Not A Sly Company, Really



Rahul Bhattacharya

 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, where he meets his life's love a wild and feisty lady by the name of Jan.

Rahul Bhattacharya's first book Sly Company of People Who Care is based on his own personal journey that he had undertaken, perhaps to write. The novel thus has the depth of a truely felt story, and gives amazing glimpses into the writers own insecurities and tribulations.

Rahul Bhattacharya was a surprise discovery at the Hindu literary festival of 2011. But since then the book went up the charts and finally this year he has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. May be we are about to witness one more Arvind Adiga.

But that is waht it all looks on the surface. Unlike most other wirters of his age, Rahul is not at all crazy about this sudden attention. Surprisingly he does not have any blog, any facebook page and most of the time, he is not available over phone either. Rahul shuns flashlights, is curiously shy as a person and is very reluctant to even speak about his work. His undesrstated approach to life is amply visible in the way he has written his book. The title of his book appears at the end not as a sentence but as a final sign-off, to reprise the theme of the book. Its appearance in the text comes earlier. In a scene in a library, the narrator encounters in a pamphlet extolling the virtues of the Dutch West India Company, someone's scrawled marginalia. The colonial companies were very sly, and so is the company people keep in the book.

The novel, thankfully, resists offering easy characterization of a culture that has to be seen and heard before it can be understood, of a place “ripe with heat and rain and Guyanese sound and Guyanese light in which the world seemed saturated or bleached, either way exposed.”


An Excerpt

“A prize like this means a lot”

I was in the room when the prize was announced but I could have easily been outside. I was drinking a cup of tea and feeling rather relieved that my last event of the festival was finished, when I was called in. My anxiety in Chennai had to do with the events. I had practically forgotten about the prize. I was more concerned about whether I was going to address Shashi Tharoor as Dr. Tharoor or Mr. Tharoor or Shashi during our session.

I was blissfully calm about my prospects because I was certain I would not win. There were proper giants on that list. People have mentioned my Amarnath remark. It occurred to me afterwards that Amarnath had dismissed the West Indian tail. Madan Lal it was who’d removed Richards, Haynes and Gomes! I don’t think my family rated my chances either. My mother and sister were watching “Ra.One” in Mumbai and learnt of it much later. My wife, who was also the editor of this book, was eating dinner in Delhi’s Goa Niwas and said she’d forgotten about the announcement.

To win a prize like this means a lot to a writer. There is new interest in the book, which is wonderful. The purse is generous and buys you time and space to think about your next work. It’s easy for books to disappear. Sly Company for instance is set in an obscure land, written in a somewhat obscure tongue and has not had a big publicity campaign. So I feel very grateful to critics, the reviewers and in this instance, the judges, who have spread some love for it. And I appreciate sincerely The Hindu’s efforts to support writers and writing