The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel Read Free

refused to accept payment at first, and invited me to her house on the coast. At the year’s end they would do a Qurbani, a bull would be sacrificed and cooked, and I must come for that because I was like family. She used to mind chicken but four hundred of them died in the big flood, and it was a real bad experience, dead chicken floating about her yard and she couldn do nothing bout it. The government gave her back two hundred and fifty chicken and twenty-five bags of feed, but she was stayin away from chicken for a while.
    She was dougla, mixed African and East Indian, Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese, black and coolie: the term, I realised, from the Hindi word for bastard, dogala . Neither family truly accepted her. It didn’t help that she was fulaman, Muslim, this from the
Fulani tribe of Africa. Growing up she always heard people say, ‘look foolerman deh, don’t trust them’.
    ‘I like Sharook Khan bad,’ she said whenever wanting to change the conversation to more pleasant matters. ‘I would like to meet he sometime.’
    Bibi Rashida’s circumstances touched me, caught in the middle of so many things, the dead chicken floating in her yard.
    But when I brought up her suffering with Lancy in order to gyaff – ‘the coconut lady does have it hard’: I was pleased with the approach – he grunted dismissively.
    ‘Is only elections time we fight so. Just see how much dougla born after election. How come so much dougla born after election? You know what is the problem?’
    ‘Too much politricks.’
    ‘Damn true, bai. You bright.’
    Uncle Lance was a reader and could often be found perusing obscure pamphlets on the bench. He was a newspaper junkie, as I too was becoming.
    In the afternoons a cross-section of Kitty folk would assemble on the stairs of the house around a newspaper-wielding Uncle Lance, whose undertaking it was, in the words of one participant, to instigate n agitate the population. He ran the sessions democratically, throwing up an item in the air and letting whoever wanted run with it.

    CARIBBEAN MEN IN HIV NIGHTMARE
    Was Mr C. a Bajan who loved both soca music and a white woman in England?
    Was Mr B. a Jamaican with reggae music running through his entertainment veins but whose complaint started a police investigation and ended up blowing the whistle on what the authorities are calling a terrible crime?
    Finally did Emma Baxter, a white English receptionist in London set out to have unprotected sex with a host of black men who trace their roots to Barbados, Guyana, St Vincent,
Antigua or Dominica, to name a few island-nations in order to infect them with HIV/AIDS, apparently in revenge?

    The point of instigate n agitate here was not the conduct of Ms Baxter, though one man did present the Guyanese truism, ‘Pussy make man skunt.’ No, the issue was that Guyana was referred to as an island. The report had been reprinted from the Nation of Barbados. ‘The problem with island is they from I-land,’ a man with hair buns remarked. ‘Is only I they unstan, not you or we.’ Trinidad came in for licks too, ‘is sheer oil they got, too much aisle in they brains’.

    AFRO DHULAHA AND DHULAHINE
    Dear Editor,
    I wonder how many of your readers have taken note of that rice advertisement on television, in which an obviously Afro person is featured as the Dhulahine, and an equally Afro individual acts as the Dhulaha.
    Of course, I did read an article recently which tells about an Afro gentleman of the incumbent regime who, sometime back, saw fit to convert to Hinduism. But that’s his affair, and such cases must be rather rare here in Guyana.
    These are clearly not Afro roles however, and the landscape teems, surely, with actors and actresses eminently skilled and appropriate to the parts. What is also notable is that no attempt is made to disguise the ethnicity of either that purported Dhulaha or the Dhulahine.
    So I ask once more; ‘What is afoot here?’ Or will I be dubbed a racist for even