South-South Liming
Reviewing Rahul Bhattacharya’s “The Sly Company of People Who Care”
By Charles V. Carnegie | Small Axe
Rahul Bhattacharya has given us a sweet, magical lime of a first novel. Lush with the irony and warmth squeezed into its paradoxical title — The Sly Company of People Who Care — this travel narrative set in Guyana rewards at every turn. The narrator is a young man in his twenties who has “walked all the way from India” (86) and gotten caught up with the spirit of the place. As a journalist he once covered an international cricket tour in Guyana, and now he has returned for a year of exploration and self-discovery. This “slow ramblin’ stranger” (3) plunges into the everyday lives of his Guyanese hosts, illuminating all he experiences with keenly sympathetic ethnographic insight and rendering these adventures into lyrical description.
With deftness and empathy the narrator sketches the social and spatial-temporal coordinates of the Guyanese imagination: the often cruel local mythologies of race; the sensuous and varied texture of days and nights and seasons of heat and rain; the qualities of light; the intimacies of place. He moves about from his base in Georgetown with its once magnificent wooden buildings, to the “country,” as the densely settled, intensely cultivated coastal strip is known, to the further reaches of the forested “interior,” to the Rupununi savannah. Toward the end, he makes adventurous forays into neighboring Brazil and Venezuela. However, having no command of Portuguese or Spanish and with little attention to the cultural nuance that makes the Guyana sections so rich, the account here becomes thinner, more self-indulgent and less interesting, notwithstanding the protagonist’s torrid romance. The novel’s three main sections follow his passage, and the consequent ripening of his social sensibilities, through these intertwined yet self-contained geographic and social worlds.
But if anything it is the lime that gives Sly Company its underlying structure. Bhattacharya closely studies the conventions and codes of the lime, that ubiquitous southern Caribbean institution of (male) public repose; and his mastery of the medium infuses the episodic tale with warmth and verve.
Read more of Carnegie’s review at Small Axe.
