The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel by Rahul Bhattacharya

porknocking.
    There was the simplest economy of barter and credit. Porknockers would spend weeks or months in the forest hunting for ‘mineral’ before returning to the settlement. Here they would contemplate a trip to the coast to sell the bounty and drink of wine and women, but they rarely did go. After they’d repaid the shopkeepers with diamond and gold against which they’d taken supplies, there wouldn’t be much left. They limed in the settlement till mood or necessity took them back into the forest. Despite the idea of
town, its thrills and vices that they talked up all the time, I sensed many of them didn’t actually like town. They were institutionalised by the bush, its freedoms and compulsions, the smallness of the community, the eternity of its surrounds. It was the shopkeepers who routinely went to the coast to trade.
    At times I could scarcely believe a settlement like this, so little and rudimentary, existed beside the wonder that was Kaieteur. Anywhere else Kaieteur would have been a hive of tourists, the largest singledrop falls in the world, five times the height of Niagara, and so much greater than the statistic. But this was Guyana. Nobody touch she. There might be one plane a day, sometimes two, sometimes none – and a plane carried nine passengers. It would come in at about noon. A small guest-house had been built by the airstrip, but the tourists rarely stayed. They would take a guided walk for an hour or two, then fly right back.
    The days started early and the time was all ours. It rained often, in thrilling bursts, rain running down shingles in ecstatic bumps, the entire settlement, the shacks, the mango tree, pixelating in sheets of water. We went walking on the plateau, usually in threes or fours, most often it was Baby and me with Labba or Roots or both. We collected smooth stones from the creek and stroked them and placed them on our foreheads while lying on the airstrip. We laughed at the little scuttling planes when they couldn’t land in the clouds.
    There was a brilliant strangeness to the tepui, the word for plateaux like this with their own ecosytems nourished by the constant fine spray of the Kaieteur. The phenomenon of the tank bromeliad, for instance – the marvel was that it had every appearance of a potted plant, except that it was so garrulously outsize. The largest ones were two or three times as tall as I. The minuscule golden frog that lived within its leaves I could never spot. But I often saw the orange cock-of-the-rock. Such a funny bird! He was a startling orange neckless mohawk. He sat in the trees hamming it up to attract mates and nested in sheer rock face. The golden frog, the
cock-of-the-rock, they were endemic species, special to the small area around the falls.
    It was the ranger’s son who let me in on these secrets, allowing me a look at a photocopied set of notes for a bounce of rum. He was a young, handsome lad, keen on dancing. He was planning to write and direct a movie in which he would star as Kaie who had plunged down the cliff to save his tribe, the Patamona, from the Caribs, and left the waterfall in his wake.
    Everybody in the bush was a hero in a small way, and they thought of themselves as heroes in much bigger ways. They walked golden on the tabletop. They thought they could do anything, turn flimstar, fly fighter jet, fuck the greatest women, open casino in Brazil. They boasted without irony, in amusing, endearing ways. They spoke about real aspirations in humble tones. Labba said he could catch butterflies and sell them in town. He could chop the tree that obstructed a view of the falls for two grand. He could make warishis and sell them for eight grand. He could dig up a lil pond for tourist and dam it with rocks, start a pool parlour too, and then there might be a long, detailed debate on whether a pool table could be folded so as to fit in the tiny Islander planes.
    We slow-watched Kaieteur for hours from various points. The mist was