be assumption, every assumption fact.

  ‘Eat, bai, Sharook, I en’t charge by the plate, you know,’ Admiral Rambo kept urging me. ‘Throw a nex one to Sharook,’ he kept instructing the man beside the icebox. I performed my learnt Guyanese trick of leaking streams from the bottle as I walked about.

  It was getting late. The women and children had settled inside one of the concrete cabin rooms: Jan as well. So decisively she went in, didn’t come out again.

  The watchie fell asleep on a chair. The men arranged a wreath of thyme stalks around his head. They dangled wiri peppers from his ears.

  Admiral Rambo too called it a night. He’d put up a whole blooming tent inside the other room. It just about fit. In this shelter within a shelter, he and Junior crept in one behind the other to rest their weary bones.

  The remaining men continued playing, sometimes arguing, routinely slapping the mosquitoes on their chubby arms.

  On the wooden framework of the tin yard I slung up one of the hammocks Admiral Rambo had passed around.

  Soon the music died. The bulb went out. And then there was only the high pitch of the forest. I lay awake a while. The chill was seeping into me. I thought of the last time it was like this, when the cold wind had howled down the savannah, when I had sought refuge beneath dangling Moonsammy, consumed to a fever.

  THE awakening was vicious. Admiral Rambo pried open a single eye and shone a torch in it with a belly laugh. We drove through a wet, fog-drenched forest dream and reached San Martin shy of dayclean.

  I only awoke from the shock of hearing Mildred, the textbook grandma, emit the words ‘Oh shit.’ It was the first sighting of the river. She’d never seen the water so low. Here we were, driving on the red mud where there was meant to be river. I remembered just how disorienting had been the appearance of the submerged stelling at Menzies Landing that strange morning.

  I saw more lovely sights from those days gone. I saw a pair of yellow longboots drying inverted on a pair of sticks. I saw beside them two plastic barrels covered with mesh. I saw a dripping palm, a long dark jackfruit tree. It was the Cuyuni, where the man said he had chopped his pardner nine times.

  It was a long wait on the riverbank. People got off, stretched, brushed teeth. I slept again in the jeep.

  When I awoke again, there were a surprising number of travellers. They were liming by a small shop that had opened. Some were dragging their bags through the mud towards the river. They had the bright excitement of the returnee. The act of dragging or hauling bags through mud contributed to the brightness. It was the familiarity of the bruck-up, an allegiance. I know, I felt it too.

  Looking around at the crowd I was rudely interrupted by the sight of her chatting amiably with a man. He was a well put-together chap, an Indian. There was something burnt and shameless about his face. His hair was shaved down. He wore a crisp bush-shirt and light pleated trousers. On his face he wore the mark, running around like a strap from ear to ear. On his wrist hung the bracelet of Guyanese gold that West Indian cricketers sometimes wore. They were smiling and chatting, now walking and chatting, and he was carrying her bag, looking for all the world that it was them together on vacation.

  I wished there was a girl equivalent of the man I could walk with, slower and closer than they, laugh sweeter than they.

  I looked for Admiral Rambo. He was in hectic negotiations with the boatman. He came out on top, securing for his passengers the first ride across the river. I got on. She didn’t come.

  We motored with clunking sounds through inert clouds. The river was calm and brown. The trees were long and solemn. There were many small islands, perhaps newly made by the low water. The boats weaved in and out of channels. Grandma Mildred giggled as the light spray leapt up at the sides of the boat. She held the polin to the side of her laughing, weathered face. The mulatto grandchild kept yanking it down, delighting her.

  Ten minutes and we were on the other side: Guyana; Guyanese mud; short trail through forest; citizens struggling with bags; a clearing; Eteringbang police station.

  THERE was makeshiftness in the air, remote Guyanese makeshiftness, and the station itself was a freshly painted wooden home, like a proud wife’s dwell
ing, bright white and powder blue, standing upon white concrete pillars. On the signboard pitched into the ground somebody had failed to account for the length of the name. Realisation had struck halfway in: the bang after Etering was less than a whimper. On the stump in vertical letters came Welcome, oddly inviting for a police station.

  People gathered with their bags around the station. I had underestimated it: this was also the airport.

  In the bottomhouse Admiral Rambo arranged a ramshackle seat behind a ramshackle desk. This was the check-in counter. A second agent, a squirrelly man named Simon, began to tear bits of paper from a pad, scribbling numbers on them. He passed them around to passengers, encouraging them into a queue. Admiral Rambo then called out a number at a time, holding both his hands in the air as he did so, as though receiving applause. The called number stepped up to the peculiar Guyanese challenge of balancing herself on bathroom scales with all her bags while clearly spelling out her full name by the alphabet. Those with lengthy names were at an obvious disadvantage. Poor Chandrawattie Bisoondyal!

  Progress was blundering. People were resigned. Somebody suggested that passengers and their bags be weighed separately, but Admiral Rambo cussed it down saying it was sheer stupidness to do in two turn what you can do in one.

  Simon the squirrelly agent began to come under severe pressure from the station chief. Things were running behind schedule. There was a big group today. Five planes were due to come in. There was plenty to be done. Accordingly, every few minutes a thundering ‘Simon’ rang out from above, and off he would go scurrying and scurry back faster, cussing under his breath.

  I didn’t join the queue. I sat on a rock beside the station. Some way away, people were liming under a large mango tree, as people would at Menzies Landing. An Amerindian lady had set up a stall. The waiting room.

  I walked about, tried to look purposeful. I chatted a while with a Rasta, who’d just chided somebody for photographing him from behind. ‘Rasta nah believe in backside business.’ He added after a few seconds, ‘Whatever done in darkness soon come to light.’ As a fee for having chatted with me, I think, for having let me hear the proverb, he asked for a raise. I gave him some useless bolivars.

  I joined the queue, coming around to believe that mechanical activity was the most sensible option. And indeed, never had a queue felt so therapeutic. All I had to do was look at the shapes of the heads and necks before me, occasionally watch Simon skitter about, hear Admiral Rambo call out numbers, followed by the slow recitation of a Guyanese name.

  Half an hour passed this way.

  ‘Weh the mistress deh?’ Admiral Rambo asked as I ascended to the bathroom scales.

  ‘She coming.’

  Security was next. People threw open their bags on the grass as the chief, the man who’d been chewing Simon’s ass, beat his fist against his palm and let his eyes run over the contents. Occasionally he directed a constable to hand him something which he examined with a variety of pokes, thumps and sniffs. He was a big black man, with laughing red eyes and a thick, loud voice. He looked like a fun man who enjoyed playing the part of a menacing cop. My stuff was searched.

  I proceeded to the next queue, at the bottom of the stairs. It led up to an accounts register in the station. Immigration. I filled in the columns. That too finished.

  I stepped back out into the light. And down the stairs, under the mango tree in the distance, bronzed and superior with her man in tow, Jankey Ramsaywack, twenty-one.

  Secretly I was hoping I’d emerge from these procedures haloed with a golden new clarity. I would know precisely what to say, how to seize back, if not the girl, then at least some great lasting beauty from our thing. No such dawn.

  GRADUALLY the people who’d been liming beneath the mango tree began to queue up, and those who’d been processed took their place. I resolved not to look at her. The sky was blue, the blue of a flame. Beneath it the police station dazzled white.

  Eventually two little Islanders pecked through the sky like a pair of storks. This cued more classic Guyana scenes. One plane began dipping towards the turf, then curved back up, drawing murmurs of interest from the mango tree. The two planes made long, wide circles; the first descended again, before swooping back up. Heckles and suck-teeth rose from the assembled. Shortly after, a bunch of sleepy soldiers emerged from the bush in half-buttoned fatigues, rubbing their eyes with exclamations of ‘o skunt, bai!’ They sprinted out, buttoning up as they ran. They cleared a set of barrels from the turf and lined them up along the sides. The airstrip. The planes circled one more time, low over the Guyanese forest, and landed.

  As soon as the second aircraft hit the earth people rushed towards them, to the great alarm of Simon the agent. ‘Is not the buspark, ya’al hear, that is plane there, not minibus, this ain’t big market.’

  Fifteen minutes later three more Islanders arrived. They pulled up beside their companions. In the distance they looked like toy planes. It felt that at any moment the pilots, wearing dark glasses, leaning casually against their crafts, might pull out a remote control from their pockets and send them soaring up.

  The planes formed a large triangle with the mango tree and the station, where the procedures were continuing. Simon, under dreadful pressure to dispatch the first flight, made frantic dashes between the three points.

  The entire drastic possibility only struck me now. It occurred to me that I could be ushered on to one of these planes by Simon the agent at any moment, and we might be forever cleaved as though by a knife. In lovers’ hurtsmanship one precludes such possibilities, assuming always that the other party will come to their senses before it is too late. Simon’s frenzied scuttling was eroding my confidence in this matter. She could not tell, how could she, she was in the middle of procedure. To her the point of ultimate reckoning was far. Out here beneath the mango tree it was getting precarious.

  I considered going up to her and asking courteously, directly, ‘Are you coming?’ On deliberation it didn’t seem like anything at all. All it did was lob the ball in her court. Perhaps it was what I wanted, to not be saddled with the act of abandonment.

  Nevertheless I tried to rouse myself into making the approach. I would be firm, look straight into her lovely, fearsome eyes, disdaining the male beside her. Perhaps it would be attractive.

  About then a young constable sought my attention.

  ‘Me?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, you.’

  He confirmed with the chief, some fifty yards away, who pointed at me with his baton, holding it like a sten gun.

  We walked over to the chief.

  The constable took guard beside him with a smirk. ‘The man make innocent face, though.’

  The chief too was grinning. He had a scar on one cheek; it turned into a crater when he grinned.

  ‘Whoa, boy, is the Indian national,’ he remarked.

  He lingered on the statement. Addressing the constable, he added: ‘You right, the man pull innocent face for true.’

  ‘What going on, chief?’ I asked, myself grinning.

  ‘Who permitted you to ask a question?’ he shot back in a raised voice.

  It startled me.

  He turned to the constable.

  ‘You hear me grant permission?’

  ‘Negative, bossman. I ain’t hear that at all.’

  The chief grinned once more; then took it off as if it were a sticker.

  ‘It is I conducting the investigation, do you understand?’

  ‘What investigation?’

  ‘Sir,’ he said very deliberately, ‘I don’t think you heard me. I ask the questions. You give me answers.’

  He returned his baton to his waist. I noticed he had no eyebrows.

  ‘You know the girl?’ he asked, with sudden belligerence.

  He pointed to the side of the station, beyond the stairs, another fifty yards away. She stood with the man, both appearing to be in conversation with a constable.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘How so?’
r />   ‘She was my—I was with her.’

  ‘How do you mean you were with her? You fuck she?’

  The constable blurted out a short, snorting laugh. The chief glanced at her.

  ‘She look like she give sweet pum-pum, though. You ketch the meat fresh? Like it getting stale already.’

  The constable gurgled. ‘Go easy, bossman. Man be from India.’ The chief fixed me with an eyebrowless stare.

  ‘Explain to me, sir, how you know the lady.’

  ‘We travelled together through Venezuela.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Just so,’ I shrugged. ‘We were travelling.’

  ‘Just so? What kind of jackarse travels through Venezuela just so?’ He left his mouth open. I could see his tongue, white, thick, rising up to wet his palate.

  ‘Sir, I strongly suggest you submit a reasonable answer.’

  ‘It’s the truth, chief. It was just … tourism.’

  ‘Tourism!’ He involved the constable.

  ‘Look where the man tourism take he. Eteringbang! How much tourist you see here?’ The depth of his boom, the deliberated certainty of his delivery, they had a mesmerising quality.

  ‘Let me start from the start,’ he said, rolling the thick syllables out slowly. ‘What were you doing in Guyana?’

  ‘I came just’ – I was about to say ‘just so’ and reconsidered – ‘for a holiday.’

  He looked at me with a mix of incredulity and contempt.

  ‘It’s a very interesting place. I came to look at the culture.’

  He sighed. He looked at the constable.