The Sly Company of People Who Care
SynopsisPlot
In flight from the tame familiarity of home in Bombay, a twenty-six-year-old cricket journalist chucks his job and arrives in Guyana, a forgotten colonial society of raw, mesmerizing beauty. Amid beautiful, decaying wooden houses in Georgetown, on coastal sugarcane plantations, and in the dark rainforest interior scavenged by diamond hunters, he grows absorbed with the fantastic possibilities of this new place where descendants of the enslaved and indentured have made a new world. Ultimately, to fulfill his purpose, he prepares to mount an adventure of his own. His journey takes him beyond Guyanese borders, and his companion will be the feisty, wild-haired Jan.
Story
About this book
A twenty-six-year-old cricket journalist from Bombay quits his job and moves to Guyana, a small South American country shaped by colonial history and successive waves of migration. The novel follows his time in Georgetown, where old wooden houses stand in varying stages of decay, on coastal sugarcane plantations, and in the dense rainforest interior where diamond hunters work. He becomes absorbed by a society built by descendants of enslaved Africans and indentured laborers, mostly from India, who arrived under British rule.
Rahul Bhattacharya's unnamed narrator is drawn to Guyana partly by cricket, a sport that still connects the Caribbean to South Asia and Britain. But his attention gradually shifts from sport to place and people. He watches how different communities coexist in a country where ethnic and political tensions run close to the surface. The landscape itself plays a central role, from the low-lying coast protected by sea walls to the forested highlands further south.
The story eventually crosses Guyanese borders when the narrator sets out on an adventure with Jan, a spirited companion. The book won the 2012 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, which recognizes writing that evokes the spirit of a place.
