The Sly Company of People Who Care by Rahul Bhattacharya

The Sly Company of People Who Care by Rahul Bhattacharya
(Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2011)
278 pages

Rahul Bhattacharya’s captivating first novel follows a year-long adventure in the life of a young cricket journalist who decides to become a tourist in Guyana, the small, impoverished nation on the north coast of South America. The narrator chooses this place for his extended getaway, because it piqued his curiosity when he had visited it briefly with the Indian cricket team. He arrives without friends or connections or much of a plan for how to spend his time. Establishing himself in an apartment in the capital city of Georgetown, he is swept into the lives of the people around him. He associates with a changing parade of acquaintances, some of whom become friends. The novel proceeds as an extended picaresque travelog, documenting the narrator’s encounter with a place and its people.

Keen observation and a musical ear for spoken language are reasons enough to read the book. Bhattacharya establishes his narrative ability from page one. In fluid style, he confidently presents lively and authentic settings brought to life by street people and villagers, neighbors and hustlers and workers going about their daily lives at labor and at play. The characters come and go, trying to make a living where they can. A man known only as Baby, who claims to be a paroled criminal, takes the young man by river boat to the interior of the country on a diamond-mining expedition. One weekend he accompanies another friend to nine weddings, since traditionally everyone is welcome at a wedding, and this friend, called Ramatar Seven Curry, has a passion for weddings. He travels with a goods trader to a town on the Brazilian savannah, and later he takes a tourist jaunt to Venezuela. With another friend he conducts a cooking marathon, and the kitchen fills with neighbors helping out. The frequent changes of scene and character result in a packed, sometimes noisy, and always engaging trip through Guyana.

The cultural backdrop for the many rich atmospheric sketches is the question of race relations in Guyana. Formerly a colony of the Dutch and then the English, the country is home to a large population of East Indians who were brought in by the colonists to work the sugarcane fields and rice paddies. The people whose ancestors came from India live, often uneasily, alongside the descendants of African slaves. Add to the diversity Portuguese, Chinese, and native Amerindian populations, and the variation in traditions and attitudes makes for a striking ensemble. Bhattacharya captures the vivid cultural legacies of these different groups and their mutual misunderstandings based on racial identity.

Since the trip to Guyana is based, in part, on the quest of one young man for a surer knowledge of his own personal identity, the focus on multiple versions of identity in Guyana gives the story a heft and significance and establishes a suitable framework for the young man’s individual experience. The novel includes just enough history and politics to help the reader make sense of the current panorama of life in Guyana.

Bhattacharya represents speech patterns of idiomatic English as exquisite music. The narrator also refers regularly to the ubiquitous music of the region, starting with roots reggae and dancehall and the soca of Trinidad and Tobago–a blending of calypso and American soul of the Sixties. A development out of soca, the musical style called “chutney” builds on the Caribbean sound with East Indian accompaniment on the dholak, the harmonium and the dhantal. He mentions Bruce Springsteen and famous songs of Bollywood films, to name just a couple of other examples. Music punctuates everyday life, and ordinary speech sounds like music. Bhattacharya’s talent for creating his own language in a musical style lifts the novel to a level of literary excellence. Cricket journalist as poetic observer! The strength of atmospheric detail depends not only on sound but on lush visual representation throughout, as the narrator describes countryside, city street scenes, and everywhere people gather. Brief, bright, Dickensian character portraits vibrantly follow one after another throughout the book.

A few times the realism got a little more real than I needed to hear. I am thinking of a few of the conversations among men about women. The other day on Twitter, a woman posted this: “Men, we asked you to express your feelings, but we had no idea how disgusting they are. Please repress them!” I laughed, but that was my reaction to some of the raw talk among men about conquests, past or imaginary. The vulgarity is part of the stream of patter heard every day, and the accuracy of the picture would be damaged by an expurgated report. Bhattacharya manages to include the full range of male psychology without seeming to endorse the cruder aspects of that picture. The dignity accorded the wide range of characters of all backgrounds is one of the book’s major strengths.

In closing, I want to mention what a pleasure this book was to read. A balance of seriousness and laughter shapes the book. When he chooses, Bhattacharya can be extremely funny, merry even. Again, the analogy of music seems relevant. The book plays like a graceful, rhythmic song.

The Sly Company of People Who Care has been longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and although this is only the third of the finalists I’ve read, it would be surprising if this masterfully written novel does not make the shortlist. It has already won this year’s Hindu Literary Prize, where competitors on the shortlist included two other novels on the Man Asian Prize longlist: River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh and The Folded Earth by Anuradha Roy.

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