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

its meat close to pig. And as white and then red rums were killed alongside the rodents, by the time the evening officially began, with people congregating beneath the mango tree, there was already a kind of latent madness in everybody’s eyes.
    We played a session of semi-drunken cricket. End of play was signalled by a firesnake, darkly orange, slithering across the pitch. Men went for it with a stick and a prong. The Siddique ladies squealed. The reptile was beaten with the stick and hoisted on the prong, a bulge pressed against the stretched skin of its stomach. Somebody tore it with a knife: a frog fell out with a bloody splatter, fully made but for severed limbs. The snake was sacked for its skin. The crappo was dispatched with a kick under the shop. It was the rudest dinner interruption I ever saw.
    People drifted into one of the two shops. The generators were switched on. An action movie was on at Big Leaf’s. I settled in Siddique’s.
    It had the special feel of a small inexplicable place in South America. Rice and flour sacks were heaped in the corners. Everything was wooden, the walls, the tables, the benches, the floor, the beams, the counter, the shelves, the windows. A Hindu Dharmic Sabha calendar was nailed on the wall, beside it an Islamic calendar of the Peter’s Hall Sunnahtul Jama Masjid, and beside that charts of snakes and frogs in the region. There was a living powis in the room as well. This is an exceptionally silly kind of turkey, jet black with a white belly. She was disconcertingly large and underbalanced. She pottered about on the beams above us. She made me terribly insecure, for she discharged droppings in unreasonable quantities and moreover was liable to sudden flapping flights, often landing on someone’s foot or thigh and nobody noticed but me.
    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,’ ‘the gal real come of age’. The music ran loud – soca, chutney, chutney-soca. The games began. Dominoes, but to accommodate me one of the tables moved to Rap, which was the card game I knew from my childhood as Knock Knock. A returned porknocker sponsored a bottle of five-year, and I sponsored one too. Somebody also came along with high wine. This was a cheap colourless spirit of sixty-nine per cent alcohol. If you peered into the bottle the vapour singed your eye. Spilled drops burnt holes in the wood like acid. We drank the five-year, but along with that, the loser in each game of Rap was to down a capful of high wine, two capfuls for a particular kind of loss. Also, there were these very fat joints floating about. The whole thing was doomed from the start.
    The games proceeded apace, with people gaily threatening each other, ‘I gon drunk you skunt tonight mudderskunt’. Soon the high wine capfuls were making dents in everybody. I felt the bones in my head softening. I could not escape the feeling that strangers were lifting me by the hair and dropping me for laughs. In a faraway corner bench Dr Red leant back against the wall and stared at the
powis on the beams and said, ‘I would feed you, powis, I would feed you in a natural manner.’
    The wooden room grew in din. Baby began making forays to the counter to talk to the Siddique daughter, routinely breaking into his slow gold-gleaming laugh and saying, ‘Eh heh heh, that is a very am biguous statement gal, eh heh heh. Very am biguous .’ He said this no matter what the poor girl said or didn’t say. The elder Siddiques soon caught on, and the girl was dispatched inside. If she emerged later, it was only in the company of Mrs Siddique, putting an end to Baby’s ambiguity.
    Things within and without were aclatter. I thought racoons were chewing up the shack and began giggling. I exited Rap in order to exit high wine. I compensated with an extremely large five-year. I took a seat beside Dr Red. He showed me a British halfpenny