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

horizontal in the morning and vertical at night and in between times was the revelation. The shorter rainy season, anyway strong only on the coast, was meant to have finished. But this year was different, Labba said, because the white man and his policies and his gluttonies were mashing up worlclimate. Earlier you didn’t need the calendar because you had the weather. This year the light rainy season had been so long and hard that it had rained more than in even the heavy months. We were in the first days of February and it still continued. The water in the river was the highest he had seen in his eighteen years, and the falls had never been thicker than now. You felt it could wrap the globe in its immense flowing tendrils.
    The swifts that lived in the mysterious place behind the falls
were reputed to come out at dawn, but I also saw them come out an hour before noon, swooping up in unison and exploding and scattering high in the bright blue sky like pinpricked tinsel. If you lay on your stomach and crept to the edge of the overhang by the head of the falls, it was the closest you could come to feeling like the swifts. Below was the gorge, a surreal lushness. Sound rose up it like steam. The rainbow was a halo around the violence of impact. The river gathered itself after the spill, sidewound away through the forest, forever changed.
    We would lime on the mad overhang beside the sign that warned of the 741 ft drop. We’d gyaff, smoke herb, though I had nothing like their capacity. It was breathing to them. They took entire little branches, didn’t bother with cleaning, housed them loosely in paper and lit up.
    We talked about music. I felt indebted to Roots. I’d liked him very much ever since he was calling the cricket from his hammock in his dark glasses, but I felt indebted to him. It was he who let me know that it was not Abul Bakr the big man sang about in Duppy Conqueror, but a bull bucker , and it was he who explained to me ‘sipple’ from the terrific cosmic opening wail of War Ina Babylon: sipple, Jamaican for slippery, like watch your step. We agreed it was a fine name for Baby and added it to his list of names. We were on the overhang and Roots sat shirtless – they all were usually shirtless or in fishnet vests, with thin muscular bodies hard as, scarred as old school desks – Roots sat shirtless, legs crossed and shoulder-length dreads blown back and ganja emerging softly from his nostrils.
    He had spent some time in Jamaica and spoke highly of the vibe up there. He was down with dreadtalk. He used overstand for understand and shitstem for system. To signal agreement he said ‘ites’ and ‘seen’. He sometimes did the whole ‘I and I’ thing but more, I suspected, as performance. He considered himself a conscientious Rasta. He showed me a terrible festering gash on his finger, which, like Marley’s toe that killed him, he refused to
amputate. He ate ital. He was drawn to the idea of Repatriation. ‘Yeahman, some day. Not right away but some day, some day when the vibe is right. I going fly ome … Yeahman … fly ome.’
    And high above the swifts flew. And in the benab, Dacta Red and the ranger’s son perused the Bible in order to ‘locate the solution for certain spiritual problem we run into’. Over at the settlement, Mrs Siddique, who liked it here – ‘homeside got too much them-say me-say’, a phrase that felt to me directly translated from the Hindi tu-tu main-main – Mrs Siddique stirred her pot of curry. And you could pick up all these vibrations. I cannot explain it. It was heightened vibing. I’m not even certain I realised at the time.
     
     
    ON our fourth day a group of porknockers returned to the settlement. They were seven in all, rougher than rough, steppin like razor, they could chew bullets, kick down trees. They came with great big cheer and a supply of wild meat, eager to sport like sport going out of style.
    All afternoon they curried labba, a kind of large rodent,