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

noticing this not very amusing attempt at comedy.
    Yours faithfully

    ‘Prapa talk, bai! Dah prapa talk!’
    ‘Don’t make stupid, banna. You know how that man go make racial out of anything. Besides, is not blackman who getting insult, is Hindu.’
    ‘Hold on, hold on. You even wonder why it have blackman with the rice? Is because till now coolie don’t accept that it was African who bring rice to Guyana.’
    ‘Don’t speed me head in morning time, banna. Blackman think he can plant rice. Give he one square yard and is ganja you going to find there.’
    ‘Hold on, hold on. Who bring the ganja here? Is them coolieman sadhoo who bring it.’
    ‘All two ya’al wrong. It’s chinee who bring it.’
    Uncle Lance took the stage now.
    ‘Hear nah, ya’al hear about Robert Waldron? It had one Robert Waldron in Wakenaam, good. From when he a boy Robert would wake up every morning before sunrise, good. Walk from house to house, fetch the milk, walk to the stellin, ketch boat to Parika, ketch bus to GT, sell the milk in GT. Wakenaam see him back not till nightfall. Robbie wukkin hard. Next thing he get a cycle, good. Robbie prospering, going by more house, makin more collection, sellin more milk. Bam, next thing Robbie buy a vehicle. Bam, next thing he get a man to work fuh he in town. Robbie doin real good. And then he decide fuh mind cow heself . Everyone in Wakenaam big up they eye. You ever hear of blackman or fulaman minding cow? Is only Hindu who can mind cow. Bam, inside two months they all dead out. One cow ketch disease, next one get mash down by van, next one die at chilebirth, next one feel lonely and take he leave for heavenly abode. And Robbie back to where he start.’
    ‘So what that have to do with rice?’
    And so it went, restless early days in Kitty, ripe with heat and rain and Guyanese sound and Guyanese light in which the world seemed saturated or bleached, either way exposed.

3
    I WAS frankly unimpressed when I saw that blasted scamp again. I should say I was not wholly unprepared for it. I had described our meeting to Uncle Lance and friends, attaching to it a strange spiritual dimension. Now Guyanese are born sceptics. Their foreparents were either forced or tricked into coming here, and thereafter white man, black man and brown man had each scamped the hell out of them. To take things at face value was considered the most basic weakness.
    So they laughed when I told them about the suffering murderer and the terrible burden he carried in the vagrant streets. More so when I showed them the plastic pebble.
    ‘Man who could scamp with melted toothbrush, bai, that man gafo be professional.’
    ‘True professional.’
    One or two people gave me a hard scolding. These were people who left their wallets home and walked with exact change to the market. To the bank they went in pairs. If they saw a pretty girl thumbing down a car they stepped on the gas.
    Yet there was some delight taken in my man, since scampery was so rampant that the ones who shone amid the competition were
reverenced. Of course I had been a packoo – packoo, the monkfish, superbly ugly, so ugly that it must also be stupid though it was very sweet to eat – I had been a packoo but I was also privileged to have been had by a scampion.
    I was about the city trying to extend my stay in Guyana. When I had come to Guyana first there had been a good basis. I was a cricket reporter. The first Test against West Indies was in Georgetown. I was twenty-two, and naive beyond my years. The visit had been for a week, a week of bewilderment and curiosity, moods and images, names and rhythms, contours of a mystery world one could perceive but not grasp.
    Now I’d come on the longest return-ticket available, of a year, and without valid reason. At the airport the suspicious Sherry had stamped me in for a month, leaving me a ladder of paperwork to climb. I didn’t mind it. To reinvent one’s living, to escape the deadness of the life one was