The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel (16 page)

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Authors: Rahul Bhattacharya

BOOK: The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel
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She sashayed away, carrying her African bearing in her big black dress, humming a hymn we were made to sing at the morning assemblies of my Christian school in Bombay, standing in lines, wearing our ties, Praise, My Soul, The King of Heaven.
 
 
‘UPSTAIRS, upstairs,’ I heard a hoarse voice call out early one Sunday morning. I had returned late the previous night from the bank robberies in the country. I feared it was Jackie hauling my ass to church.
I went out to the balcony. Below Uncle Lance stood in a cuddly, grumbly teapot stance that appeared to suggest that I’d stood him up. I mentioned this.
‘You got to be sharp, bai, you got to mean what you say.’
‘Mean what, Lancy?’
‘You said you going to look out for when I come.’
I invited him up for a cup of tea.
‘With lemongrass,’ I lied, well aware that the specimen I had planted in a pot had mutated to regular grass.
‘Mornin ah wastin,’ he growled back.
I splashed water on my face and left in boxers and tee.
He began to walk even as I descended the stairs. We walked a few minutes, over the stink canal to Drury Lane.
‘So here you got a little bird-racing going on, right by you,’ Uncle Lance said. He had remembered an old conversation from Kitty. On the grass embankment vendors sold seeds from damply spread sacks. Men stood around by the trench with cages. In them dark
shadows of towa-towas and fire-reds flickered and danced. There were parked cars, a clean Sunday vibe. People stood in gyaffin formations, and gyaffin specked the Sunday air.
‘Nobody gamblin today,’ he said. ‘That is good, chap, cause let me tell you, gamblin is worse addiction than sweet woman. I learn it the hard way.’
There was going to be no race, that was clear. It left me mildly puzzled as to why we were here. He climbed on to the boot of a car and gave himself a lethargic morning-stretch against the windscreen.
There was a newspaper beside him. I browsed through it.
Man Shortchanges Prostitute, Gets Severely Beaten
Two Children Were Riding a Pregnant Donkey and Lashing It
Cocaine in Cabbage: Mother of Three Remanded
The short item about a pandit accused of larceny I read out to Uncle Lance.
He gurgled like a child.
‘You ever seen pandit in action?’ he asked, quivering with laugh.
‘I been to weddings.’
‘That ain’t pandit, bai. That is just like clerk. Me show you what is pandit.’
To my surprise he beckoned me into the car, still quivering, and we sputtered down Sheriff Street, past the back of the botanical gardens, past the rumshop that declared upfront that Malcolm X is a leader not a follower, and the giant lampshade which was the Church of the Transfiguration, through the tall palm of Le Repentir Cemetery and out on to the East Bank Highway.
A short way out of Georgetown, aback a canefield, amid a cluster of jhandis beside a tangle of palmyra, he brought the car to a juddering halt.
The mandir was in a covered yard, lined with waist-high idols. Inside this perimeter of idols a quartet of musicians struck up an uptempo bhajan. A pair of men played the dholak and the harmonium. A young girl went at a dhantal, a tall metal rod clanged with a piece of iron shaped like a horseshoe, an instrument developed
in indenture as far as I could tell.
Bhajan sunavo, baidyanath,
a lady in a gaudy salwar kameez sang,
O baba, puja karo baidyanath
.
Pandit was in his chambers. A group of people stood at the door, watching him at work. And from the door one got a close view of Pandit, a man with a harelip, white hair, broken teeth and fleshy breasts peeking through a Hawaiian shirt. He sat at a desk and considered the matter before him.
The case was of a young boy dying of asthma. It was presented by three generations of ladies, possibly a grandma, ma and sister. Pandit began by making inquiries about the family and the property – a process in which he frequently closed his eyes, feigned anger and on occasion looked downright violated. The matter of the property he pursued further, its dimensions, its division, the strain on the family over the division, how the boundaries were aligned, which tree on which boundary. As he received the answers, his earthen face turned scarlet, his eyes shuttered tight, his breasts trembled and one cowered at the prospect of the final eruption. But he kept sustaining the build-up, going often to the terrifying brink but not beyond. One time he blew out two candles in a huff. Another time with an unexpected shout he summoned fresh cloves via a woman with bright lipstick and enormous cleavage, all the while keeping his eyes shut. Opening them at last, he created something on a notepad with abandon. It was the property.
‘Piece ah land they fightin fah. It causin all this destruction, this scatteration.’
‘Do sumthin nuh, Pandit,’ the sister pleaded, with the liberty of the young.
‘The thing gone too deep,’ Pandit replied.
‘Come nuh, Pandit,’ the mother joined in.
The grandmother looked on with stoic fatalism.
Pandit raised his voice.
‘The evil spirit going round-round round-round and it settle right here’ – he stabbed the pencil into the pad – ‘right here pun the eastern boundary, pun the noni tree.’
He fixed his gaze, one by one, on each of the ladies.
‘The spirit weigh pun the bai. It press down pun he till he cyan breathe—’ he put his hands around his own neck and made large asphyxiating sounds, ‘and the same spirit going to kill alyou.’
Silence.
‘Is true,’ the grandmother said at last. ‘He granfadder go dah way too.’
Pandit adjusted his harelip into a pout; then, leaning forward, he delivered the blow.
‘The bai not goin fuh live. Me nah do it.’
More silence, followed by the twinkle of tears. The situation deteriorated rapidly thereafter. I couldn’t tell exactly what was going on, but it felt fatal. Minutes later, when all seemed lost and it felt like the boy was already dead and the mother had let her forehead drop against the wooden table – that is when Pandit administered the turnaround.
He would consider assisting. If the boy was still alive they were to return with barley, turmeric, and fifteen thousand in cash the next day.
‘Wha I like bout Pandit is he honest deh,’ the relieved mother said as they exited the chamber.
‘When pandit seh it he mean it,’ the sister concurred.
‘Trut. He not a man fuh give false hope. Da’is a thing to respeck in today daynage.’
It was so massively Naipaulian that for long afterwards I suspected it was an elaborate wind-up, and the joke deh pon me.
That afternoon, dispensing a slow rub to his dhal-belly, Uncle Lance not so much said as dictated the aphorism, ‘Bai, in Guyana it have pandit and it have bandit and sometimes it hard to tell the two apart.’
Ever since, Uncle Lance and I called each other Pandit and Bandit, each using either name for the other.
 
 
I LEARNT of Uncle Lance that he once had a wife who fled with a lover to the United States, that he had a son who worked there ‘programming computer’, and that he himself once ran a plasticwares shop in Kitty Market and thereafter a three-car taxi service – ‘such a roaring success that I could enjoy me a early retirement’. The last of these facts had a practical bearing on us.
For there came a period that we devoted our Sundays to cookery. These days began with Uncle Lance appearing in a shaky white Toyota AT 192, one of his old taxis hired out to a friend through the week. With three short blows he’d announce his arrival at half past five. Off we’d go in the drizzling dayclean. He would lean suspiciously on the steering wheel as he drove, squinting at the windshield as if alarmed to find a world beyond it. He never ever pushed the needle beyond a hair’s breadth of 30 mph, an aspect I called attention to frequently.
‘You ain’t see me drive, Pandit. I could reach GT to Kwakwani in one hundred minutes. You know Kwakwani? You cyan know is where! You only bin here a couple of days! Is sheer bush. One hundred minutes, Georgetown to Kwakwani. O my foot heavy, O it made from lead. But you ga think for the fool on the road, right. That is what an upstart like you don’t un’stand.’
‘Nobody on the road, Lancelot.’
‘There was a time we had nice zebra crossing, right. They would paint am steady. Could see them stripes from a mile, eh, shining pon the road. The stripes now vanish, the zebra done exstink.’
‘Nobody on the road!’
‘Jackarses them does take an
angle
into the crossing. You not allowed that. You got to start one side of the crossing and walk
over
it till you reach other side. Now people cuttin in from any part of the road, causin one bundle of confusion and jumpin on the stripes, “look I’s pon the zebra.”’ Suck-teeth.
By six a.m. the wharf at Meadow Bank was already crowded. Riches were everywhere, smell of river, stink of fish, blood in the morning. Alive in the drizzle, filthy-footed, we’d hustle with zeal.
It was serious fare, no jokey trench fish, no hassar and hourie and patwa. Here were shark and trout, ten kilo gilbakas and their pricey heads, whiskery catfish and highwata fish, mounds of shrimp and bangamary and packoos, their tails twitching behind stupidy flat heads like the fronts of woebegone school shoes. One watched the skinning of the packoo with sorrow. It was so honest and foolish. When a cutlass was introduced into its mouth, it would bite and not let go. The skinners were vicious. They stood at wooden platforms and let rip at the creatures, splotching customers with scales and entrails. It was an unfathomable violence, such a contrast to India, where men with moustaches sat tranquil on their
hasiyas
making meditative incisions as if in penance.
On the way back we would stop at the Sunday market in La Penitence. Here, shopping, chomping on a pink guava or a cassava ball, Lancy might break into a calypso, and it had to be said he did well for a voice like his. He knew all the folk songs, the shantos and calypsos, the Bill Rogers and Dave Martins.
At Sheriff the session would begin. We might make a herb and pepper batter for the shark or the banga and lash her with tennis rolls and Hot West Indian sauce. The catfish we might curry with raw mango. I might impress him with my breakthrough invention of pumpkin with karaila and butterfish (in the same pot). Lancy was an expert chopper, saying a chinee gal taught him, and he could do two onions in the time I did one. His stance at the stove was a hand on hip, a heavy lean back, eyebrows arched, a man bemused.
Over cooking and eating we encountered the connections and disconnections with India. Every now and then Uncle Lance would pull out a remembered term from his youth, for instance,
bartan manjey
, to wash dishes, a verb morphed into a noun. There were words he knew which meant nothing to me. Like
sanay
, to mix and eat with the fingers. This bewildered him. No less than the fact that I had never eaten a dhalpuri before Guyana.
There was good reason for this. I had never lived, only travelled in the Gangetic plains from where the coolies were drawn. My
contact with its peasantry was so limited, I knew so little about them, and Bombay Hindi was so different from the dialects of the eastern plains. It took me a while to work out that the Guyanese verb ‘chunkay the dhal’ – dhal to rhyme with shawl – derived from
chaunk
, for
tadka
. Equally it amazed Uncle Lance that we didn’t use curry powder in India, without which no curry in Guyana qualified as one.
One day, a good three months before Christmas, we thought to make the putagee Christmas dish of garlic pork.
We drove out to Mon Repos on the coast looking for fresh pig. The capped ladies giggled with Caribbean punning, ‘Me ain’t givin out me pork. Hear nuh, Anusha, the bai does wan pork, you givin out you pork?’ Anusha giggled, we all giggled, and she supplied us two fatty pounds.
At home we washed and lowered the pig into a transparent bowl. We threw in bruised cloves of garlic. We deleafed the fine leaves of thyme from its stalks and sprinkled them in with holy abandon. We halved the firebomb peppers and threw those in with final fingerfuls of salt. We covered the pig with vinegar and fastened a cellophane over the top. It was to be left like this for three weeks. Our pig, she would breathe in every last rumour of flavour.
The bowl we placed on a doily – such a furnished house! – on the central table. No matter what, I could not stop staring at it. Lancelot too eyed it heavily. Every other sentence contained the words ‘gyalic poke, Bandit, gyalic poke’. After two hours we decided to fry one piece ‘jus fuh see’. An hour later a quarter of the bowl was done. Three weeks on, two pieces remained. Damn fine pieces though.
In this manner, in between rambles, assignments and long days in the country, I became Sunday friends with Uncle Lance, and through him I met many people in this easy, informal world.
From the vantage of the Sheriff balcony, standing red rum on ice, we watched people. He would divide passing citizens into two categories.

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