The Middle Passage (13 page)

Georgetown is a white wooden city. One would like to sketch it on rough dark grey paper, using black ink and thick white paint, to suggest the lightness and fragility of the two-storeyed buildings, a fragility most apparent at night, when light comes through verandas on the top floor, through windows, through open lattice-work, and the effect is of those Chinese ivory palace-miniatures lit up from within. The city was founded by the British but escaped being built by them – British colonial architecture in the West Indies has had few moments of glory – and was largely created by the Dutch, whose influence remains. The streets are laid out on the grid pattern, and in the Dutch manner canals once ran down the centre of the main streets. Most of the canals have been filled in and replaced by asphalt walks lined with the spreading, many-branched saman tree, which in appearance is a nobler oak.

It was perfectly ridiculous then to feel on that first day that I was in a frontier town of the Wild West. It was the wooden buildings, I imagine; and the empty wide streets – I had arrived on Boxing Day. It was also the prevalence of the name of Booker’s, a name which went around the world during the crisis of 1953. Booker’s are the largest firm of merchants and planters in British Guiana, and at one time virtually controlled the country; according to the People’s Progressive Party, they were and perhaps still are the villains of the piece. Now, seeing the name Booker’s on hardware stores, foodshops, machine-tool shops, drugstores, taxis, I felt I had come to rescue Georgetown. I walked down the main street on spurs. Old Booker, bearded, gruff-voiced and tobacco-chewing, waited with the five Booker boys to shoot me down. The natives had fled from the streets and were cowering in barbershops and saloons.

In fact the Christmas celebrations were still going on. A sour-faced white drunk leaned out of the window in the house next to my boarding-house; and in the room next to mine there was another drunk who was groaning and intermittently singing Puccini to the radio. I could hear every sound he made. The wooden partition and the ventilation gaps at the top ensured that. As a result, I found myself walking about on tiptoe, doing everything as quietly as possible, just listening to the noises next door.

Late that night I was awakened.

‘I’m a bum, I’m a bum,’ the man was saying. He gave a prolonged groan. ‘I’ve just realized what a terrible bum I am.’

‘You only make yourself so,’ a woman said, plaintive yet consoling.

‘No, no. I
am
a bum.’ Then, reflectively: ‘Biggest blasted bum in B.G.’

‘You
make
yourself that way.’ The woman sobbed a little.

Silence. A groan, a rumbling snatch of song. Then:
‘Do what your mother tells you!
’ the man roared.

I lay straight and still in bed, unwilling to move, to make any betraying noise.

I had been told that the Guianese Christmas celebrations last a week, and I was not surprised next morning to hear the drunk next door freshly drunk. As soon as I could I left the house. I made many telephone calls, with such success that by the middle of the morning Abdul, friend of a friend, was taking me to the Rahimtoolahs, friends of his, rich and respectable people who lived in a large house in an elegant area. The upper floor, open, jalousied and with Demerara windows, was cool and airy; but the paint was peeling and the furniture was rough. The house had large neglected spaces, and there were only calendars on the walls.

Mr Rahimtoolah, a big man with fat quivering thighs revealed by shorts, and a blotched face and a turtle-like neck, said apologetically that he was living in a wooden house only for the time being; he was soon going to pull it down and build something modern in concrete.

He introduced us to Mike, a young English National Serviceman with dull slanting eyes, big teeth, heavy lips and a line-moustache that was very faint and definitely askew. Mike had the appearance of someone much abused; he was the friend of plump-cheeked Miss Rahimtoolah.

Whisky was brought out and we were asked to admire the glasses. They carried the words ‘Ballantine’s Guide for Beginners’: they were marked off like measuring glasses, the varying depths labelled ‘teetotal’, ‘timid’ and ‘tally-ho’. On the bottom of the glass a man hung from a scaffold: this was ‘the last drop’.

‘You went to the Chinese last night?’ Mr Rahimtoolah asked one of his Portuguese guests.

‘We decided to go to the Indians after all.’

They were speaking of the clubs of Georgetown; and Mr Rahimtoolah, with much pride, explained the frenzied activities of the clubs during the festive season, while his daughter passed round fresh drinks.

In the women’s corner talk began about the respective merits of Great Britain and British Guiana.

‘People in B.G. are more hospitable than people in Britain,’ Mr Rahimtoolah said.

‘I agree,’ said Mike.

Then they talked about the seasons, and how wonderful it was to have spring, summer, autumn and winter instead of just a rainy season and a dry season. I felt the conversation had been rigged for Mike’s benefit: he now spoke about the seasons like an expert called in to give advice. He described snow in detail and announced that he was going to tell a ‘funny story’. Miss Rahimtoolah and Mrs Rahimtoolah laughed in advance. It happened, Mike said prefatorily, ‘before we moved to the new house.’ He paused to allow this to sink in; his glass was filled; he drank. I was waiting impatiently for the story which already had Miss Rahimtoolah giggling, the bottle of whisky shaking in one hand, the other hand covering her mouth. At last the story came: one winter Mike’s father, going out of the back door for an undisclosed purpose, had been covered by snow falling off a roof.

Mrs Rahimtoolah shrieked and said, ‘I
love
England.’

Mr Rahimtoolah looked at her indulgently.

Abdul, reclining on a Berbice chair, spoiled the mood of Indo-British amity by saying that he hated England and never wanted to set foot in the country again.

He took everyone by surprise. He looked surprised himself.

‘Of course I had friends,’ he said, destroying the silence he had created. Then, smiling at Mike: ‘But they were reserved friends.’

‘That’s England, though,’ Mrs Rahimtoolah said, relaxing.

Mike agreed. He looked mollified, and made a little speech about the warmth of his welcome in British Guiana and the hospitality of the Guianese people.

The embarrassing moment had passed. Two national myths had been flattered: Guianese hospitality, English reserve. Mr Rahimtoolah shook his fat legs in relief.

Some overdressed young girls, evidently of families as respectable and rich as the Rahimtoolahs, came up the steps, and there were gay exclamations. Mike was taking them all to the army camp; the outing appeared to be of importance.

We ourselves left, and went on to the Ramkerrysinghs, whose Christmas week entertaining, Abdul told me, was fabulous. At any time of day or night food and drink were to be had in any quantity; and, appropriately, the Ramkerrysinghs dispensed their hospitality in what looked like a large hall, thoroughly contemporary, though, thoroughly modern. The living area was not broken up by walls; the bedrooms in one corner were marked off by partitions that followed a wavy line; in another corner was the kitchen; and in another there was a large well-stocked bar, fitted up to look like the genuine commercial thing, where guests sat on stools and the host played barman. It was the Ramkerrysinghs’ claim that they had every drink in the world. This looked likely.

We were introduced briefly to the eaters outside the kitchen. Then we joined the drinkers at the bar. I couldn’t take any more whisky. I asked for red wine. There was none. I was given some hock instead. ‘Take some ice, nuh,’ one of the drinking Ramkerrysinghs said, and he dropped two cubes in my glass. I drank quickly and then was taken on a tour of the house. In the veranda that ran down one side of the house there were many more people. From their appearance and the looks they gave us, they clearly belonged to the house; they seemed used to having peasants shown around. In a wavy-partitioned bedroom we came upon a whole group of women lying on beds. I felt I had intruded into a zenana, and the effect was heightened because the women appeared to be of many races.

I said nothing to them and they, lying in a heap like puppies, stared superciliously at me.

I returned with relief to the bar, passing various china ornaments on the way, among them an open book on which was written the Lord’s Prayer.

At the bar they were talking about the soft drinks industry: it seemed that ‘competitions’ were killing the trade.

‘Put chits in one or two corks,’ said the senior Mr Ramkerrysingh, behind the bar. ‘Is what
I
would do. No fuss, no bother.’

The drinkers, at his instigation, were experimenting wildly with one drink after another, wines, liqueurs, spirits. Already slightly broken by the morning’s drinking, I decided to stick to hock on the rocks. The senior Ramkerrysingh pushed the ice-bowl towards me and I took two pieces of ice. As soon as I dropped them in, the drinking Ramkerrysingh who had put the ice in my first glass, said, ‘I don’t know where you learn to drink. You don’t know you mustn’t put ice in wine?’

The senior Mr Ramkerrysingh said he liked living simply himself, and that the purpose of the establishment was to entertain foreign businessmen: the hotels of Georgetown were inadequate.

‘You got to impress these fellers,’ he said. ‘And I can tell you what I put out I more than make back. When you dealing with big people you got to treat them big. You got to think big.’

Abdul nodded and said to me, ‘Mr Ramkerrysingh always thought big. He started in a small way, you know. Those of us now starting have a lot to learn from him.’

It was surprising to hear, when we sat down to eat, that the country had been going to the dogs since politics and the Jagans had come to it.

When we went to Abdul’s home we found his wife distressed. Her car had hit a child. She had stopped, but the child had got up and run off. No one would tell her whose child it was or where it lived – ‘You know these black people’ – and so she didn’t know whether the child was injured.

In the boarding-house the drunk was still drunk.

Outside Stabroek Market, its pavements bright and cluttered with fruit-sellers, their baskets, trays and boxes, I asked an elderly Negro, who was respectably dressed and pushing a bicycle, to direct me to the Government Buildings.

‘I am passing by there,’ he said. ‘Hop on.’

I hesitated. He was very small and thin. But he insisted, and I felt I would have offended him if I refused. So I sat on the crossbar, he pushed the cycle off with a run, hopped on to the saddle, breathing heavily, and we wobbled through the traffic. In this way I arrived at Mrs Jagan’s office.

I had read and heard so many malicious accounts of Mrs Jagan that I was prejudiced in her favour. Although she has suffered much from visiting writers, she received me kindly in her small air-conditioned office. She sat behind a large desk, neatly ordered, on which were photographs of her husband and children. Her bag was on the floor. I thought her far more attractive than her photographs: women who wear spectacles rarely photograph well. A plain cotton frock set off her balanced figure; large hoop ear-rings and red toenails gave her a touch of frivolity which seemed incongruous in that office, the door of which was marked:
Hon Janet Jagan, Minister of Labour, Health and Housing.
She looked tired, and her talk was frequently broken by nervous laughter.

She said she was a pessimist. No one was more surprised than she when they won the elections in 1957. The country had lost much of its drive since 1953, when the constitution was suspended, she and others were imprisoned, and the British troops came in. Many supporters, ‘without stamina’, had deserted at that time; and the country had lost further when the party which had come to power so completely in 1953 split in 1955 along racial lines, Indians on one side, Negroes on the other. Race had, in fact, now become a major issue in British Guiana. She spoke of this with genuine regret. It was a subject to which she often returned during our subsequent meetings, and I fancied there was more than regret at racialism: there was regret for the camaraderie and the friendships of 1953. She remembered what certain people, now enemies, ate, how they talked, what her children had said to them. Since 1953 the party had also lost the support of the intellectuals; and this was a blow, for British Guiana did not have the talent that Trinidad had.

Specifically, I had called that morning to have my trip to the interior arranged. We turned our attention to the large map on the wall behind the desk; and abruptly one was reminded of the size of the country – the Rahimtoolahs and the Ramkerrysinghs had made one forget. Mrs Jagan had travelled widely through the country; she knew it better than most of the Guianese I had met. The district of Berbice in the east was her favourite. It was the liveliest. It produced the cricketers, most of the writers, and the best politicians: her husband, of course, came from Berbice.

The side door of the office opened, and Cheddi Jagan himself came in. He was wearing a suit and carried a briefcase. He had just come in to say that he was off to the bank to sign the agreement for the loan to buy over the Georgetown Electric Company.

It was an oddly domestic scene, and I felt an intruder.

In 1953, when the British Guiana constitution was suspended and British troops went into the country, the Jagans were the pariahs of the West Indies. Trinidad was so horrified it forbade Cheddi Jagan to step off the plane at Piarco airport; it should be noted that most of the important Trinidad politicians of the time have since been discredited. The Jagans and their party were accused of fomenting strikes, undermining the public service and the public force, spreading racial hatred, and generally advancing the cause of international communism. ‘Reliable sources’ established that there was also a plan ‘to set fire to business property and residences of prominent Europeans and Government officials … This information was supported by reports of unusual sales of petrol to individuals without cars who carried it away in cans or bottles.’