A review by Frank Birbalsingh

The Sly Company of People who Care is the first novel of Rahul Bhattacharya, an Indian author who was born in 1979, lives in Delhi, and previously wrote a book on cricket – Pundits from Pakistan: On Tour with India, 2003-04. This background scarcely qualifies Bhattacharya as author of a book on Guyana, unless it is for his occasional references to West Indian cricket in Sly Company. What we know is that Bhattacharya paid two brief visits to Guyana, once in 2002 and again in 2006. That this brief acquaintance with his subject should generate such informed and zestful commentary is breath taking!
Although described as a novel, Sly Company does not tell a connected story which might suggest a work of imagination or invention. The narrative consists entirely of a factual account of the author-narrator's travel through Guyana and neighbouring countries such as Brazil, Venezuela and Trinidad, although Guyana's history, geography, politics, economics, sociology and culture reap the lion's share of his attention. Sly Company would lose nothing if considered as an exceptionally brilliant travel book, nor does it gain by being treated as a novel. But fiction has become extremely flexible as a genre nowadays, and there is no reason why Bhattacharya's characters, descriptions and dialogue may not be seen to benefit from fictional techniques.
Sly Company is divided into three parts the first of which recounts hair-raising incidents on the narrator's trip to Kaieteur Falls using an overland route from Georgetown. It is a daring venture that includes character sketches of porknockers with names like Nasty, Dacta Red, Roots, Labba, Baby and Foulis which splendidly capture rough and ready ways of living and bare knuckle escapades necessary for survival in damp, hot house, tropical forest conditions where mortal danger may lurk at every turn. In one incident during "a session of semi-drunken cricket" a firesnake appears and is beaten with a stick and hoisted on a prong before its stomach is torn open with a knife and "a frog fell out with a bloody splatter. If this does not catch an atmosphere on the edge of survival, consider an experiment of the narrator who keeps six yarrau fish in a bucket of water to observe their growth, only to see them cannibalise each other until one supremo survives in water tinged with blood and floating pieces of fish. As the narrator sums it up: "In the bush everything could be wicked, everything left to chance."
Part Two offers an enlightened and enlightening appraisal, from a sympathetic outsider's point of view, of the history of ethnic relations between Indians and Africans in Guyana. As an Indian himself, the narrator's comments on Indo-Guyanese feelings about India are revealing: "Their [Indo-Guyanese] Indianness felt more intimate than mine. They longed for it; I had no such longing. I was wearied by it, and in fact in flight from it." More importantly, Bhattacharya perceives reasons for troubled relations between Indos and Afros in Guyana: after Abolition, in an effort to keep freed Africans on the plantation at low wages, plantation owners destroyed African initiative in starting their own villages; but, out of similar economic motives, they later issued land grants to Indians and helped with drainage and irrigation of their farms. The result: "At worst the Africans saw the Indians as illiterate, barefooted, clannish heathens, misers who hoarded coins under their bed, who had strange customs and rituals and wore strange uncivilised costumes... At worst the Indians saw the Africans as the condemned: ugly, black of skin, with wide noses and twisted coir for hair, mimics of the white masters, without a language, culture or religion of their own, frivolous, promiscuous, violent, lazy." Such studied information implies that, in addition to knowledge gained from observations on his brief visits to Guyana, the author of Sly Company also relies on vigorous research for his insights and general commentary.
Part Three opens with the tension of police efforts to combat crime and the relief of humorous anecdotes from Lance Banarsee (Uncle Lance.) We then get a salacious snapshot of the seamy side of nightlife on Sheriff Street in Georgetown, followed by an even more salacious, often erotic romp of the narrator and his female companion Jan (Jankey Ramsaywack) through Venezuela and Trinidad. Throughout all this and the narrative, as a whole, Bhattacharya displays a surprisingly sure grasp of Guyanese speech, for instance, in aphorisms like "Sorry fuh maga dog, maga dog turn around bite you," or "two man rat cyan live in one hole." He also flawlessly reports a woman's reason in court for burning another woman's forearm: "she ah lie like a dog, is she who jook me fust," and is equally impressive in catching a childlike Guyanese impulse for boasting, bluster and baseless bravado that is intended merely to impress, dominate or frighten.
But the puzzling title of the book needs explanation. It stems from the author's discovery of a manuscript of Dutch colonisers who, after all, laid the foundation of Guyana as a nation. The first three words of a section of the pamphlet praising the "civilising mission" of the Dutch West India Company were "struck out" and "replaced by a single word SLY. " Then, in the margin, a sentence "they think like they care" was started and abandoned. Hence the author's ironic title for a Company which enslaved and traumatised people for profit in pursuit of a civilising mission. Irony is also driven home by the epigraph to Sly Company: "All this was Dutch. Then, like so much else, it was English," a quotation taken from Light Years, a novel by James Salter. In casting a baneful eye on the predatory practice of bartering colonial peoples, this quotation applies equally to the city of New York, which was originally owned by the Dutch, as it does to Guyana.