Reviewed by Mohsin Siddiqui

Rahul Bhattacharya’s first novel, The Sly Company of People Who Care, opens with an anonymous narrator, a former cricket journalist from India who decides to take a year off from his “real” life to wander about, to be “a slow ramblin’ stranger”. He chooses, as the venue for this meandering, Guyana, in the north-eastern corner of South America. The location, right next-door to Venezuela, naturally leads one to the assumption that this will be a Hispanic-influenced novel, perhaps in the vein of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or the edgier Roberto Bolaño, complete with quasi-mystical romanticism, heavy on the symbolism and possibly borderline incomprehensible. One of these three presumptions is correct. By the end of this page, you may realise which…

In the case of the other two though, Bhattacharya heads off on a tangent. This is probably because Guyana is nothing like South America “proper”: half the population is of Indian descent, with Africans making up another quarter, and the remainder a mish-mash of Portugese, Chinese, mixed-race, and indigenous peoples; oh, and a handful of white people. It is through this cultural and racial fondue-pot that Bhattacharya’s narrator wanders, into and through the forests of Guyana to the capital Georgetown and back out to the borders of Brazil and Venezuela.

“Gooroo”, as he is known by the other characters in the book (all part of a made-up identity that presents him as an instructor of “kamasutra” to “gals in the bush”), has a one-year visa for Guyana, and is on a mission to — in that one year — reinvent the idea of “living”, and to escape the shackles of his past existence. Somehow surviving by writing occasional travel articles, Gooroo spends his time trying out many different things as part of his Guyanese gap year. The longer Goorro stays in Guyana, the more characters crop up: there are con-men and hustlers, sages and prostitutes, fishermen and housewives, all of whom add their own particular flavour to his narrative, both ethnically and otherwise. That grates a little bit: Guyana is no Paradise, but the spectatorship that Bhattacharya brings to his novel verges on rapturous tourism of the Floridian retiree sort (“Oh my goodness, this is so ethnic!”).

Despite this experiential euphoria, Bhattacharya and his proxy narrator create what is essentially a travelogue, albeit one far more nuanced than say those of V.S. Naipaul, who is referred to many times in The Sly Company of People Who Care. Compared to Naipaul, Bhattacharya’s narrator is thoroughly emotionally invested in Guyana and his descriptions of its blended culture, legacy of colonialism, slavery and indentured servitude, are far more emotionally compelling than the intellectually aloof reportage towards which Naipaul tends.

Part of this is narration, and part of it is technique. From slum-like apartment buildings in the Guyanese capital of Georgetown and “Hassa the dead-eyed minibus driver”, Bhattacharya jump-cuts to a stint as a “porknocker”: diamond-prospecting along with a local bandit called — in finest ironic desi tradition — “Baby”. By the time he manages to get his act together, in the form of one particular individual (a romantic interest, naturally), readers may find their eyes glazing over from a surfeit of detail. Jan, the subject of Gooroo’s amorous intentions, is a “coolie gal”; in keeping with the hybridist tradition of Guyana, she’s also through her father, “a lil Brazzo”. As the novel unfolds, we end up with the two lovers being separated, less from cruel fate and more from the stern practicalities of an expiring visa and a departing flight home.

What Bhattacharya’s narrator seems to seek are answers about Guyana’s history. In so doing, he manages to explore a gamut of events and people that shaped the country, from the first Europeans to tread its shores to the import of indentured “coolies” from India. The narrative recap of Guyana’s history, implicitly told through an ensemble of characters with colourful names (“Dr Red” and “Ramotar Seven Curry” are but a brief sample; it only gets better) is actually extraordinarily interesting, especially because there is so much to be learned from the history of this country where race mixes and matches without ever actually coming together cohesively. But where the novel fails is in creating any real sensibilities: it is so focused on the environment that we find out next to nothing about the narrator himself.

There is a lack of insight; rather, the novel is characterised by a sense of dislocation that is all the more masterful for its smoothness. Bhattacharya is so technically competent that the sense of dissonance comes purely from the situations in which Gooroo finds himself, not from the prose that leads to these different loci. The complexity of Bhattacharya’s story is wonderful, but it is also its greatest failure, what with excessive luridness and a plethora of details regarding Portuguese, Indian and African identity. In capturing all these various flavours, Bhattacharya occasionally goes over the top. Like an actor who doesn’t know when to stop emoting, he fills page after page with absurd dialogue (not in content, but in form) and throws so many different people at his audience that one wishes his editors had included a list of dramatis personae.

It takes a special kind of sadist to write a book peppered with argot and dialect, and an even more special sort of masochist to read it. In The Sly Company of People Who Care, Rahul Bhattacharya proves himself to be the former, and in reviewing it, I find myself clearly planted in the camp of the latter. The fact that I had to get bi-focal glasses during the course of reading this novel is, I am convinced, directly a result of having to re-read the conversations of multiple Guyanese characters in a desperate attempt to make sense of what they were actually saying.

In a rare example of success actually being damaging, Bhattacharya’s prose is so vivid (and ostensibly accurate) that it fairly demands both a dedicated translator and a dictionary of dialect. “Is there a code that I’m missing?” I wondered, flicking through the book frenetically. “Did I drop a glossary? Why does none of this make sense? Why is he talking about “lime”? What does citrus have to do with race politics and colonialism?”

Bhattacharya’s evocative gifts are tremendous, certainly, but I suspect that they are far more effective in his journalism than here. For a short novel, his tendency to launch sensory assaults can verge on the overbearing. Combined with this, the episodic nature of The Sly Company of People Who Care veers into Twitter territory: short, and pithy, and leaping about like a startled gazelle … beautiful certainly, but not especially easy to keep track of. A little less exploration of geography and a little more of inner space, and this novel could have benefitted tremendously.

The novel won the Ondaatje prize, 2012

The Sly Company of People

Who Care

(NOVEL)

By Rahul Bhattacharya

Picador, US

ISBN 1250007402

288pp. $15

Opinion

Editorial

‘Source of terror’
Updated 29 Mar, 2024

‘Source of terror’

It is clear that going after militant groups inside Afghanistan unilaterally presents its own set of difficulties.
Chipping in
29 Mar, 2024

Chipping in

FEDERAL infrastructure development schemes are located in the provinces. Most such projects — for instance,...
Toxic emitters
29 Mar, 2024

Toxic emitters

IT is concerning to note that dozens of industries have been violating environmental laws in and around Islamabad....
Judiciary’s SOS
Updated 28 Mar, 2024

Judiciary’s SOS

The ball is now in CJP Isa’s court, and he will feel pressure to take action.
Data protection
28 Mar, 2024

Data protection

WHAT do we want? Data protection laws. When do we want them? Immediately. Without delay, if we are to prevent ...
Selling humans
28 Mar, 2024

Selling humans

HUMAN traders feed off economic distress; they peddle promises of a better life to the impoverished who, mired in...