By Brendan de Caires

The Sly Company of People Who Care by Rahul Bhattacharya (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2011.-  ISBN-10: 0330534734 |  ISBN-13: 978-0330534734)

Georgetown – at least the city of my childhood – is not for the fainthearted. For practical purposes, I grew up there twice. First in a quiet nook of Campbellville, safely distant from the fleshpots of Sheriff Street, then downtown, a few blocks north of the prison and the arson-friendly stores of Regent Street. Before I was ten I had watched Walter mesmerize the crowds at Louisa Row, and Viv dismantle the Aussies at Bourda. I had seen corpses floating in canals, half-naked mad people living in cardboard boxes and drinking trenchwater. My black nannies, whom I loved, were kind enough to take me to all the wrong places, most memorably into matinees at the Plaza, the Strand (‘the cinema in command’) and the Metropole – sometimes to House and, on one red letter day, to Pit. Nobody needed to tell me that lil’ Putagee boys had no place on the streets after a certain hour – some evenings I’d hear screams of Tief! Tief! as the choke-an’-rob boys plied their trade – for we all had a natural sense of the perils and the pleasures of the city.

Very few outsiders see beyond the obvious decay. V S Naipaul, our self-appointed flagellator, made several mean-spirited forays into the city, and issued large statements about it and the menacing, mythical forest beyond, not just in his early pessimistic travelogue The Middle Passage, but decades later when assessing the re-elected Jagans for The New York Review of Books. Naipaul’s prescient grasp of…..