Having spent a year touring the Caribbean, first time novelist Rahul Bhattacharya transports his readers to the shores of Guyana in “The Sly Company of People Who Care.” The 278-page book took Bhattacharya two-and-a-half years to write and focuses equally on the landscape and the people of this South American country. Speakeasy caught up with the Delhi-based author to talk about what it means to be Indian in that region as well as the  etymology of the word.

How closely related were the events chronicled in this book to what happened to you in real life when you were in Guyana?

Not very. I thought applying my background to the narrative was a sensible thing to do for a couple of reasons. First, there was no plausible reason to send someone to Guyana otherwise. It’s not the kind of place anybody goes to, and cricket was a plausible reason.  I wanted the narrator to be someone who is not tied to a job, a family, something like that who is free to wander. I wanted the texture of the book to feel a little bit memoir-ish so it feels like all of this actually happened.

You are 31. Why make the protagonist 26?

When I was there I turned 27 and it was close to my age. The period of Guyana is actually based roughly on the period I was there. It doesn’t matter, I wanted it to be someone in that age group who is young but has a sensibility that goes beyond an adolescent and early 20s sensibility. Someone who has understood a little bit about the world and processed his ideas about life and the arts and music and books. It’s also the sexual adventure of somebody who has a limited time and who are sort of – it’s also meant to convey youth as well as the desperation of a relationship in its very first throes.

Where did the idea for this book germinate?

The place itself. It’s true to my own experience because I wanted to sense of the fascination and wonder. But I wrote from a little room in Delhi and it was, the building next to mine was torn down and being reconstructed and for a long time it was like writing in a cement mixer. There was a lot of noise and the place like mine the walls were porous, they had sliding doors and they constructed a five-story building. There were stone polishing machines too.

Did you make a point to write the book in a politically correct manner?

It’s such a confusing thing, being an Indian in the Caribbean. I wanted to supply that information to the reader. When you say Indian it could mean one of four things so because of all these sort of great historical mistakes there is a great confusing as to who and Indian is.  Book concerned with politics of the place since when you think of the Caribbean you think of a society that has been set up like a factory. It was just an undiscovered place where a few tribes lived and then the imperial powers discovered it and decided to annex this land and then they wanted to grow something on it and brought sugar cane. It’s a book which looks at this entire historical process.

This is your first novel but not your first book. What did you pull from your previous book-writing experiences and what did you reinvent?

It was completely different. It was much harder because the other book I did was a chronicle of something that actually happened. I built this whole world organically and I think that voice was, if anything, more important than anything because I think voice in fiction is entering into so many worlds of thought and emotions and how you take a reader along. It depends not only on the general voice but beyond that how you modulate your voice and carry people into the hearts and lives of the people you are writing about. It was harder in this book, the novel.

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