THIS novel starts with a new sense of adventure in a land that hasn’t been spoken about much; neither has it had a very glorious past. It is set in Guyana which is inhabited by East Indians, who are descendants of the coolies, the indentured labourers from India, Africa, mixed races, Portuguese, Chinese and the Whites, the last named being very few. The indigenous people here are called Amerindians and Indians from India are called Indian nationals.
At the book launch event of this book, the author, a Delhi-based journalist, was all praise about the Caribbean nation of Guyana – its people, its language and dialect, its colonial history and racial politics and its decaying wooden splendour. “It’s such a rawly beautiful country with its red rivers and rainforest. I felt an instant affinity to its colours and dialects – it was so different from anything I’d experienced before,” he said.
In this novel, there is an unnamed narrator, a former cricket journalist from India, who declares his intentions in life and thus his story – to be a wanderer, or in his words, “a slow rambling’ stranger.” Actually he flees from his country to escape the monotony. Rambling through the forests of Guyana, the ruined streets of its capital Georgetown and out to the borders of Brazil and Venezuela, constitutes the novel’s central action though the narrator’s heart lies in the exuberant and often arresting observations of a man plunging himself into a world full of beauty, violence and cultural strife.
The narrator seems bewitched not only by Guyana’s striking blend of cultures, borne out of colonisation, slavery and indentured servitude, but also taken in by the occupants of the building where he takes up a flat – “the gold-wearing, gum-chewing, husband of the landlady, Hassa, a minibus driver, Indian-Chinese cashier called Curry-Chowmein, Kwesi, the electrician and Uncle Lance who was an Indian.”
This is the story of a 22-year cricket reporter, an Indian national, who leaves Bombay to arrive in this raw country, Guyana, in search of an escape from “the deadness of life” and embarks on an adventure with Baby, a diamond hunter. He begins a brief stint as a ‘porknocker’ before discovering diamonds across the terrain of Guyana, while being completely engulfed by the mud. He gets to witness a life that he has probably not witnessed in his life and is thoroughly enchanted by Guyana.
The book however is slow-paced and filled with dialogues in Guyanese dialect and too many descriptive accounts like when talking of Guyana as being “ripe with heat and rain and Guyanese sound and Guyanese light in which the world seemed saturated or bleached,
The book reads more like a travel diary, giving a vivid description of the country called Guyana and its people who live on the fringes, taking big risks and surviving as best as they can.
(Picador, Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR)
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