The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel (13 page)

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Authors: Rahul Bhattacharya

BOOK: The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel
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Roger Khan, basically, was made Governor General. He governed over what came to be known as the Phantom Squad, or simply Phantom. Phantom was abstract. It was a loose association. It did hits and melted into the night. Phantom was a response to the African Taliban. The mercenaries were ex-convicts and ex-lawmen and gunmen imported from neighbouring countries, most of them black. The financiers were believed to be Indian businessmen, some of them druglords, chief among them Roger Khan.
On the street this was suspected a long time, but confirmation came in 2004 when a cattle farmer named Shafeek Bacchus was gunned down in a drive-by shooting. ‘Wrong man,’ one of the perpetrators was heard shouting as the vehicle drove away. The right man soon came to the fore.
He was the brother, George Bacchus, a chubby balding chap, known about Georgetown as a shady hustler. He claimed to have been the intended target. He confessed to being part of Phantom. He was an informer. But Phantom had turned ugly and he had cut out. Drug scores were being settled every day, people were killing as part of gang wars; the operation had spun out of control. He made affidavits recounting intimate details of Phantom operations – where the captives were tortured, where the bodies were dumped. The most sensational disclosures were about the involvement of the home minister. He claimed to routinely meet the minister
in his office, where, surrounded by weapons, the minister would collaborate on hits.
Two days before George Bacchus was to testify in court, he was found dead in his bed.
There was a limited inquiry into Phantom operations; the minister was cleared. He was moved to India as high commissioner. He had stamped my passport. How much I didn’t know!
But now, in 2006, four years after he was found outside his crime-busting vehicle, Roger Khan’s luck was out. He had fallen out with the police chief (with whom, everybody in Georgetown gossiped, he shared a mother-daughter pair of mistresses). He was out of favour with the government. He was on the run. He put out desperate advertisements in the papers boasting of his patriotic support to the government in crime-fighting at his own cost. He bragged about the help he’d given the Americans when an embassy employee was kidnapped by the African Taliban.
Yet, the Americans, having no use for him anymore, wanted him for trafficking cocaine. And if the Americans wanted him, the Americans got him. As the June rains fell over Georgetown, he was picked up from Suriname with 213 kilos of cocaine, transferred to Trinidad, and whisked away to the USA. Guyana was circumvented altogether.
The front pages still showed Roger Khan, in a humiliated position, cross-legged on the floor, hands tied, shorn of his beard, in vest and boxers: a fallen don.
Fallen, but in the eyes of much of the Indian population, as Andrew Douglas had been for the Africans, a folkhero, a demigod. When Indians were being butchered and robbed, Roger Khan had stepped up for them. He had changed the very self-image of the community. Our reputation had been for internalising violence, a man told me: slash the wife, chop the neighbour, hang self. But after Roger Khan he could see that the black man was at last afraid of Indians. ‘Watch there, man be Phantom,’ he heard them whisper.
African Taliban, Phantom; it was an absurd manifestation of the racial confrontation, self-defeating of course. African Taliban had not
only attacked Indians, but left in its wake dead black policemen, dead black bandits, made criminals out of able black youth. Phantom had not just attacked Africans, but further criminalised a dubious section of the business class, and cast a pall on the conduct of the Indian party. And between them, African Taliban and Phantom had sprouted scores of new criminals, new gangs, set new standards for violence, a free for all, and driven a vulnerable citizenry, divided by race always, out to the far edges.
 
 
CONSIDER the Singhs of La Bonne Intention; a terrible condition of anxiety has choked the Singhs. Their vast property, gated, fenced and electronically secured many times over, is by the main road, but the house has been built deep inside, away from the noise of the vehicles and, crucially, the coveting eyes of passers-by.
Mr Singh lives in borderline paranoia, more so after the minister of agriculture was assassinated in the village some months ago. He is a thin, drooping man with a boomerang for an Adam’s apple. He despises the blackman. He is himself going on ebony. The problem in Guyana, he will tell you unprompted – it is the first thing he will tell you – ‘Black people don’t like work, they like killing people.’
Ask Mr Singh about Roger Khan. He’s got a problem with the thing, a serious serious problem. ‘The problem is there was only one Roger Khan. You need one hundred.’ He likes this numbers game. His solution to kick Guyana into shape is to import fifty thousand Indians. (This is a different figure from the Sindhi trader, who suggests a hundred thousand, or the Chinese pig farmer and bakery owner, who recommends a half million Chinese.)
Mr Singh’s routine, you sense, has been developed and perfected over time. ‘You ever see a sign sayin Made in Africa? Like you see a sign, Made in India, Made in USA, you ever see any sign which says
Ma-de in Af-ri-ca
? Cause they ain’t make nothing in Africa.’ He does not wait for a response, instead masterfully segueing the
final syllables into a lingering suck-teeth, before adding: ‘Actually, is AIDS they made in Africa.’
Every day dawns fresh with prejudice, with a fresh urge to get the juices going. With an early morning breakfast of sada roti and baigan choka, in boxers still, he chances upon the television a black man. Boom! the day comes alive. ‘Shut you stinkmouth, nigger! Lock up the man. Arrest he for ugliness.’
Turning to you he asks, ‘You know what happen with blackman? God burn them. They skin burn, they hair burn, and with that they brain burn too. They want to talk like whiteman, look like whiteman. Cause they got no culture of they own. They don’t like Indians cause Indians got they own culture, right.’
‘Well, I feel they have an inferiority complex,’ Mrs Singh, up since dawn, monitoring the housework, cooking a variety of food, adds sympathetically.
You begin to think that it is merely Mr Singh’s way of talking. For people of various races have appeared on the television, each denounced spectacularly. ‘The man so ugly,’ he remarks of an Indian presenter, ‘he mother push he out after four month.’
And then bam, it’s back! ‘Blackman is like an alligator. They just done eat from you hand and they want to bite you hand. You got to fight fire with fire. You know how they treat them in South Africa? That was the right thing to do.’
Hatred, disillusionment have permeated the Singh household. It isn’t race alone. A young Singh, a soft-spoken, likeable girl, a former volunteer for the big Diwali motorcade on the La Bonne Intention community grounds, has concluded that Guyana does not deserve to be a country. Nothing is done properly here. No matter what you say about them, white man know how to maintain thing. Best to give it back to the UK, or let USA take it over, as though both countries are actively bidding for the honour. In any event, she is out of here asap, like her sister before her. At present she can express her disgust in minor ways, by, say, supporting not just the Indian team in cricket, but any team against West Indies. What is race is race, what isn’t race, that’s race too.
Fear and anxiety govern every move of the Singhs. They knew the assassinated minister. They have family who had their business burnt, acquaintances who have been robbed and terrorised, killed. It may very well happen to them. Chores in town are never done by oneself. They are never performed simultaneously, but sequentially, so that nobody is ever alone, even if it means somebody waiting in the car hour upon hour.
The maid at the Singh household is Melissa, a ‘thick, red gal’ of admirable loyalty, though not above the odd petty filch. In the house she carries the contamination of the low. The Singhs do not let her handle food; though unlike in India, she is permitted to sit on chairs and have a cup of coffee with the missus – indeed, the casualness of the relationship would scandalise people in the geographical India. Melissa has a smiling face, a busy, pleasant air, and altogether not unattractive looks. Mr Singh calls her ‘ugly duckling’. She laughs every time he says this. And Melissa, red and not black, will herself find a way to loudly berate ‘them stupid black people’ at every available opportunity.
Mr Singh runs a prosperous immigration agency (it was he, a friend of a cricket administrator, who had advised me on my visa). He has recently started exporting pepper sauce and curry powder. He is doing better than ever before. The property has too much on it, refrigerators, televisions, SUVs, cash, jewellery. Every new acquisition is a source of greater anxiety. The health problems are piling up for Mr Singh: breathing problems, ‘black eye’, blood sugar – ‘this bloodsugar something eh, too low and you got a problem, too high and you get a next set of problem.’
And it emerges that this man, proud of proclaiming he is Kshatriya, a warrior, who will refuse to bow down before the blackman, ‘Fire with fire. I can show blackman AK, make him smell AK,’ is in fact a frighten likkle kitty! He cannot bear being alone, and on those occasions when circumstances have conspired to such an end, he will shut every door and window and fester inside with his fears. He is massaged every day with various lotions to keep his skin soft and fair it up as much as possible. He is contemplating
emigrating, to UK, Canada, USA, anywhere, but never to India, no: ‘They does treat we like we is blackman.’
 
 
CONSIDER too Akingbade, who goes by this single epithet, Yoruba for ‘brave one who wears the crown’. As we walk down the line on East Coast Demerara, not many miles from the home of the Singhs, old friends call out to him as Charles. ‘Can I help it if certain ignorant specimens insist on calling me by my slave name?’
Mr Singh I had chanced on, but Akingbade I sought out. I tell him so. I had read his letters to the editor. Mr Singh called him a propagandist.
He is a heavyset, slow, tentative man, grey facial hair, in worndown mocassins, crushed black denim and a bright green dashiki. His hair is in a fro, his spectacles are thick and black, the styles of his hero, Walter Rodney, the great intellectual and activist assassinated during the reign of the dictator. But Akingbade has long departed from Rodney’s non-racial agitation. He aligns himself with the party thought responsible for the death of his one-time hero. It is the ultimate indictment of Guyana.
There is much that is inspiring in Akingbade’s African pride, the reclaiming of the name, the garment, his interest in old African cultures – the medicinal remedies, the soirées, the drumming sessions. But it has come in this instance with a blindness.
He cannot refer to Five for Freedom as criminals. They are exactly what the name says, freedom fighters. To him the crime spree was not a crime spree but an ‘armed African resistance’, a just response to police and state repression. The murders, abductions, arson, sexual violations against an ethnic community – it is not revolting, it is revolution. ‘A necessary and inevitable corrective.’
He points out that African petty criminals are executed or jailed but the drug barons, architects of the narco economy, are allowed to roam free. ‘Twenty-five metric tonnes of cocaine pass through the country every year. They have not made a seizure greater than
ten kilos. They are apprehending the mules, the cargos are sailing through. The pickpocket is caught. The dons are safe, building their empires on blood money.
‘Resistance,’ he says, making his thick hands into fists. ‘Resistance by any means.’
He considers me not adversarially, but cautiously. He cannot be candid with me as the Indians are (who not only assume I’m on their side but that I have come specifically to bear witness to their persecution). So when talk turns to the black academic who put out the extraordinary thesis that an aim of supplanted Hinduism on these shores was the extermination of the black race, he does not argue in its favour. Yet he cannot bring himself to condemn it. Instead his admonishment is reserved for the ethnic relations commission which had the publication banned. ‘It is systemic. It is systemic.’
Anything could be inverted, corrupted.
I thought of something I had seen in one of the Five for Freedom handbills. The escapees, it said, would ‘fight for the African-Guyanese nation just as the sea bandits Walter Raleigh, Francis Drake and Henry Morgan had fought for England and been honoured by the queen’.
And I thought, going back to the music, of a Tosh song, Here Comes the Judge. In the special way of reggae it is able to confront tragedy with a mix of rage and humour. Tosh plays the judge, and this judge ‘have no mercy’. One by one he calls the names of the mighty explorers and privateers who pillaged the Caribbean, among them Francis Drake and Henry Morgan. Each answers in a splendidly exaggerated English accent, ‘yeh-es sir’. They are made to plead guilty to six counts, from robbing and raping Africa to teaching black people to hate themselves. But we were forced, protest the invaders in their accents.
Contempt!
, pronounces the judge, and orders their hanging by the tongue.
What it had come to! Without irony, Africanists looking to Drake and Morgan for inspiration.
Walking down the line from Akingbade’s village, Bachelor’s Adventure, we reached Buxton. It was an old, proud community, named after an abolitionist, the second of the cooperative villages freedmen had formed a century and a half before. Over the years it had supplied Guyana with some of its most enlightened minds.

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