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Little Bunkar
By Adam Hays

"Mr Personality and Miss Prudence,” ran the headline in the Berbice Gazette; alongside my grainy, pouting likeness. The picture had been taken less than twenty minutes after the new principal, Mr Forbes, had told Vibert and I we could no longer cycle to school together.

I had smoothed down my gingham dress, pulled my white socks up to my knees, poked my tongue out at him and said no way. His Dravidian brow had furrowed in fury like the Pakaraima valleys, and were it not for the scholarship there is no doubt I would have had his ruler across my knuckles.

Alongside my sullen image, Vibert’s dumbstruck expression gaped at the camera like a police mugshot. He had been stunned once by my show of defiance, and then again, before he had time to recover, by my rebuke over his mute reaction to Forbes’s declaration.

Vibert and I were inseparable. His scholarship was to read science, mine to read English. Both included, according to the article, funded travel to study abroad. I wasn’t quite sure, at that time, what ‘a broad’ was, let alone whether or not I wanted to study it.

On the back of the scholarship had been the titular headline. There was nothing wrong with ‘Mr Personality’ as a nickname, but ‘Miss Prudence’? Was that the best they could come up with? I didn’t like it at all, it made me think of stewed fruit and bony women.

My thumb absently wormed its way into my mouth while I read, and my entire body went rigid with horror. I yanked it out of my mouth but, too late, the fire was upon me. I lurched back from the table with the ratchety chilli caking the back of my throat.

I flung the paper to the floor and ran for the bathroom, slipping on the red-black-green-gold hessian rug that did not sit well on the polished dark mahogany floor. Closing my teeth around the tap I gurgled water, my eyes and throat burning from the chilli that Mama Kay had liberally pasted to stop me sucking my thumb.

I drank so much that I was nearly sick; water sloshing around in my belly like an upset goldfish bowl. I straightened up as the agony eventually began to subside, and, panting over the sink, I heard singing in the distance; simple, lilting melodies sprinkling notes like rainwater onto a plantain leaf.

I ran to the window and called to the thin Indian man ambling along the street.

“Budho! Hey, Mama Kay! Budho is here.”

Somehow elegant in his destitution, Budho was a wiry creature with old cargo pants rolled up to his knees, and coarse hair on his pipe-cleaner arms. He meandered along my street in Cumberland Village most days from the homeless shelter, singing hoarse rhythms with which to beg for food.

“Bunkar!” Mama called like that - boon-kyar - her voice tinged with Caribbean harshness and an edge of calypso.

I tore into the kitchen, where Mama Kay held out an iron plate piled with rice and peas, with a crescent of roti perched on the side and achar for zest. I took it as I passed.

Mama Kay never once ignored Budho’s pleas for food, but she would not ever take it to him herself, nor would she ever allow him in the house.

As I got outside, the heat thumped down, slowing me in my tracks. I felt a prickle of sweat erupt across my brow. Unfastening the wire gate at the front of the house, I stepped up the sharp camber onto the blacktop, feeling the heat of the road like a griddle through the worn soles of my sandals; pampas grass scratching my ankles.

When Budho had finished eating I showed him the newspaper, exchanging it for the empty plate. He finished chewing while he read, then lowered the paper and regarded me like a curious new breed of mosquito.

“Bunkar,” he said after what seemed like several minutes. “Destiny has grand things planned for you, girl.”

“But doesn’t this mean I have to leave, Budho?”

His voice was a solemn whisper. “Bunkar, the world is a big place, and as you get older, Guyana will seem small. You have great talent, girl. Don’t waste it.”

“But my Mama ...”

Budho put a finger to his lips and opened his eyes wide. “Your mama is doing God’s work. She show me great kindness. She save my life every day.”

I sucked my teeth, the way I had seen Mama Kay do. “She won’t even let you in the house.”

Budho shook his head, and pulled himself to his tired feet. “Your mama is a good person, Bunkar. She only want what best for you.”

And with that, he turned and shuffled off along the dusty blacktop towards the Canje Bridge and New Amsterdam, singing for his alms as he went.

I pulled a ten dollar bill from the apron pocket of my school dress and rode to Bugee’s corner market. It was just a convenience store, but Bugee had tried to make it look like a fast food outlet, with ancient, yellowing pictures of burgers and fries above the counter, locked into smeared glass panels, labelled by prices painted in dollars over the top, like the perishing exhibits of some forgotten museum.

Bugee himself was a furniture polisher, a trade he conducted in a back workshop. He had opened the market also to bolster the meagre income from the furniture trade.

I bought a cream soda. The sweet taste was delicious on my sandpapery mouth after the miserable chilli experience, and I held the cold bell-bottomed glass bottle to my hot neck, breathing in the vanilla.

The white wood clapboard hoarded the day’s heat in our old colonial house like a miser. I wheeled my bicycle under the house, propping it against one of the thick wooden stilts that held the house in the air, for when the flash-floods engulfed Cumberland Village.

Inspired by the prospect of solace from the insolent heat, I went to the back of the house to bathe. I peeled off my school dress and climbed into the corrugated iron water butt.

The water was warm, the dusty back yard having collected the sun all afternoon. The metallic odour of oxidised water in the iron butt did away with all thoughts of vanilla, and the rust in the water clung to my skin at the surface like tomato soup scum in a washing bowl.

Cumberland Village was formed of little more than the long, straight blacktop and the line of stilted wooden houses on either side. Beyond the village lay the sugar cane fields, and, beyond these, acres of wetlands lay at the lip of the rainforests, whose wild green fronds squeezed up, untamed, between the houses.

Vibert lived next door. His back yard had a kind of natural bank that led into the wetlands, and from where I sat I could see the alligators basking half out of the water, their gnarled bodies immobile in the heat. The broad leaves of a banana tree near the water would have afforded them at least some respite from the heat, and I decided the 'gators were stupid not to avail themselves of this opportunity. For this reason, I did not fear them.

But the prospect of leaving home gnawed at my belly in a most unpleasant way, and made me regard the village as if through a picture frame. I’d tried to ask Vibert how he felt, but he only ever shrugged.

I sat there, the newspaper in one hand and the cream soda in the other. Thoughts of Vibert and his reticence were interrupted by the sound of tyres and the blast of a car horn from the front of the house.

Even in late afternoon the sun beat down without surrender, and by the time I’d walked to the front of the house in my underpants and sandals, I was bone dry.

___________

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