Book review: A portrait of Guyana and its polyglot idiom

Book: The Sly Company Of People Who CareRahul BhattacharyaPicador 282 pagesRs495

One of the criteria used to judge the quality of writing is its adherence to rules of grammar and punctuation. A novel like Rahul Bhattacharya’s The Sly Company Of People Who Care, inspired by his year-long sojourn in Guyana, makes one question this assumption. Bhattacharya’s book is not perfect; nor is it easy to read. But it is deeply interesting and innovative: for he breaks rules and re-forms language, wielding it in an impressionistic manner to create a portrait of Guyana and its polyglot idiom. At some places the language is hard to understand (“Wa’m to you, buddeh?”), and yet in other places it’s musical and strangely beautiful (the euphemism for urination is the oddly poetic “shed a tear.”)

Bhattacharya’s own experiences seem to form the basis for this book, for the narrator, like the author, is a former sports writer, who after visiting Georgetown during a cricket tour, decides to escape the weariness of his life in India and return to Guyana. Part travelogue, cultural commentary and history of Guyana, Bhattacharya’s work occupies the uncertain territory between fiction and non-fiction. In both form and subject matter, it cannot but evoke Trinidadian-born VS Naipaul’s The Middle Passage.Bhattacharya creates a portrait of a country still divided by race, despite its many, many colours, shades and nuances. He traces the origins of the conflict between the Afro-Guyanese and the Indo-Guyanese (now enacted between shadowy militant outfits like the ‘African Taliban’ and ‘Phantom’) to 1838, when, after the abolition of slavery and indentured labour from India was brought to replace the African slaves that worked the sugar plantations.

The idea of India is a faint but ever-present part of Bhattacharya’s narrative — for he encounters India in the imagination of the Indo-Guyanese, the prevalence of ‘chutney’ music and hindi film songs, the features of the mixed population, in his own otherness and struggle to escape India.

Bhattcharaya’s experience of Guyana is best brought out by his compelling, elemental characters — the diamond hunter-murderer-fraud Baby and the beautiful, exploitative Jan. The characters themselves reflect the fluidity of the creole tongue of Guyana, hard to understand and grasp, with multiple — almost duplicitous — meanings. It’s the use of language, fluctuating between idiom and more orthodox form, which ultimately captures Guyana. Early on in the novel, Bhattacharya expresses these contrasts and complexities in a beautiful passage: “A lovely raining day....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.”

Bhattacharya’s book, for this reviewer, provokes the realisation that in many cases, writing restrained by the conventional ‘rules’ of language — rules originally articulated and instated by colonisers — can often prevent innovation. It’s only by breaking these rules that Bhattacharya can invoke the poetry and rhythms of the ungrammatical Guyanese patois — using language in a way that is not merely idiomatic, but also subversive and provocative.

Samhita Arni is the author of The Mahabharata — A Child’s View