The Sly Company of People Who Care

by Rahul Bhattacharya

  Outside was bright burning space. Just above were the clouds, I could see their bottoms. Below they made shadows on the brown waters etched into the great green forest, aglimmer at parts, essential Guyana. It rolled on, eternal as the sea, broken once or twice by red dots of timber works. To the forest you could surrender yourself. Its eternity comforted me; the world didn’t cease; we were small. Minutes passed, tens of minutes. Soon came the isles on the mudred Essequibo, where the Dutch built their first forts. Beyond them the Guyana which was captured, conceptualised and executed. The enormously long straight canals ran through strips of estate like lines of molasses, dizzying in their sly symmetry. We were dropping altitude. The paraphernalia became visible, the creases of mud dams, kokers erect like little guillotines on the bloody water.

  Now came the dull flame of the Demerara, its city snout poking into the old ocean. We dipped towards the rust spread of Stabroek, real as burnt earth. Then over the scrap iron roofs of Georgetown prison in the old plantation of Work and Rest. We were low. The seats were shaking. We rattled over the grids of GT, a melange of mix-up destinies fermenting over the humid dots of the equator. It was Sunday. Somewhere below Kwesi’s mother passed around black pudding in Kitty. An Amerindian brother walked after preaching off Sheriff Street. We made a broad swerve, tipping over the coast to the ocean and coming in again. Somewhere below in Pradoville the rich played dominoes under an umbrella by the pool. We began to descend on the former plantation of Ogle. In a patch of grass between trenches a pair of matchstick boys kicked a football to each other, acquiring size, length, a third dimension, and as they vanished altogether I was frozen to a fright by the image of little Brian Persaud, eyes like hers, the ball at his feet in the savannah, wondering if in a moment of miscalculation, calculations that till now seemed so impregnable, wondering if I had left him a sibling.

  10

  IN the morning there was a chase across the road. I had always wanted to see a pursuit like this in Georgetown, and how odd that it should happen now, on the last day, outside my own home. It was the man’s luck that there was a patrol vehicle around the corner. They went after him. He darted up a street.

  ‘Why they don’t shoot he in the foot?’ Jackie the cleaning lady said from below. She had barely acknowledged me after I’d failed to return to church. ‘Yo, listen,’ Midas told her, at his post earlier than usual. ‘You’re not allowed to shoot a man without a weapon. Though out here, out here anything goes. In New York …’

  The thief was hunted, dumped in the back of a pick-up. He was bare-chested. His hands were cuffed.

  ‘Chop off the man hand in public,’ Wazir the water-jar delivery man said. ‘Chop off ten body hand the problem done solve.’

  Everybody retreated. I stood staring at the chase long after it was finished. It was still early.

  I learnt a day can be the sum of the parts of a year, and so acutely lengthier, heavier, too heavy for a single day to bear. In the place where guilt and accusation collide there was no room to breathe. Night was a slow fire, daylight disfiguring, its pinpricks leaving nothing to conceal.

  I would go to Uncle Lance. I would tell him everything. I would purge my soul before him. He would make the correct pronouncement. He would know who is who, what is what. I hadn’t the courage to think anymore – someone else must judge.

  It was the finest kind of Georgetown day, with low grey clouds and the lush suggestion of wetness that would at some point yield to rain.

  What a rambling route I took to Kitty, walking north and east, into Section K Campbellville, and what a different world were the Camville backstreets, community folk liming at corners, Rasta snackettes, some abandoned, high green vegetation, crooked signs of broad confidence, ‘fixing done here’. At Redeemer Primary School I played cricket with schoolboys. I wanted someone to like me. I wanted to feel healthy and young. I could barely look at my own shadow. I made one direct hit, didn’t bat or bowl. They didn’t notice when I was gone.

  I drifted on to Prashad Nagar and then to Sophia, and such a fine line between Prashad Nagar and Sophia, such different sides of the tracks. A cloudy radio day in Sophia. Women hollered to one another, each asking the other to speak harder. Parrots and toucans in small leaning houses, buffaloes and cows in proper shit-smelling stables, goats stagnating on bridges, a minor sawmill, fumes in the air, rows of posts. I came back through Prashad Nagar where India lived on in Chandranagar Street, in Premniranjan Place, in the Dharmic Sabha Kendra, in concrete houses and in paranoia.

  Back out on Sheriff I walked till the embankment road, wishing away slow time with every step. At the intersection of the breadfruit tree I turned west towards Kitty. I walked, and the houses, the palings, the girls on stairs, the trees, the smell of distemper, the trenches, they all kept bringing back a sad freshness, an old excitement. I went into Alexander and stepped along. In the distance appeared Kitty Market with its icicle clock tower and rusted roof. How remarkable it had felt, the roof, the tower, the community beneath it, the very name, the low skies and the running wires on wood poles – how remarkable it had all felt, murmurings of a new world.

  My old home looked abandoned. There was nobody in the passageway, not even on the bench outside Uncle Lance’s door, where there ought to be at least Uncle Lance in his vest.

  I knocked on his door. There was no reply. ‘Pandit, is me,’ I called out, and kept knocking. Still no answer.

  I peeped through his louvres. The house looked bare and dark.

  His silly cuckoo clock loomed large on the wall over the table. I could go to the magistrate’s court, as I used to in the early days. It seemed the only reasonable place to go. I could sit there and watch, pretend to be sentenced or pardoned – at any rate, there was a promise of a judgement.

  … Even so, I tried to tell myself again as I walked, even assuming it were indeed the case, that she was innocent – and it may not be at all – she could have at least held her own damn bag …

  The court was full. People were spilling out. I stood at the door.

  The case was of a collision, a boy in a car with a lady on a scooter. The boy was wealthy and Indian, the lady was working class and African. She had lost an arm and a leg. She was riding without a fitness certificate, a permanent licence, a helmet and insurance – ‘bareface and boldface in a naked bram,’ as the boy’s lawyer kept exclaiming. He was a big black man of many quips, an orator, an entertainer, a provocateur. Petty criminals tittered at his jokes. One felt sorry for the limbless lady. In this atmosphere, under these provocations, she was unable to answer the simplest questions. She stared blankly out of the window, and I blankly at her. She wouldn’t get her limbs back.

  By the door the mood was running hot. ‘The only blackman you can trust is a dead blackman,’ the boy’s supporters said. ‘It have some honest coolieman – the dead ones,’ the lady’s supporters said. A barracker, a regular, he kept saying, ‘A collision, sah, there be a collision, there has been a mighteh likkle collision.’

  On my own case there was no judgement. Court was dismissed.

  Town was busy. I could not bear to confront it. I walked up Hadfield, up all the way till the D’Urban backlands, where people dumped dead bodies. Again I turned towards Kitty. There was nowhere else to go. Through Bel Air Park and Newtown, back past the corrugated tin wall to Uncle Lance’s door.

  ‘Open up, Bandit,’ I pleaded. There was no answer. I sat slumped on the bench for a while.

  I looked for Bibi Rashida Rawlins, the dougla coconut lady. I saw her there, fat, dimpled, cloth-hatted, and I wished to sink into her loving matronly bosom.

  ‘Cyan hear from you, bai,’ she said brightly as I approached her. ‘Me think you gone back India. You miss out on me Qurbani too.’

  ‘Gone tomorrow morning, Aunty Bibi,’ I told her, casually as I could. ‘Where the Uncle deh?’

  ‘You en hear?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Uncle gone.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘Gone outs
ide. US.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Is gone he gone. He pack he bags an give up the house an gone.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He get rob after he take out money from Western Union—’

  ‘Uncle did Western Union?’

  ‘Yes! How you think he retire so soon. He son does send he t’ing steady. They try fuh choke n rob he and he get vex an decide fuh leff. You know how he does know everybody. He cut a round at the embassy, in like three week time he get visa.’

  ‘He get hurt?’

  ‘Nah, he nah harm. They get he money, but he only pick up couple ah fine scratch. He just turn, ahm, emotional. Me tell he, watch Uncle, me go fallo you … You alright, bai? Look how weak you get so.’

  ‘Yes, Aunty Bibi, alright.’

  I felt tears coming. To disguise it I reached forward to hug her goodbye. And the tears, they kept returning at intervals, involuntary, undramatic.

  I left her.

  School had broken for the day, and the air was full of it. I walked among the children, craving for their easy camaraderie, their hope. It was elusive.

  I plodded on, looking desperately for somebody but there was nobody. Uncle Lance, he was gone. I walked to the old haunt of Baby, searched hard in the clamour, but Baby was nowhere. And she. I could feel her walking beside me, her great frizz tickling my face … She must have, I tried to tell myself again, what else could it have been?

  Afternoon was finishing. I walked and walked, I walked out of fear of stopping. I went out as far as Lombard Street. There a grand madman upon a plastic chair invited me to take the chair beside him. I am the great Flood, he said, clutching my hand, and remember, don’t cork the bottle. He was in a headband, crisp trousers, an old bowtie. ‘The negritude of your corruptions,’ he jabbed a finger in the air, ‘the crablouse in your aarti.’

  The sun began to lower on Georgetown on the Atlantic. I walked in slow curlicues, unearthing new corners, new windows, new bruck-up moods and, with a start, like a cat leaping at my head, there appeared an old scene, that place there the site of a great washdown one time, this one here of a legendary winedown, and now the erstwhile residence of Mr Bhombal, the wet prints of his green longboots on the stairs.

  In the evening it rained. Georgetown was so gorgeous when it rained. Its green shone and its white was washed, and the old woods, the greys and the blacks, they kind of gave off that fragrance of greying and blackening wet wood. Soon the streets were deserted. Light crept like a thief out of the fragile wet houses. Somewhere in the drip drop dark a maga dog whined. And my tears, they kept returning at intervals, and I tried to purse them to no avail.

  Dayclean.

  Gone.

  The sly company of people who care

  ALSO BY RAHUL BHATTACHARYA

  Pundits from Pakistan: On Tour with India, 2003-04

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I want to thank, firstly and mostly, for generosity that I will never forget, the great ladies Vaneisa and Aunty Marlene, and ole ho Brian P.

  For kindnesses, Amy, Erika, Sherry, Anil Beharry, Marc, Maga, Warren, Uncle Lloyd, Ann Savory, Mikey and Harold and Jackie, Grajo and King and John, Mr Adams, Uncle Bill, Honey, Anjie, Ameena Gafoor and Andaiye and Nigel Westmaas, Dale Andrews, Naresh Fernandes, Pragya Sinha, Rajdeep Mukherjee, Kim Johnson, Michael Atherton, Doreen and the late David de Caires, the Gobins, the Persauds.

  For permission to quote from her calypso, Rohini Jones; and for clarifying the successor membership situation for Alan Daniel aka Lord Commander, Mr Camejo of the Copyright Organisation of Trinidad and Tobago.

  For insight, Eusi Kwayana, Dale Bisnauth, Roy Heath, Jamaican musicians.

  For their attention, Leslie and Pallavi; for that, and much much more too, Anand Persaud and Eric Chinski.

  For allowing me to take them for granted, my mother and sister.

  And, lastly, more than mostly, magnificent Shruti DB.

  Copyright © 2011 by Rahul Bhattacharya

  All rights reserved

  Originally published in 2011 by Picador, an imprint of

  Pan Macmillan Ltd., Great Britain

  Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  www.fsgbooks.com

  eISBN 9781429929233

  First eBook Edition : April 2011

  First American edition, 2011

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following

  song lyrics: calypso in section 6 of Part Three courtesy of Rohini Jones; “No Crime,

  No Law,” by Alan Daniel (aka Lord Commander), courtesy of the

  Copyright Organisation of Trinidad and Tobago.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bhattacharya, Rahul, 1979 –

  The sly company of people who care / Rahul Bhattacharya.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-374-26585-4 (alk. paper)

  1. East Indians—Guyana—Fiction. 2. Race relations—Guyana—Fiction. 3. Identity (Psychology)—Fiction. 4. Betrayal—Fiction. 5. Guyana—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9499.4.B537S59 2011

  823'.92—dc22

  2010047596