The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel (9 page)

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Authors: Rahul Bhattacharya

BOOK: The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel
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BABY was a black man, black going to red – not red enough for red, but red enough for his childhood call name Cookup: a bit of this and a bit of that. He had shed the name quick. As he grew older his skin, his whole face, turned more like a blackman, no longer showing a strain of ‘every blasted thing that ever step into Guyana’. This was the power of black, he said in a way that was half pride, half boast. In America pardners with much lighter skin than his, and even clear skin like mine, they could get called blackman. ‘Drop a lil single drop of black in any colour, see how much the colour turn black. Anytime you got a little black in you, you is a blackman. Eh he. That is the power of black.’
He had short hair, browning and greying in parts, in which he made a clean two-inch slit for a parting. On his face he kept an impeccably slim French beard – he could use any kind of knife to maintain it, did not even need a mirror. It was a chubby, button-eyed face: a baby face, though not by any means a young face. I took it to be the genesis of Baby. It seemed so obvious that I never asked. And anyhow they called him by so many names, I thought anything goes.
Of his childhood it was a different story each time. Once he
told me he ‘never had an ole bai, neither an ole lady’. He was left at the hospital gate a few weeks old. A nurse took him in, left him to her sister who worked at Parika stelling. He grew up hustling with her on the stelling, selling any little thing that might be sold, a training for life. ‘I learn fuh
unstand
people, y’unstan?’ One day he got a gig going up the Essequibo with a dredge party.
Another time he told me that he grew up in Albouystown in something like a range yard, with eight siblings, and he was the smartest of them all, and they all dead out because they were not so smart. One of them had taken him into the interior and trained him as a porknocker.
Ask him which of these was true and he’d reply, ‘How you mean, Gooroo, all two is true.’
I knew this much about Baby. Also that he was a ‘Nonpractising Fundamentalist Eighth Day Adventurist’.
Of me he knew less.
Our entire knockabout adventure was born of a kind of bravado. Perhaps we saw something in each other that we recognised; but it was bravado that propelled us. After being twice scamped I went looking for him in that same street by the big market. I found him sitting by a barrow of cherries, pretending to sell. ‘Come nuh, sweetheart, lemme be the godfather,’ he called out to a pregnant girl as she walked by. ‘I only givin out stepfather,’ she winked back. He dragged you involuntarily into that sort of play. I told him that I’d caught up with Magistrate Van Cooten after all. He remembered the case: he thought the crime vicious but had good words for the conduct of the criminal. Baby kept responding with ‘eh he’, looking interested and downpressed, staring into the cherries. Finally, he asked, ‘So the magistrate tell yuh this at Le Repentir cemetery or Bourda cemetery?’
We talked old reggae again. Reggae was the key for reggae is a brotherhood. Once you’ve imbibed the upstroke of ska, the zen of bass, the roots of reggae, repetitions like body pulse, words like fire, like ice, it becomes a kind of possession – music like a gravity, as
Burning Spear said. For a while you turn tone-deaf to everything else. The symmetries and the concerns of other music, they feel unenlightened to the genius of this simplicity. So our understanding was at this crucial level.
I asked him about porknocking and the interior, and he told me stories. I said he should let me know when he’s going in next. Sure, he said. Let’s go soon, I said. Alright pardner, why not catch me back here two days, he said by way of putting it off. My paperwork was finished, I had itchy feet. I proposed we buy supplies the next morning and leave. This was bravado. He didn’t expect it would happen. It did.
My only condition was that we go overland – it was cheaper to fly. I would pick up the fare and the supplies. In this, of course, he had a subsidised trip and I have no doubt he scamped me a little here, a little there. Yet, if anything, I was the more dependent. The expertise was all his. On the river I had been an encumbrance, and perhaps elsewhere too. He’d taken me deep into the heart of something. In sum, I felt, I probably owed him. Under the umbrella of bravado it was difficult to see the truth of things.
I reflected on the Foulis affair in many ways. It occurred to me that had there been no near-murder I would have looked at things differently. A plain theft – it was possible to bathe the incident in a scampish light.
‘ … So Baby vex now after the man hand he a couple of piece of fine-fine stone like sand. So he gone now in the middle of the night to the man gravel, flick on he tarch, jam up the tarch by he neck, howler monkey making noise, all kind of jumbie floating about but Baby focus! Is diamond he t’iefin in moonlight! …’
It didn’t feel that way, though. The raised cutlass, the trembling man beneath, it had heightened one’s sense of judgement. Yet the first was an act of instant madness, the second a calculated deceit and perhaps the more depraved.
When I played him back in my mind, which was often and in a variety of moods, the reel finished at the finish, with him waving
diagonally on the tepui, distorted and shameless, and over the end credits Tony the guide demonstrating his hair over the maga dog riddim in the laser blaze of the parallel sun.
 
 
I RETURNED to Kitty exhausted. I could not shake off the pall of lingering inspection, introspection that had enveloped me. My motion had ceased. To stop is to sink. Yet I did not feel sunk so much as afloat, which with its attendant lack of drama was the more frustrating.
Physically I felt drained. Cooking and washing and all the things of everyday living felt like too much to do. Rather than recovering vigour I felt more depleted with the passing days. Effort made me vomit.
It took me a week to find out that I had a low-grade dengue fever. Its chief effect was listlessness. The temperature subsided in some days, but the passivity remained. I felt bloodless. There was nothing to do, I was told, but rest, hydrate, pop pills and wait for my mosquito-ravaged platelets to regenerate.
The illness brought on a period of emptiness I hadn’t felt since ma and papa died. They were good, decent people, rooted in their efforts, never taking the car when a bus could do, never a bus when they could walk. Ma had died from infirmity, and papa afterwards from sadness really. My childhood memories of sickness were glorious – skipped school, whiled-away pampered days. Ever since ma I associated sickness with the weight of a sad house, a strange, unregistering kind of grief lost in the suffocation of relatives.
It is not nice to be sick alone. I wished I could sleep through the period. I didn’t call home. I dropped a short jaunty email to my three older siblings telling them of the wonderful trip into the rainforest and a plan to approach
National Geographic
with a feature. ‘Hopefully they will say yes and you can show it to the relatives when they come home! Love.’ I didn’t want to worry them with the illness. And to speak it would have been admission of a misjudgement. I didn’t want to give them that.
For a fortnight I lived on Gatorade, coconut water, pineapple, French cashew, sapodilla –
chikoo
– and tinned Van Camp’s Pork and Beans, bought from the appropriately named Survival supermarket. The beans I ate with sweet tennis rolls, which with butter could be a little like Bombay’s bun maska. There was one especially trying aspect to this period. Little crappos would find their way into the house. I was tormented by them. When in panic I feared they, like fluttering pigeons, were liable to do anything. I had seen Guyanese swoop them up like a fallen peanut and fling them out the window. I couldn’t bring myself to it. If they were on the floor, I had a technique worked out for them. I covered them with a bucket and dragged them across to the door. But more often they were wont to get into the sink. I spent hours in distress, staring at them, cursing them. Tapping around them with a stick would worsen the situation: they would hop about among the washed utensils.
One day I willed myself to grab the thing. It took a great deal of psyching myself, and then with my hand encased in a polythene bag.
He’s small
, I told myself,
he’s small
. After pulling out a dozen times, I snatched it. I felt it pulse in my hand as I ran towards the back door and let go of it. It caught the grille on the way out, fizzed across the air, rotating like a wild Ferris, and crashed into the water tank below the whitey tree. It stayed still a few seconds, and then I saw it hop away. I knew I had damaged it. I felt a dishonour I cannot explain.
In a few weeks my energies began to restore. I became acquainted with the new developments in the building. Kwesi Braithwaite, fake diamond on his ear, Kangol on his head, had recently taken to booming loud RnB (Beyonce, Ne-Yo, T-Pain, I’m ’n Luv (Wit a Stripper)). The nuisance was one thing. The practical implication was for the power bill that was on a single meter shared by the six tenements using a formula. The formula was a mathematical miracle. I understood it had led to uprisings in the past, and though nobody understood how it worked, they always returned to it. The formula could not be changed to accommodate the ‘laalessness
of one body or two body’. And some days later, Rabindranauth Latchman from Latchman’s Hardware came to bust Kwesi tail for t’iefin a lead from his shop.
Otherwise it seemed like life, old life. And two months of life had never felt older to me. On the weekend Hassa still brought home a set of black whiskery hassar in a bucket from a trench by the national park, cheerily thumped them dead on their heads with the back of his knife and curried them, dousing the building in flavour. The cashiers were still busty. Uncle Lance could still be spotted on the bench studying, say, a booklet on Duncan’s Signals, or a Jehovah’s Witness report on world population.
I didn’t lime much with Lancy and friends. I spent time in the sweet breeze discovered at the back of the house, at the top of the back stairs, reading, snoozing, watching the yard over the tin. It was a spare lot with high grass at the edges and a small neat house on stilts in a corner. The yard held just the single tree, a great breadfruit tree with luminous leaves which pointed and curled. In a shed, bigger than the house, a braided welder worked. He worked alone to the radio, at whichever hour of the morning or night he liked, and from afar it felt that he was at one with his work. Beside the simplicity of his self-made shack, under the ornamental majesty of the breadfruit tree, to watch him spend his days, building, mending, was a solace.
The exact moment of recovery was when I inexpertly pierced the top of a coconut. I had found the tenderest spot. The knife went straight through. It had been in the fridge. The chilled water gushed into my face, my eyes, like fizz from a soda bottle. I was stunned. Then I laughed. I hadn’t felt that alive in a long time.
Outside, Georgetown shimmered in the heat in between the rains. In the months which followed I began to tramp about again, in town, and up and down the coast. Often I found myself in the stray countryside, hosted by generous acquaintances, some freshly made, some from the cricket tour, and some entire strangers, for I had walked all the way from India.
The mood was very different now. One escapes one’s life, for however long, seeking adventure – I think of the Hindi word
dheel
. This is what kite-flyers in Bombay shouted when they wanted the spooler to let loose the thread. I could not fly a kite, as unnavigable to me as chopsticks, but I liked giving dheel, and I liked very much the thought of dheel. So one escapes one’s life seeking adventure, and with enough dheel and some luck, that happens. But the thread is anchored. You can only go so far. The impulse must change. Instead of adventure one seeks understanding. It comes with a heaviness. The only way to be exempt is to resolutely not ponder, but I was given to pondering.
It struck me forcefully there wasn’t much to do. The loneliness of acknowledging this can be difficult. I began to walk less, take the bus more. In sun or rain it was the more practical thing to do, but I know I did it to counter loneliness. I liked the minibuses. I liked how there were no stops. You could flag one down where you wanted and you got off where you wanted, bellowing a specific instruction above the roar of music: ‘over the bridge’ or ‘when you turn’ or ‘corner’, or with absolute precision, ‘by the blue rubbish bin’. There was a packed, peopled sexuality to the bus. They played the vulgarest soca and duttiest dancehall. Nasty stuff. Sweat, smells, sounds, hair, skirts, fingernails, tapping feet, there was a hot tropical charge to it.
But where to go? A stop here, a stop there, a meal here, a conversation there, humid lethargy, slow ruin. And I was liable to absorb the slow ruin. For instance, at that hallmark of the tropical colony, the botanical gardens. The famed old collection had dwindled and now there were mainly unlabelled palm. No brass band played on Sundays anymore, the old timers rued. In the abutting zoo, the lioness appeared eager to be put out of her misery. The birds were gorgeous, fluorescent toucans and macaws, the absurdly large harpy eagles who clawed at chunks of meat the size of a human face, but hardly anybody came to look at them.
Loneliness it was that led me to two or three little affairs so
full of tacky fraudulence that I escaped them before they could develop. Never mind.
I found nourishment in the shaded cool of the national library. Georgetown was where a bookshop was a stationery shop, and of the three actual bookshops, one was about to shut down. The library too was in decline, you could tell by the paucity of new books. People tended to use it for siestas. Sun-sapped souls would come in at lunch hour, put down a stack of magazines by the foot of the chair and sleep. I myself fell into a few good ones there. It was the most peaceful spot in town, a small table with four low, steeply reclined chairs set around it. Beside this was a beautiful big jalousie door and beyond that a lush yard in which the serrated shadows of plantain and banana leaves swayed like passing thoughts, and sometimes if it rained the drops pinged in through the slats. One remembers little things about places. And of the library I remember the hand-me-down colonial bureaucratic militancy with which a membership query could be entertained only on a Tuesday or a Thursday morning – people were not exactly ramming down the door to get in – though a question on any other matter was permitted; I remember how immaculately one of the ladies at the counter balanced her pregnancy against her stilettos; I remember the disgruntled vibe of the ageing security guard at the gate with the baton at her waist, how, though she made as if to be further disgruntled, only the clamour of schoolchildren at 3.30 could ever revive her.

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