The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel (12 page)

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Authors: Rahul Bhattacharya

BOOK: The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel
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‘The man you been reading is a jackarse.’
We turned towards a bearded gent with formidable eyes and rings, his fingers clasped before his chin.
‘A jackarse,’ he repeated.
I was taken aback.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘What you are saying, basically, is that we have forgotten our social organisation, which is the most ancient and scientific organisation the world has seen.’
‘What I am saying is that hierarchy matters less here. I can see that without a book. It’s a good thing. Like at the wedding, rich and poor people hang out together, drink and chat. India is, you know, paralysed by hierarchy.’
‘But what you say is insulting to us as Guyanese and Hindus. You have to understand. They killed our language. They made us bury our dead like them. They made us go to mandir on Sunday like them. Made us get maar’d on Sunday like them. But our culture, our religion, our order, has survived.’
‘That is not what I’m—’
Things might have gone anywhere from here; but Ramotar Seven Curry introduced us. The man was a rice-mill owner and a pandit, though not a smalltime performing pandit. He was an important member of the Guyana Hindu Dharmic Sabha. We spoke about rice seasons and the price of rice nowadays.
The drinking continued. No break was permissible. Someone or the other came by and topped you up. I could not keep up with the goliaths. As dusk began to descend over Canal no. 1, and though the sandflies had begun to bite, I fell asleep in the chair.
I opened my eyes to Ramotar Seven Curry’s urgings – he had
an effortlessly loud delivery, rumbling up from his vat – ‘Raise up, raise up, next place got to attend.’
He praised me for sleeping so soundly while sitting.
‘This is nothing,’ I said. ‘My grandmother knew how to sleep standing.’
‘Long-time fellas had a lot of skills, you know. Many many skills and techniques that you don’t see now. I would like, railly an truly, to reintroduce some of these techniques for the younger generation. The younger fellas must realise it. Say if you granmudder could teach youth them to sleep standing, that is a skill for life. Not just for work or play, but for life.’
People got into vehicles and drove over to Canal no. 2, ten or fifteen minutes away. This was a Muslim wedding, the boy’s side lime, the McDooms – from Makhdoom I guessed. I ate beef curry and rice and dhal and baiganee. Ramotar Seven Curry did not eat the beef. We took shots by the gate and proceeded back to Canal no. 1, to the boy’s side lime of the wedding we had attended in the morning.
By now things were no longer distinguishable. The scene seemed the same; a canal by a thin mud road, a high wedding house, balloons, streamers, a Banks tent over the yard, dancing in the front yard, food in the backyard. Further the same people appeared to be dancing at both the Canal no. 1 and the Canal no. 2 houses.
People wore striped T-shirts with caps. They wore long shorts and half-buttoned shirts. Some were in glittery suits. Women wore sleeveless tops with long skirts or frocks or dresses with low necks. Some wore loose spaghetti-strap chiffon dresses.
The house rattled with the Bhojpuri orchestration of socachutney. To the ear chutney had the quality of a racket, a particular kind of clanging racket. I say this as pure description. Here came the harmonium, tassa and synthesised beats of the new hit Mor Tor.
Lawa milaye, sakhi lawa milaye
, from the old ceremony song: the exchange of rice grains before a wedding, Mor and Tor, mine and yours, mixing together.
Give me yours, I’ll give you mine.
Ask
a youth what he thinks Mor Tor means, and he will point to his thrusting groin: ‘Is like motor, know what I saying?’
The dancing picked up. The main thing about East Indian dancing was to twirl your hands. You could be putting on a heavy winedown, you could be shuffling on your toes, but so long as the wrists were cocked and the hands were twirling and the fingers were making designs it bore the stamp of an Indian dance.
Ramotar Seven Curry was in his element, peaking through long years of experience at the right time of the night. He cracked loud jokes. One minute he was dancing with a stranger’s nani, next moment with another’s toddler.
He encouraged me to dance with a young girl with long lustrous hair in a red crepe dress and black stilettos, and we did and she asked if there was any chance I could introduce her some day to the actor Arjun Rampal. Of course, I said, I writin a film for him next, would you like a part too? Well, only if it across
him
. Soon she left with her family. It was only weddings she was allowed to attend.
I looked around for Ramotar Seven Curry. I could see his blurring shape in the crowd.
A youthman staggered up to me. He handed me a drink. I took it.
‘You know how much Banks I could drink?’
What a riddle! I applied my mind thoroughly.
Searching through my experiences it occurred to me that I had been five months in Guyana. It stunned me. I had arrived in the wet season. A supposedly dry season had gone; another wet season had begun. It was June. My intonations were changing. My hair was cut different. I had gotten accustomed to knocking about doing nothing.
‘Like you thinking hard, buddeh.’
I reapplied myself to the task.
I recalled that I had seen three men in Berbice wash down four cases of Banks. That made thirty-two each. To be safe, I added a few to the number.
‘Thirty-nine.’
‘No.’
‘Forty-seven?’
‘No.’
‘Eighty-one!’
‘No.’
‘How much then?’
‘Hanesly? Countless.’
‘Oh.’
He went off and returned with two fresh bottles. He clicked the caps open with his teeth.
‘Watch.’
He finished the first in two gulps, flung the bottle by a tulsi plant at the fence, repeated the feat with the next, and began to exchange fist bumps with me.
Another man came over and said, ‘Ei, brudder, Seven Kori he tell me you waak from India. Fuh trut?’
‘Trut.’
‘Trut! Shake me hand, brudder. We’s have the same blood you know.
Blood
I taakin bout.’
He pushed aside the youthman, put his arm around me and whisked me off towards the paling.
‘Is one favour I ga fuh ask you, buddeh.’
‘You ask, man.’
‘Me wan a beautiful wife from India.’
‘But you got so much beautiful girls right here in Canal.’
‘Abidese ah
love
gals from India. Aishwaarya, Raani. Me gat a lil condition, buddeh. Nobody must knock am already. Me ga fuh be the furst to knock am. I thank you, brudder frum India, for this favour. Like Hanuman you gah fuh kerry the message an fetch she.’
Before discussions could proceed further we were distracted by an emotional dispute just outside the gate. We went to see. The quarrel was at a critical juncture. The question was whether one man had chucked the other or not. A chuck was a kind of shove
with terribly humiliating implications. Both men, one in a half-unbuttoned shirt and a moustache, and another with dilated almost-crying eyes, knew how pivotal this question was. The pendulum of honour swayed delicately.
‘Danny, you know me since when, man, and you chuck me?’ said the man with the almost-crying eyes.
‘I chuck you? I
chuck
you?’
‘You chuck me, Danny. Is chuck you chuck me.’
Suck-teeth. ‘If I chucked you, you rass be drownin in the canal behine dey.’ Suck-teeth, suck-teeth, suck-teeth.
‘I goin bust yo fockin head, Danny, if you chuck me again.’
‘Is
chuck
I chucked you? You call that
chuck
!’
Voices rose. The congregation egged on a fight. Suck-teeth rent the air. It appeared that something dramatic might occur when—
‘Nuh row, nuh row, nuh row,’ Ramotar Seven Curry burst through the gates with arms open.
Even though he was an extremely short man with extremely short arms, he managed to embrace the quarrelling men and jam them up against each other.
He said many things that I could not catch. But the result was that the rowing men shook hands. The gathering dissipated, a little disappointed. Ramotar Seven Curry beamed.
‘See what it about?’ he told me. ‘People in there dancin and fetin. Out here there a little misunderstanding take place. But it’s a wedding night, and one of those fellas got to realise that and say, “man, it be so-and-so pickney wedding night, and we must not be going on so.” It’s a union time. Fellas got to realise that in the family there will be some fighting. But railly an truly, is not how you fall out but how you come together, right, that is what is family.’
Ramotar Seven Curry shone with sweat and coconut oil that streamed down his forehead and on to his thick cheeks. Above us the stars were out in huge numbers. They failed to reflect in the long dark canals. For no apparent reason we began to walk down
the muddy road along the canal, passing dark trees and frail houses darkened by the exodus to the wedding house.
A star broke and fell into the canal; it dissolved into the black water.
A little bat slammed against Ramotar Seven Curry’s chest and dropped dead.
‘Now look how that bat fool heself,’ he chuckled. He picked up the creature and laid it by the side of the road, tenderly spreading its wings.
‘I could tell you one fact about myself,’ he said.
Unusually, he waited to be prompted.
‘Go for it, man, Seven Kori.’
‘There was a time they would call me Dig Dutty. Ramotar Dig Dutty. Was me alone among sheer gals going for the gal functions. They singing and dancing, you know the long-time wedding songs they got, real sexual. Plenty sugarcake gals.’
He looked embarrassed. I prompted him again.
‘What happen then, Seven Kori?’
‘You could imagine how much dutty I dig! You understand, right? Eh he. Of course, I was a young fella then. When a fella young, he looks at the world in a very very different way. But the beautiful aspect of a wedding is that the bai grow up. He change. So after my own wedding I request everybody, “hear nuh everyone, it’s time you give me a more respectable call name.”
‘Cause I believe in this institution of marriage, man. Railly an truly, we getting reckless, man, in this society. Even the Indians. Not only that, I will say even the Hindus. That is what concern me. All this thing about reputed wife and thing. In long-time days the white man never accept Indian ceremony. Nobody register and that is how you get the concept of reputed. But, railly an truly, why do we need repute today? That is what I ask people. Is it a good repute or a nasty repute?
‘We learning the wrong things, man, we adapting to blackman principles. You find Indian girls now going with blackman too.
Is the men too who got to share the blame. Yes! The fellas got to own up for letting she slip away … Well, comin back to my story, since that time they change it from Ramotar Dig Dutty to Ramotar Seven Curry.’
We must have walked a mile or more along the canal. Our styrofoam cups had run dry.
In the distance a pair of white lights shot through the heavy muddy dark. We hitched a ride back to the wedding house with a family whose own weddings Ramotar Seven Curry had once graced.
LIFE in the country was slow, but upon reflection a fair amount happened in those days. There was a period, for instance, when I returned to the Corentyne, and here to my great regret I missed a grand bank heist by no more than ten minutes.
Very early that morning I had left for the canefields with Moses Moonsee the ratcatcher. Now a name like that breaks open the past straight away. As we hurtled in the truck through the fraying dark, I thought of the forebear of Moses Moonsee, a lettered munshi, a Mughal clerk, who had fled to a distant continent to do manual labour, and whose eventual progeny caught rats. One sees what one wants to see. As Roald Dahl’s ratcatcher looked like a rat, so Moses the ratcatcher looked to me pure munshi. I gave him spectacles when he had none. He wore an old pair of jeans, yet those legs appeared to me cross-legged and housed in a dhoti. The object in his hands was a 22-inch, but it was to me a tall register.
Perhaps too it was the hallucinatory hour before dayclean, damp, diffuse, with scattered flares of psychedelia, given to invert thoughts.
As suddenly as dusk turns to night by the equator, so dawn turns to day in a snap. And as we bumped along the trail into the backdam the world had turned yellow-blue, cruel and dazzling.
The cutters and loaders and chainboys and the rest of the cast glistened in the morning. Moonsee set about his task, loading a can of spray on his back and walking through rows of burnt canestalk. It was only once the cane had been burnt for cutting that the rough charred stalks betrayed the harshness beneath the order – why the masters preferred coolies with horns on the base of their fingers. Amid the sweating scything work was the animation that made labour a social place. A drunk worker vomited with practised clarity. ‘Watch, you liver faal out,’ somebody cautioned. A man came clumping from afar holding up an enormous camoudi. ‘The man scarch! The man scarch! But the man nah dead!’ The reptile was placed on the ground. It was nine or ten feet long, thick, part burnt, part ash, part golden-green, twitching. Moonsee himself arrived with a set of dead rats, laying them out in incremental sizes. ‘Watch, abi get a family heye.’ He jabbed each in the chest with his 22-inch. ‘Dah daddy, dah mammy, dah pickney, dah nex pickney.’
Afterwards we gyaffed beneath a peepal tree at the estate office. The yard was full. It was Friday: payday. Beyond the gates the Friday market was out in force, competing for the workers’ wages before they were spirited away at the rumshop, or deposited pragmatically in the two banks on the main road.
And that is where, in mid-August, a fortnight before elections, which would be won comfortably by the Indian party, the hold-up occurred, an hour to noon. A group of bandits arrived with AK-47s, ordered the civilians to the side, shot at the glass facades, entered the banks, cleaned out the vaults and made off with sacks of loot into the backlands. It was a wonder that they hadn’t come on horses.
For a week I followed the adventure every morning in the papers, the effect like a serialisation. The bandits hijacked at various stages a pastor’s car, a fisherman’s motorbike, two tractors, a boat. They had planned to head downriver and escape into the Atlantic. But a series of slapstick blunders – the first tractor bumping into a bike, the second tractor sticking in the mud – had allowed police to catch up. They managed to get away on the boat. But with police in
pursuit, they could no longer expose themselves on the bare ocean. They crossed the river, dumped the hijacked boat and hoofed it.
This was a mistake. It was good territory to lay low in, as bandits often did, but exactly the wrong terrain to be on the run. Beyond the elaborate Dutch artifices, the polders and the kokers, the land was the way it had always been: swamp, bush, wet grass, low jungle, inhospitable, empty.
There was water at every step. The bandits were bogged down. There was little, if any, fruit to eat and weak overhead cover. Hungry, exhausted, they were forced to shed ammunition as they went along. Then the heavy AKs. Then sacks of wet cash.
The manhunt continued over long days. Through the accumulation of details in reports, the untravelled, impenetrable landscape opened up vividly to the eye. I wondered how it was that the bandits kept going. Was it an ordeal or an adventure? What questions did they ask themselves? Did they?
It was a good fifty hours before the killings were made. Every day another one or two men were found and executed, because dead men don’t tell tales. Their mugshots appeared in the papers, black-and-white squares, expressionless, depthless, defeated. And yet beneath the flatness there bubbled a kind of bravado that said: ‘My face flat now, but look, look how confident I was.’
 
 
WHEN I thought back these days to my original visit to Guyana, that strange and alluring week in 2002, I no longer saw the flashes and moods that I used to. I only saw how much I did not see.
It had passed me by in 2002 that six weeks before I had arrived, on the carnival of Mashramani, Mash Day, five prisoners had broken out of Georgetown prison. It changed the course of the country forever. Five! It said not so much of the enormity of those prisoners, as of the littleness of the nation, the size of Britain but holding a mere three-quarter million, and the domino trail of how one thing led to another in a small, hot place.
It went back to how the society had been planted, civilisational seeds drawn from here and there and thrown together in a patch to grow. It went back to how the land had been settled, the country and agriculture by Indians, the towns and professions by Africans. From these beginnings emerged the inevitable politics of race, an African party and an Indian party. They were once the same party. Class held it together, workers against masters. And race split it in two, under leaders of charisma and ego, with names like in a movie, Jagan and Burnham.
Cheddi Jagan was Indian, an America-trained dentist, handsome, firebrand, earnest, doggedly Marxist; Forbes Burnham, African, brilliant, suave, a London-educated lawyer, the silkiest of speakers. Together they had formed the party, and in 1953, when they swept to victory in elections, buoyant, America and Britain feared Guyana had gone red. It took just one hundred and thirty-three days for the crown to send in her troops, sack the government, arrest party members and suspend the constitution. The party began to strain; Jagan and Burnham’s was a case of ‘two man rat cyan live in one hole’; in two years the division was official, the components consolidating in time along race.
Give them five minutes, it was said, and Cheddi could antagonise a friend while Forbes would convert an enemy. And it was Burnham who was helped to the premiership by America and Britain in 1964. In 1966, Guyana became independent, Burnham remained the leader. For twenty-one years, till his death, he ruled as a dictator, running the economy into the ground and alienating the Indians to such an extent that when Jimmy Carter came to assist in Guyana’s first free and fair elections in 1992, he declared it the most divided country he’d ever seen.
An aged Jagan won the presidency at last; the Indian party stayed in power thereafter. In the years of its rule, Guyana remained the poorest nation on the continent and the second-poorest in the hemisphere. Eighty per cent of its graduates fled its shores, and of the rest whoever could did, leaving to clean toilets, sweep houses,
cut cane, so that it is said with confidence there are more Guyanese living outside Guyana than in it. In a situation of such hopelessness the basest instincts burn; in Guyana it is race.
Everything is linked. Every day you transacted with the world around you, and every day people you met in it knew something you didn’t. Looking at smithereens of a bank window on tarmac, they knew things I didn’t. It could be debilitating, mystifying, desperate; I wanted to scratch my way in.
Though I came to it late, for me the jailbreak of 2002 was key. It was no more a criminal thing than a political or racial thing. It came in the wake of a disputed election. It was masterminded by extremist African activists. They hid the jailbreakers in a village on the coast. In that village’s backlands they set up a camp and tutored in it a posse of youth soldiers, some as young as twelve. Guns were put into their hands, ganja in their mouths, ideology in their minds, and they were let loose.
For months the jailbreakers and their cohorts ravaged the Guyanese coast. Executions, robberies, abductions, arson. Broadly, there were two targets. One was the police. The police, like the army and the bureaucracy, was predominantly black. For this fact it was mistrusted by the Indians; for the same fact it was resented by the Africans. The other target was Indians. They had a special affection for the businessmen.
From time to time the masterminds would circulate handbills as statements of mission. They were signed ‘Five Freedom Fighters’, or more catchy yet, ‘Five for Freedom’. Another name, ‘African Taliban’, was coined when one of the five captured the public imagination – combining terror and farce, an appealing mix in the Caribbean – by appearing in a video, bin Laden-style, wearing fatigues and holding an AK.
The man in the video was the leader of the five, Andrew Douglas. He was a protégé of the bandit of whom I’d learned up at Kaieteur – Blackie. Such a small place!
Like Blackie, Douglas was a former lawman – a policeman, an ace
driver who did the chases. And like Blackie he was given a public funeral when he was killed, some six months after the jailbreak. It was endorsed by the black party, attended by thousands of Africans, his coffin was draped in the national flag, his journey from lawman to outlaw to martyr complete.
The handbill at Douglas’s funeral was signed ‘One Thousand Black Men’.
It began:
African-Guyanese built this country over a period of 212 years of brutal unpaid laboured. Today, 164 years after the end of slavery, many of the descendents of these true Guyanese live on pavements, in abandoned buildings and in little square boxes barely large enough to qualify as a prison cell.
It ended:
The Company of black freedom fighters demand system of Government and distribution of the national wealth that ensure the protection of our human rights and provide equal opportunities for the development of Black business. We demand government expenditure not only in cricket and squash where Indians and Portuguese predominate but also in activities in which African-Guyanese predominate such as athletics, football, boxing, basketball, music and art. Until these basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all African-Guyanese, the builders of Guyana, there will be no peace.
Douglas’s death was shrouded in mystery. He had been found in a car, shot in the head. Nobody was sure who made the hit. As time passed more and more bandits, presumed bandits and innocents were taken out in similarly mysterious circumstances. The police claimed to be uninvolved. So did the army. Under pressure for answers, the government finally alluded to ‘some kind of phantom body out there’.
And then one day, in late 2002, on the coastal highway, outside
the village of Good Hope, an army patrol straying from its zone stumbled upon a bulletproof jeep containing hi-tech weapons and surveillance equipment the likes of which the state did not possess. Outside the vehicle – and on this technicality was release secured – were three men. One of them was of particular interest, a well-known tycoon. Shaheed Khan was his name, better known as Roger Khan.
 
 
ROGER Khan. In the Guyanese enunciation it sounded like Raja Khan: King Khan. I knew his face well – dopey eyes, thick eyebrows, black beard, blank arrogance. Boyo the newspaper vendor told me that its appearance on the front page could hike the day’s sales by twenty per cent.
Like every good don, Roger Khan was self-made and his life of crime began early. He went young to the United States, and by the age of twenty-two he notched up a number of offences, including drug- and gun-running. In 1994, while on probation, he fled to Guyana. He was a wanted man in the USA ever since.
Back in Guyana he made a phenomenal rise. He took risks, greased palms. He’d had some training as a civil engineer. He hustled a big contract on the university campus. He came into some money, and his next project was to build low-cost cement houses. His business interests multiplied, lumber, a laundromat. He bought an island in the Essequibo.
But his principal business was cocaine. This was a huge trade in Guyana. Itself Guyana produced no cocaine, but perched on the Atlantic, with its proximity to cocaine nations, it was an ideal transhipment point. The joke on the street was about ‘value-added’ exports. No item was above cocaine. It was stuffed in fish, timber, fruit, greeting cards, cases of skin cream, intestines of humans, cartons of pepper sauce, drums of molasses, shells of coconuts. Estimates put the trade at anywhere between twenty and sixty per cent of the whole Guyanese economy. And the drug barons were thought to be predominantly Indian businessmen.
All understanding of the Caribbean is available in its music. There is a brilliant satire from fifty years ago, No Crime, No Law, by the calypsonian Commander. It rings open with the striking lines
I want the government of every country / Pay a criminal a big salary
. The logic is established early on.
If somebody don’t lick out somebody eye / The magistrate won’t have nobody to try
. The fast-powering lines keep rolling out, each funnier, more visual, women parting men’s faces with poui, boring out their eyes with saws. Through the humour the essential truths behind the comedy gather a terrific force. The entire rapidfire exposé is done inside three minutes.
So when a man kill, instead of swinging he head
, Commander concludes,
They should make him Governor General instead
.

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