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Summary
Summary
In flight from the tame familiarity of home in Bombay, a twenty-six-year-old cricket journalist chucks his job and arrives in Guyana, a forgotten colonial society of raw, mesmerizing beauty. Amid beautiful, decaying wooden houses in Georgetown, on coastal sugarcane plantations, and in the dark rainforest interior scavenged by diamond hunters, he grows absorbed with the fantastic possibilities of this new place where descendants of the enslaved and indentured have made a new world. Ultimately, to fulfill his purpose, he prepares to mount an adventure of his own. His journey takes him beyond Guyanese borders, and his companion will be the feisty, wild-haired Jan. In this dazzling novel, propelled by a singularly forceful voice, Rahul Bhattacharya captures the heady adventures of travel, the overheated restlessness of youth, and the paradoxes of searching for life¿s meaning in the escape from home.
Author Notes
Born in 1979, Rahul Bhattacharya is the author of the cricket-tour book Pundits from Pakistan , which was voted one of the Ten Best Cricket Books of all time in The Wisden Cricketer (London). He lives in Delhi,India. This is his first novel.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The narrator of this debut, an Indian national, is a 22-year-old cricket reporter who has left Bombay to explore Guyana's exotic landscape and people ("Guyana was elemental, water and earth, mud and fruit, rape and crime, innocent and full of scoundrels"), many of whom he befriends. In vigorous yet lyrical prose employing a pungent vernacular, Bhattacharya describes Guyana's horrid heat and thunderous rain in sensuous detail: the pretentious, decaying buildings of its capital, the unbearable humidity that settles on the men who go "porknocking," or searching for diamonds in the muddy soil. Violence breaks out easily during nights of drinking, yet people care about strangers. The narrator falls for a seductive young woman, but their first trip together-to Venezuela-veers from romance to threat when he re-enters Guyana without papers. In fact, a dark undercurrent of dread haunts the novel, and what begins as a desultory adventure story delivers the shock of multiple betrayals. Bhattacharya's distinctive voice, which incorporates both Guyanese and Indian dialects, results in an authentic and sybaritic tale. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
The 26-year-old unnamed narrator of Bhattacharya's first novel needs a change. A cricket journalist from Bombay, he decides to quit his job and spend a year in Guyana. There he discovers a forgotten former colony of decaying wooden shacks in the capital, Georgetown, and vast sugar plantations along the coast. Eager for adventure, he travels deep into the interior to join a secret society of porknockers (the local name for diamond hunters). He later meets Jan, a volatile Guyanese woman, and they travel to Venezuela. The novel ends as his visa about to expire, his relationship to Jan consigned to memory he prepares to go home. Readers looking for a more traditional, story-driven novel may be disappointed, and Bhattacharya's smooth, insightful prose includes a lot of Guyanese creole, a patois that can make for a challenging read. Yet the novel is a lovingly delicate study of Guyanese culture, in which Bhattacharya captures the restlessness of youth, the yearning for new experiences, and the driving need of travelers to go beyond their own internal borders.--Gladstein, Carol Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The narrator of this novel journeys into Guyana's interior to seek answers about the country's past. IN the opening paragraph of Rahul Bhattacharya's first novel, "The Sly Company of People Who Care," the unnamed narrator, a former cricket journalist from India, declares his intentions for his life, and thus his story - to be a wanderer, or in his words, "a slow ramblin' stranger." That rambling, through the forests of Guyana; the ruined streets of its capital, Georgetown; and out to the borders of Brazil and Venezuela, constitutes the novel's central action. But its heart lies in the exuberant and often arresting observations of a man plunging himself into a world full of beauty, violence and cultural strife. It's impossible, reading Bhattacharya, not to be reminded of V.S. Naipaul, even if he weren't referred to several times throughout the story. Naipaul defined the lonely, empty middle ground occupied by the descendants of Indian immigrants living in Africa and the Caribbean who no longer belong to any nation. Bhattacharya's narrator, despite having been born and raised in India, occupies similar territory, having given up on his country and the identity that was supposed to come with it. By and large, though, the similarities end there. Unlike Naipaul's disillusioned protagonists, who stand perpetually outside the world they live in, Bhattacharya's narrator is thoroughly invested in Guyana and its striking blend of cultures, born out of colonization, slavery and indentured servitude. If anything, he is more reminiscent of Dante in the case of the "Commedia," a careful listener and observer who, while in exile, faithfully records the stories that come his way. For Bhattacharya, that listening and recording means creating a narrative loyal to the traveler's experience, with all the awe and confusion that attend it. His novel is populated with images and people skillfully sketched rather than fully developed, so that often all that remains in the reader's mind is the smalt detail - the upside-down watch on a man's wrist, the plum-size dimples on a woman's face. Similarly, the creole animating the novel's dialogue and the often fleeting appearances of black and Indian characters seem to be incorporated at times less to illuminate than to add an auditory texture to the fictional world. There is, inevitably, a disorienting quality here. Bhattacharya resists lingering too long in any one place or with any one person. As his narrator takes the reader-through his apartment building in Georgetown and his impressions of its people ("Hassa the dead-eyed minibus driver; a pair of busty Indian-Chinese cashiers who people called Curry-Chowmein"), he reveals almost nothing of himself. The novel's seduction, and the reason it deserves close reading and admiration, stems from its expansiveness and the quick movements of its prose, which can leap nimbly from a casual conversation with a con man to a trip into the jungle with that same con man in a single page. The novel, thankfully, resists offering easy characterization of a culture that has to be seen and heard before it can be understood, of a place "ripe with heat and rain and Guyanese sound and Guyanese light in which the world seemed saturated or bleached, either way exposed." The narrator's first expedition into the interior of Guyana to go diamond hunting, or "porknocking," comes about as a matter of chance. He's driven by whimsy but retains his depth of vision. Bhattacharya avoids the usual pitfalls of writing about a foreign culture with the intention of discovering something about it - a goal that all too often finds writers resorting to sweeping generalizations. The narrator describes the "slow-watching" of a waterfall and stands "alive in the drizzle, filthy-footed." There is a music behind everything: in nature, the "amphitheater of leaves"; in life, the rhythms of the local language, and of the reggae whose lyrics of protest are constantly evoked. In a village of porknockers, a half-dozen people (with names like Dr. Red and Nasty) share the page as they drink, argue and fight. They and other characters - including my favorite, Ramotar Seven Curry, known for his devotion to attending weddings - come to life in all their eccentricity, their humanity and flaws intact. Bhattacharya's narrator emerges from his adventures seeking answers about Guyana's past, and the country's history - from the arrival of the first European explorers and the African slaves they brought with them, to the importation of impoverished Indian workers, or "coolies," as indentured servants - is gracefully retold. Bhattacharya uses the complicated webs of African, Portuguese and East Indian identity flowing through Guyana to reveal not only how the country was settled, but also how differences in race and class came to breed bitter discord. Guyana is consumed by race, and the author's subtle and repeated shredding of seemingly indelible racial divisions is one of the novel's great achievements. Here he describes the "putagee," or people "of Portuguese extraction": "Portuguese had come to Guyana as indentured laborers even before the Indians and the Chinese. They were light-skinned and independent-minded. They rose up the ranks, and now, small in number and of high position, they could look at race as something they were not a part of." And on the people of a coastal settlement: "The folk at Menzies Landing were black, or more often red. . . . In the direct Guyanese way a red person was a direct visual thing. It implied mixed blood and, obviously, a certain redness of skin. Black and Portuguese could be red. Black and Amerindian could be red. East Indian and Portuguese could be red." ONE wishes at times that Bhattacharya had tried to include less in order to say more. A second layer of description following the narrator's move to a new house occupies too much space in an already crowded novel; a journey to the Brazilian border takes too long. By the time the narrator is finally drawn to a single character, a gorgeous young woman of mixed race (mostly "cooliegal," though "my father got a lil Brazzo in him," she says), both their romance and their travels together feel artificial, in part because the narrator remains more a guide than a character, one who points the reader's attention to the hidden corners of a society while keeping the secrets of his own heart at bay. He may occasionally try the reader's patience, but that's only because he wants you to see what a remarkable and exquisite world he has made. Dinaw Mengestu is the author of the novels "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears" and "How to Read the Air."
Guardian Review
Anyone writing a fictional travelogue about Guyana inevitably follows the trail of illustrious adventurers such as Sir Walter Raleigh, Evelyn Waugh, Edgar Mittelholzer, Wilson Harris and VS Naipaul, all of whom have written memorably about Guyana's fabled interior. All five figure in Rahul Bhattacharya's debut novel, but Naipaul especially so, given his shared "Indian-ness" with the protagonist. Bhattacharya is Naipaulian in the scrupulousness and precision with which he observes and records native life and landscape. But where Naipaul's restraint can lead to overmanaged and ponderous prose, Bhattacharya's writing bursts with as much passion as the tropical downpours he describes. His novel contains some of the finest poetic descriptions of Guyana's landscape I have ever read. The wettened stars, the floating drizzle or rain blowing in lilac gusts over rice fields, the trombone of cows from a soaked pasture - all these and more capture the essence of Guyana, which is water. The protagonist is a young Indian who leaves his country behind in the search for "magic". Cricket lures him to Guyana (the batsman Carl Hooper moves at the crease "with the softest sweetest paws and the slowest sleeping winks"), but he is soon overwhelmed by the fecundity of people and place. "On a ramble in such a land you can encounter a story a day." The fictional travelogue is packed with characters - rogues, hustlers, pork-knockers, wise men, harlots, fishermen, drunks and countless other "small" people who are observed with compassion and genuine appreciation of their kindness, humour and warmth. Naipaul's Miguel Street is a background text, though Bhattacharya's protagonist has no scorn or superiority in him. Indeed, on occasions, the simplicity of people affects him unexpectedly: "A tear welled in my eye. I don't know. There was something in the scenes . . . Coolie people milling about in coolie ways. The shabby sparkless dressing, the uninspiring hair styles, the flat resignation in those eyes . . . the packets of Guyanese curry powder and Guyanese chowmein and bottles of brandless coconut oil, the stacks of Hindi discs . . . the absurdity of so many journeys, so many displacements." The longer he stays in Guyana, the more he becomes aware of the lives of the common people, the descendants of slaves and indentured labourers, who managed, by monumental effort (for example, moving a hundred million tonnes of earth by shovel, to create the irrigation canals that define the coast), to "defeat defeat". "Raw, accidental, those used to be my words. How long it took me to see that everything was brought here. The land which seemed to me so raw was created. The crop it was cultivated for, sugarcane, sugar once so precious it was a royal dowry . . . and the society which seemed to me so accidental was once made in the most deliberately manufactured way possible." Bhattacharya's novel celebrates the creative genius of the Guyanese, whether it be the mud they moved or the creole language they made for a new land. He has great mastery of the cadences of urban and rural creole - the language of slave and coolies, and arguably Guyana's (and the anglophone Caribbean's) greatest achievement. It has won the region two Nobel prizes for literature. Bhattacharya marvels at its texture, a voluptuousness which he links to the very body of the people; it is a body scarred by history but, in the form of Jan (the protagonist's Guyanese lover), is also erotic, thrilling, tropical. The protagonist reads Naipaul's In a Free State during his affair with Jan. In Naipaul's novel, sex is an anxious and seedy business, but in Bhattacharya's the affair with Jan is described in some of the most beguiling prose to emerge from the Caribbean. To follow in the footsteps of the likes of Naipaul is a daunting journey, but Bhattacharya, in his first novel, has shown a talent reminiscent of the early works of that great pioneer. David Dabydeen's Molly and the Muslim Stick is published by Macmillan Caribbean. To order The Sly Company of People Who Care for pounds 10.39 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop - David Dabydeen Caption: Captions: Water . . . 'the essence of Guyana' Anyone writing a fictional travelogue about Guyana inevitably follows the trail of illustrious adventurers such as Sir Walter Raleigh, Evelyn Waugh, Edgar Mittelholzer, Wilson Harris and VS Naipaul, all of whom have written memorably about Guyana's fabled interior. All five figure in Rahul Bhattacharya's debut novel, but Naipaul especially so, given his shared "Indian-ness" with the protagonist. Bhattacharya is Naipaulian in the scrupulousness and precision with which he observes and records native life and landscape. But where Naipaul's restraint can lead to overmanaged and ponderous prose, Bhattacharya's writing bursts with as much passion as the tropical downpours he describes. His novel contains some of the finest poetic descriptions of Guyana's landscape I have ever read. The wettened stars, the floating drizzle or rain blowing in lilac gusts over rice fields, the trombone of cows from a soaked pasture - all these and more capture the essence of Guyana, which is water. - David Dabydeen.
Library Journal Review
A cricket journalist and native of India, Bhattacharya sets his first novel in Guyana, and his narrator (whose name is not revealed until about 30 pages shy of the end) shares the author's homeland and profession. The first third of this richly detailed novel is a challenging read that follows the narrator as he journeys through Guyana and encounters a variety of characters, primarily East Indians, Africans, Amerindians, Portuguese, and Chinese. These characters, with names such as Baby, Roots, and Labba, speak an equally interesting mix of English, Guyanese, Creole, and East Indian. When the narrator meets 21-year-old Jan(key), his adventures heat up as the pair explore each other along with forays into Brazil and Venezuela. -VERDICT While providing readers with a unique look at a country seldom featured in fiction, this generally well-written piece definitely requires patience to sift through, given the challenges of the local language and meandering plot. Avid readers of fictional travelogs filled with local flavor may find this of interest.-Shirley N. Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
PART ONE 1 LIFE, as we know, is a living, shrinking affair, and somewhere down the line I became taken with the idea that man and his world should be renewed on a daily basis. Those days I liked thinking in absolutes - life, man, the world - but people like to be specific about things. Hence, my actions were a little difficult to explain. To be a slow ramblin' stranger! It made perfect sense to me. I still had to make friends, and my first one was Mr Bhombal, a waterworks technician. Mr Bhombal was, like me, an Indian national. Bhombal was his first name, yet I took to calling him Mr Bhombal. He just had that vibration. He wore polyester trousers. His steel watch faced up palm side. To read the time he would raise his forearm to his eyeline. Ordinarily I would deflect the question of why I was in Guyana: 'Nice girls, eh' or 'The people here are all leaving' - wholly correct - 'so somebody had to come'. But as Mr Bhombal was so sincere in his effort to play elder brother, I told him the truth. I told him I came here once and afterwards had dreams. The low sky, red earth and brown water made me feel humble and ecstatic. The drenched wooden houses on stilts wrenched my soul. I told him I'd be here for a year. Mr Bhombal had a way of conveying that one was on the precipice of a dreadful mistake; however, not to worry, with practical thinking one could make something of the situation. He had gloomy eyes, a fat, melancholy face, framed precisely by drooping eyebrows and defeated lips. He was not bald or even balding, but his hair was extravagantly spaced. He would consider the facts sociologically (was his word), then logistically (at this stage he asked detailed questions and closed his eyes as the replies came). My needless arrival here, he contended, could be swiftly rectified by application to another country: each time he called up a different one. Ultimately, after much deliberation, he would conclude - indeed, it was Mr Bhombal's conclusion for any issue - that the secret of the resolution lay in discerning 'how much goodness there is in the good, how much badness in the bad'. His facility to believe this was a fresh insight each time amounted to genius. I would insult Mr Bhombal and he would take it well, in fact with glee. He felt he had provoked thought. Such triumphs were fleeting. Soon Mr Bhombal would return to his cocooned misery. 'Up-down,' he said wearily of his days, from the engineering office below to the shared living quarters above. He made the journey in green gumboots - longboots they were called in Guyana. When he did venture out, it was before dark, to the seawall or to the young Sindhi assistants of the variety stores on Regent Street who deflated him with their sad ambitions of owning shops here. Being an Indian-national sort of Indian national, Mr Bhombal struggled in this kind of place. He was scandalised easily. He was aghast when I told him that many reggae songs were a bhajan for an Ethiopian king. The Africans were one thing, but what of the East Indians? At least Trinidad had malls and cinemas. 'Is this life?' he despaired, donned in longboots hours after he had traversed the single flight of stairs. 'Is this country?' Guyana had the feel of an accidental place. Partly it was the epic indolence. Partly it was the ethnic composition. In the slang of the street there were chinee, putagee, buck, coolie, blackman, and the combinations emanating from these, a separate and larger lexicon. On the ramble in such a land you could encounter a story every day. Take the one recounted to me at the bar in the cricket club by the lawyer. The case was of a lady he'd once badgered so hard in the witness box that she fainted. A year after the event she knocked on his door. 'Thick Indian girl, country manners, powder on chest.' He was not good with faces, but he remembered her on account of the fainting. She wanted to retain him. She had been accused of killing her own baby. Everybody suspected that the child was by a black man. Certainly her behaviour was odd. She would shave the child's head every week, so nobody got to see its hair. And when the child died she didn't report it, she buried it. She claimed he choked on his vomit. They proved the presence of vomit. He won her the case. But he had no doubt whatever she killed the baby. No, why the arse should it bother him? It was not his to decide guilt and innocence. He was a professional. Anybody could kill their baby. The lawyer was putagee - of Portuguese extraction. The Portuguese had come to Guyana as indentured labourers even before the Indians and the Chinese. They were light-skinned and independent-minded. They rose up the ranks, and now, small in number and of high position, they could look at race as something they were not a part of. I walked plenty in the early days. There were no shadows in Georgetown. A young town, poetic and wasted, its exquisite woodenness going to rot or concreted over, it was cleaved and connected by trenches which fumed, blossomed and stank. There were no tall buildings. Under the high equatorial sun, shade trees, some so large and spreading as the saman, rarely crept beyond their own peripheries. When 'sun hot', as them boys said, it had no place to hide. One day, idling in town - Sunday, quiet - I sat to rest on Carmichael, one of the streets that spoke out from the big church, when a man with a rice sack over his shoulder approached me. 'Gimme a lil t'ing nuh, soldier,' he said. His hair was browned with dirt, a face like shattered dreams, idealistic and corroded equally. He made one want to say, 'No man, don't worry, it's not you, it's the world.' He had come out of jail, done time for murder. He was a porknocker. He went into the interior and hunted for diamond. One night, sleeping with his kiddy at his crotch, he found his own pardner trying to get into it. He always slept with a cutlass under his head. He grabbed it and chopped the man's face nine times, till the man dead. I bought him a juice and gave him the fare to his home in the Cuyuni, three rivers west. In return he handed me a hideous plastic pebble. He had made it by melting toothbrushes in the big prison on the Mazaruni. 'You could keep that,' he said, as I studied the grotesque glory of the object. 'Thanks.' He offered his fist for a bump. 'Baby's the name,' he said and slid away. In less than a fortnight after my arrival, Mr Bhombal was gone. He told me only hours before. A matrimonial match had been found for him in Bhubaneshwar. The matter needed to be settled at once. I saw him off at his house. He departed with hasty clumping movements, leaving behind nothing, only the prints of his green longboots on the wooden stairs. It was a lovely raining day, the kind of Georgetown January day that would singe me forever. Clothes flew on the line against a palm. Wooden houses cried on corners. A frangipani dripped over a crook paling. A goat bleated through thick slanting drops. The trenches were aglimmer darkly. Guyana was elemental, water and earth, mud and fruit, race and crime, innocent and full of scoundrels. Copyright (c) 2011 by Rahul Bhattacharya Excerpted from The Sly Company of People Who Care by Rahul Bhattacharya All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
