Area of Brownness: An Indian writer encounters Indian-ness in Guyana

"A young English-speaking Indian writer travels halfway across the world to write about another group of English-speaking Indians.  In 1964, it was Trinidadian V.S. Naipaul’s passage to India, an experience he documented in Area of Darkness. Almost a half-century later, The Sly Company of People Who Care –a new novel by Rahul Bhattacharya–inverts Naipaul’s journey, following a cricket writer from Mumbai to Guyana, where 40% of the population are of Indian extraction, people left behind by the brutal British indenture system.
The first third of the book is the strongest; a series of vignettes, in which the narrator describes sights and sounds—familiar and unfamiliar, safe and unsafe—during his travels in the capitol Georgetown and a sojourn into the rainforest. This tension is perhaps best embodied by the mystical Dr. Red, a “veveve very” spiritually rich elder of Amerindian ancestry whose mellow demeanor is perpendicular to his capacity for vengeance. “I lash him in all respects,” Dr. Red calmly states while recounting how he axed up a friend who raped an Amerindian girl."

SEE FULL REVIEW HERE.