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Authors: Rahul Bhattacharya

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BOOK: The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel

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It was here the jailbreakers had been sheltered. Following a big bust there would be a lime in the village, food and drinks for all. The perpetrators were kings of the limes. Youthmen saw the flash, the respect in this. Then came the implosion. Petty disputes began to be settled by the gun. The reluctant were dealt with; families, their houses burnt, were forced to flee. The very name Buxton became synonymous with terror. Eventually the army set up a base in the village and remained a presence, a community imprisoned by its madness.

We stopped at a crossroads. The asphalt road ran parallel to the coast, a road which was routinely dug up to slow the entry of police vehicles and halt passenger vehicles to plunder – the road to avoid which Indians who could afford it flew rather than drove, professing the desire to ‘piss pon Buxton’ as they went over.

Perpendicular to the asphalt a red mud track went deep into the village, till the backlands, where initially the criminals and then the army had set up their camps.

At the crossroads itself was an abandoned rumshop and general store, low and white, its walls covered in half-hearted graffiti, full with youth idling flush in the middle of a weekday, lying on tables barechested, chatting, playing cards, smoking weed.

They would be ‘glad fuh work,’ they said, ‘but nobody going touch we cause we from Buxton.’ Among them was a young policeman who had quit the force after the spate of police executions. He was doing nothing much now. Another had a brother who had been shot dead by the armed forces. The friend of one was named recently in a high-profile murder. His mother refused him legal representation. ‘He made his choices. He lived his life,’ she said. The boy was twenty-one.

And there among the blacklisted youth on an idle corner in Buxton, or in the racial hothouse of the Singhs, things were bared with a bitter simplicity. A section of society was disillusioned with the state so they turned to crime. The state’s response was to suppress the movement with more crime. Every act of crime further ruptured the division. Every rupture delivered new folkheroes, demigods, Five for Freedom versus Phantom, Blackie and his heirs versus Roger Khan and his cohorts, each thing seeded from something before, and that from something before, going back to the time the Africans and the Indians were put down brutally on the foreshore of South America.

Beneath the everydayness this was the Guyana I had stepped into. How innocent Baby was in all this! I thought of him, of Menzies Landing, lives blowing in and out, the world turning, up to its tricks.

PART THREE

BUTCHER the barber – for he was once the former, an antecedence apparent in his blade work – Butcher was pleased when I told him I’d moved houses to Sheriff Street. ‘Nuff fairos on Sheriff Street.’

Butcher liked talking about women arguably more than the next banna, in particular declaring that, ‘I doesn’t have a race conscience about any gal – as long as she have clear skin.’ So when Butcher said fairos he meant hookers not queers. There were some of the latter too on Sheriff Street, like the chubby orange-haired man in the blue flatshop with his painted black eyebrows thick like two fingers. That man was a delight, cussing customers for style, thrilling them as he did. The queen of the Sheriff Street fairos, however, was a queer, a transvestite once Salman and now Misha. She reigned at the other flatshop, below the short-time. She was fine like a reed, tall, with a fabulous sprinkle of glitter over a face that was thin, bony, cruel. Her stubble was green, her voice throaty. Men were served drinks by the two female hookers, an Indian and an African, each of ordinary appeal – but their souls were lost to proud, thin Misha, surrounded already by hungrier men. They stared at her, enchanted. Neutralised by spirit they went upstairs with one of the other girls and got lashed off for three grand or boned for seven.

This was the street, the Georgetown strip: fairos, nightclubs, rumshops, cookshops, taxi companies and restaurants, mostly Chinese, interspersed with regular Guyanese homes. A sad little strip. Its obscenities were small; its excesses were nothing. There were no streetlights. The odd neon glowed as a failed reminder. Herons and egrets visited the lily and styrofoam in the trenches. Donkey carts, dray carts, horse carts, and sometimes horses devoid of carts plied up and down the strip; so too the bling bling; so too big snorting trucks, for Sheriff Street was a thoroughfare between the slim perpendicular highways along the Atlantic and the Demerara. Wild eddo with their wild heart-shaped leaves gushed forth from the margins. And how does anyone explain to anyone, let alone to Mr Bhombal, that you love this place because look, here is eddo growing wild by the trenches on the nightstrip?

THOUGH my move from Kitty came soon after the Joint Services call, that had nothing do with it. They had arrived at 5 a.m., thumping with menace on the wooden wall. I was so certain it was a dream I may have poked the first soldier to check if he was real. He responded with admirable restraint, seeing how he had AK and thing at his disposal. He was very polite – ‘Excuse the boots,’ he said before entering. Behind him were a dozen armed ranks in camouflage, except for a dainty man in civvies, a specialist searcher. That man stuck his hands up with impeccable courtesy to indicate that he had nothing which could be planted. It was an important gesture. The chief of police himself had been implicated in a sting by Roger Khan, issuing the stitch-up instruction, ‘Put drugs pon she.’

They searched every tenement, to a variety of reactions. Uncle Lance denounced them in his gravelly morning voice; Kwesi’s mother, frightened her son had been up to something, sat quiet on the bench with dignity; Hassa never woke up – and when they kicked open the door word was he continued sleeping. Conversation
about the raid ran hot for days afterwards. Kwesi’s mother was not alone in worrying that Kwesi must have made trouble. Some identified a shifty chap from Pike Street as the ‘cochore’, the informer, who had tried to out Kwesi. Kwesi’s alleged crimes ran from ganja trafficking to falling in with the Agricola gang. But the boy was legal.

Nobody ever found out what the raid was for. Or so I thought. Afterwards Uncle Lance told me that ‘certain members, and I will not call their names’, believed that it was I who was being investigated. For cocaine.

But the raid was a pleasant enough adventure. It was the small things which were accumulating. The noise from downstairs, the quarrels seeping up through the boards, the wailing children and yelping pups over the tin. The bed was breaking, the floor was rotting, the stove had to be tilted in a manner of angles before being lit. Mosquitoes devoured me with an ecstasy that crossed the last boundaries of perversion: once they ate my nipple. It happens suddenly that man loses the forbearance to hold together the small things.

There was more to it, I think. I had in that place begun to feel myself painted into a corner. As I’d started as a watcher and listener, that had become my role. This disturbed me. Lancy could luxuriate in his environment, sitting in his vest, launching broadsides, napping humidly. Kwesi could seek fake jewellery, mend the odd wire, launch daily a bid for a girl, a perfect logic to his days. Rabindranauth Latchman, recently relieved of his wife, could play sugardaddy in the sportsbar. About my own place I had begun to feel depressed.

How sorry to think that here where Africans, Indians, Portuguese and Chinese had arrived and turned themselves into one thing or another, had sired between them entire new racial specimen, a place where a munshi could turn ratcatcher and vice versa, where vulgarity was the lens to life, I had allowed myself to remain myself.

My first instinct was to think of travel. My eyes scanned the large Guyana wall map procured from the Lands and Surveys Commission. Leaf-vein streaks of blue ran through it like electricity.
Past the rivers to the west the dotted border gave tantalisingly to the curve of letters, prolonged and syllabic, Venezuela; for now I decided to simply move houses.

It was about halfway through the year. Amid rambles in the countryside, I rifled through the classifieds, newspaper days of Roger Khan.

On my final day in Kitty I rose at the same hour that the ranks had come. It was raining. Through the grille at the back the raining morning looked so wet and beautiful. Things were purplish silver. Two kiskadees tangled yellow on the zinc beneath the whitey tree. The leaves of the welder’s breadfruit tree made shapes in the wind. In the other yard fowl-cock went off like a cavalcade of sirens.

Goodbye alyou.

ODDLY I became good friends with Uncle Lance after I moved. I spotted him one day from the balcony, proceeding up Sheriff Street with short bumping steps. He was in trousers, shirt, shoes and a cap. It was the first time I had seen him in anything other than boxers, vest and rubber slippers. Just like that a man is made anew. Till that instance it had never occurred to me that Uncle Lance was a person of the wider world, that he may have a back story, or family, that he might have errands to run, that he could be seen passing on a road. To see Uncle Lance that day was in some way to see him for the first time. I invited him up for a bounce of rum.

How different he was! I had never before considered Uncle Lance’s age. It was his temper rather than his age that one absorbed – the flamboyance, wit, wisdom. It had the effect of what people call evergreen. But now he felt distinctly deciduous; dry, but for the sweat on his face. The sweat did not trickle. It lodged in his wrinkles, which were deep rather than many, bringing emphasis to them. His chin, a small, rounded piece, was baggier than I had noticed before, as though a blob of air had leaked into it. When
he took off his cap, his hair, wet with sweat and combed back, had formed itself into thin bands through which shone scalp. He was breathing hard. He looked old.

He talked so differently too! I had not heard Uncle speak in a low voice ever. He attracted the ears of anybody in the vicinity; indeed, it was anybody in the vicinity he was addressing. People congregated around him when he made jokes or lambasted the government; they continued a little longer hanging clothes on the fence or draining rice-water in the yard. So it was a shock to hear Uncle Lance say something as prosaic as, ‘Nice place you got here.’

It was a nice place. I had got a deal on it because the landlady, who had migrated and operated via a handyman, had that keenest of Guyanese convictions: that Guyanese are not to be trusted. She only let out to foreigners. But the house was neither upscale nor quiet nor large enough for foreigners. It had lain empty a long time. And still, because the previous tenants were foreigners, it was a home furnished down to a toaster.

We stood in the thick balcony breeze, five-year and coconut in hand, watching Sheriff Street. Neither of us said anything.

Below, a tattered man who passed every day at this hour rummaged through the rubbish bin. He found remnants of fried bangamary and plantain chips from the fish shop. He went along his way.

Above, a small plane fluttered in the cloudless sky.

Looking at the aircraft, Uncle Lance said at last, to some degree reverting to his old self, ‘I tell you something, bai, if we could grow sugarcane by every airstrip in this country we never got to buy a single barrel of fuel.’

‘How so, Uncle?’

‘Ethanol, bai. It got nuff ethanol coming from the sugarcane to run them Islander. Like bush rum, you drink bush rum? Bush rum could run a car. So long as you got the converter in the carburettor, right.’

He added with a kind of morose chuckle, ‘But we only runnin we own self on rum.’

We watched the plane dip out of sight. He lapsed into his unfamiliar self again.

‘Who knows where that plane going, where it coming from.’

‘Ogle, I guess.’

‘Heh,’ he chuckled again. ‘You young, bai. You hand soft and you mind clean. Let me tell you, bai, airstrip come up anywhere in the country, and it ain’t use to carry people alone.’

I expected him to get into a cocaine riff, at how the government corrupt, but instead he sat slowly on the plastic chair.

‘I walking the last half an hour.’

‘You mad! Sun hot, Lancy.’

‘I coming from a funeral. Beepat.’

I knew what he was talking about. Even by the standards of Guyanese daily crime it was a gruesome affair. The man owned an electronics store. Abducted by bandits one day, his body, decapitated, both feet hacked off, was found weeks later in the D’Urban backlands. A revenge killing, the papers called it.

‘You knew the man?’

‘Everybody know everybody, bai. It had a time when two or three murder a year was a big big thing. Now we gettin one hundred, one fifty. Now out of three quarter million that does give a rate of twenty. If you look up the statistical recordings, that is a very high number …’ Momentarily he seemed to find pleasure in numbers.

‘Politricks rip apart we country. When I was a bai in Wakenaam,’ – he held his hand absurdly low, by his ankle – ‘black people kwarril if they see me barefoot. They make me put on something on me foot! Tha’is how much love there was. Then we get the race riot and the same people hold their nose when they pass we house.

‘It was stupidness at the burial. People talking one set of nonsense. People bawling, people high, calling for Phantom to come back. They was a blackman there, just a limer, lookin a lil yardy-yardy. They chase the man away. The wife and she sister bawling, “get that man out of there”. I can’t take that kind of stupidness. Look, a man dead. People got to understand what that means. I walk away before it speed my head.’

With that Uncle Lance downed the rum and stood up. He rolled the ice cube about his mouth and ejected it in a graceful arc into the yard.

‘I gone, bai. Get home and catch five.’

‘Alright, Uncle. Take care, right.’

‘Maybe I’ll pass you sometime.’

‘I’ll look out for you.’

‘Good.’

Placing his cap tight on his head he set out again in the sun, round-headed and wide-hipped, shrinking till he reached Garnett Street, which he crossed, paused, then turned into.

I lingered on the balcony.

The humidest day. Sheriff Street passed. An emaciated Luna. A boy’s face pressed against a water jar. The clop of a dray cart. Slow Guyana, its time stretched in the sun.

A red-suited lady in cornrows. She stares at the flaming tips of her shoes. Langour, introspection in downward profile. The suit contours her body. Humidity is falling on her. She tosses back her head, to make air on her sweat. Her nostrils quiver, a face now flagrant, vulgar. I wish I could invite her up. I wish I could drench her.

Her parasol has a rip. A triangle of light flaps on her chest. Her bus has arrived. Her calf tenses as she climbs on.

Not still noon. A day to be negotiated, and another.

BOOK: The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel

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