Dear Editor,
I have read a number of letters and reviews in SN of Rahul Bhattacharya’s book, The Sly Company of People who Care, and have wondered each time whether I had read the same book since I came away from my reading with a completely different take. Brendan de Caires’ review in last Sunday’s SN (‘Naipaul plus love‘) leaves me with that same feeling.
Yes, the book has some wonderful prose, and the witticisms are funny, and every SN reviewer has praised these along with the book’s supposedly wonderful portrayal of Guyanese dialect and culture.
Since every reviewer has used excerpts to make their points, I hope that SN will afford me the same opportunity and will publish the excerpts that I wish to use to make my point. Parents will want to protect their children from what follows.
The location is the interior where Bhattacharya travels with a group of pork knockers. Bhattacharya’s book, p42: [A character, Dr Red, speaks] “Bones point to a buck gal and say he want to f—- she. Now Amerindian girls, you don’t court them …. You take their hand and you go away and f—- them. It’s a rape in a kind of a way. Bones raped a lot of buck girls.”
Bhattacharya’s book, p49: “The Siddique daughter was minding the counter. Baby frequently expressed his admiration for her. ‘Wouldn’t mind some of that coolie hair pon my face’… ”
These are only two excerpts from this section of the book which abounds with other such vile and violent comments about women, and with slang and cusswords such as sk—-, b——man, b——hole, etc. None of SN’s reviewers and letter writers, all male, have made any mention of this. It would have upset their tidy little interpretation of the book’s absolute gloriousness. Or, perhaps, they consider all of this as part of the wonderful cultural colourfulness that Bhattacharya captures, and so vividly.
Now, Bhattacharya describes himself as a mongrel Indian, someone who lives between two worlds since his mother and father come from different communities in India. My take on his book – a travel book which is called a novel because he changes names and conflates characters – is that he located his book in Guyana because during his tour here as a cricket reporter he sensed something about our local condition that he thought would either allay or explain the confusions and fears that he faces about himself as a hybrid person.
It’s as if he craved a descent into hell, craved a baptism of sorts in a journey of self discovery. In Georgetown, he kept mostly to the yards and backyards of Kitty and Campbellville. He wanted the full, down-to-earth Guyana experience. Given the chance to engage a leading local politician in conversation during his overland trip to the interior, he passed, or else he chose not to report that conversation in his book.
The book ends with Bhattacharya abandoning the poor, illiterate, young woman – half Indian, half Brazilian – whom he takes to Trinidad and Venezuela for sexual adventure. He then flees Venezuela, Guyana, all of it.
Whereas SN’s letter writers and reviewers are overjoyed with what they see as the book’s absolute wonderfulness, Bhattacharya, for his part, reports what he sees and experiences baldly, without coyness or embarrassment, and without any attempt at finessing anything.
In the end, he flees from us, from all of us, and from the crude and cruel society that he finds here and which he describes in his book. He flees from the pork-knockers’ vileness and macho violence, from the drunken Indian wedding house he attended, from our everyday racial slurs of ‘blackman‘ and ‘coolie‘ and ‘buck.‘ He flees from the damning picture we present to him about himself and his possible future, and there is nothing in any of that that speaks of gloriousness.
That SN’s reviewers have chosen to interpret his damning portrayal as something wonderful has more to do with some notion on their part of playing the English colonial master who stands above his black and brown masses and looks down his nose at them while delighting in their cute antics and turns of phrase, their colourfulness and cheer and exoticism, and their amazing ability to find comedy in their poor and tragic lives.
In his review, de Caires takes the opportunity to indulge in his usual Naipaul bashing. How Naipaul would have been praised had he chosen to write about our cuteness and colourfulness which could then have been interpreted as joyous!
His searing perceptions of our human condition can never be so misrepresented, however, and he never intends that they should be. And remember that he, too, fled from us, and has never returned.
Yours faithfully,
Ryhaan Shah
