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

words, ‘Drink it up, Gooroo, drink it,’ and then I balled up again, with groans that I could hear in echo but not repress. In the morning December said, ‘The man chant in Indian all night.’ He made a sound of tumbling marbles. ‘I try talk to the man, right, but the man dreaming in Indian. All night he go on in Indian.’

6
    THE river was red as blood underneath. I held myself down as long as I could, coming up with a gasp for life, trying to clutch at the new day. Baby was at work already, on his haunches, sawing a piece of wood. Apparently we were to leave soon. We were to borrow Labba’s boat. Labba himself was not coming. The last time out he’d been bitten by a snake. He was carrying no antivenom and his foot had swollen up like a pumpkin. He spent a month laid up alone, pacing his supplies before gathering the strength to return to the settlement. He still hadn’t the vigour to go backdam. But Foulis would be there most probably.
    We had a boat but no paddles. This is what Baby was working on. He had collected discards, a broken plastic barrel cover, a torn mosquito net, planks of wood, a tattered foam suit somebody had retained from their time as a water-dredge diver.
    He whittled the planks of wood to thin shafts with a saw. With a knife he cut two large almond shapes out of the barrel cover. He nailed an almond to the end of the shafts. The opposite ends he nestled in pieces of the diving suit and fastened them with shreds of the mosquito net. This was the grip for the top hand. He fished out the multiracial candidate’s bandannas and tied them a quarter
of the way down the shaft. This was the grip for the lower hand, for the wood was abrasive and cuboidal.
    Labba’s was a weathered blue and red boat and too big for two. We loaded the supplies on the polin in the centre. Roots brought us cane, lemon, plantain and ganja from his patch of farm across the river, and we picked half a dozen pineapples from the bush behind Labba’s shack.
    Baby had a final chat with Labba about location. We fist-bumped goodbye to all. ‘Time slip away, brotherman,’ said Roots; and with that we left.
    Baby took the bow, striding it with a crazed Ahabian glint in the eye and burning bush at the mouth, and I, lily-limbed coolie I, the stern. The early thrill! To think we were hitting this fantastic reptile, to think that we’d be making that bend in the river there, confronting the epic scopes beyond.
    It was gruelling work. It was not ten minutes in and I felt the first surges of lactic acid. Baby repeated what Labba had told us, that the water was the highest in eighteen years, and we got to pull. I took a while to start paddling smoothly, to work out the angle at which the almond best entered the water, the balance between pushing down and pushing back. It was so easy to be overcome by the river. The current, so placid from afar, felt colossal. Our movement, if the word applied, was laboured and defeated. To look up was a chilling exercise in futility. The river and its immemorial force furrowing a continent – against that two pointless paddlers. Mistake to stop a moment and marvel at the scale of this helplessness. A flicker of doubt could stall progress; if recovery was not immediate, the work of five minutes could be undone in thirty seconds. The only strategy was to stare into the tugging brown water with a dumb, blind competitiveness.
    I suspect I contributed appallingly little to our propulsion. Baby stood most of the time, making powerful muscular incisions into the current, sometimes on one side and sometimes another. We crissed and crossed the river. I could not tell if it was deliberate.
Sometimes we got enmeshed in the vegetation at the edge of the water and pulled ourselves forward using vines and branches. Baby called this monkeyjumping and said it was necessary to monkeyjump across certain parts. He looked like a real pioneer, bare-chested, ganja still in his mouth, cutlassing the creepers and hauling