Janjhat, Paperback by Monar, Rooplall, ISBN 0948833300, ISBN-13 9780948833304, Brand New, Free shipping in the US

It is in a decaying communal world that Big-Bye and Data begin their married life. Neither has a real sense of who they are, still highly dependent on the accepted village wisdom about how men should control their wives, or the proper behaviour of a modest Hindu doolahin. But they also see around them the freedom of the wider Guyanese world, and the example of those few men and women in the village who have begun to make their individual destinies.
They begin their relationship sexually ignorant and under the eagle eye of Big-Bye's domineering mooma. He, still tied to his mooma's apron strings, regards Data as his sexual plaything, but over time lust grows into desire, affection and respect. Big-Bye sees the years of canefield work yawing ahead like a life sentence, but Data has ideas about how they can make a more independent life. But first there is Big-Bye Mooma to confront and Data's struggle to assert that she is 'not Data alone. Data. Everybody Data...' sets off janjhat in the house.
Janjhat has a deep and inward focus on this couple's lives, but it is also a sympathetic portrait of a community in the process of change. There is coarseness, violence between men and women, drunken monologues of sorrow and suffering, the fantasy of the mule-boys who see themselves as gun-toting movie stars, but this is also a world of philosophers who 'want to know, to understand ahwe true self... Is not only wukkin, eatin, drinkin.'