Relatives have performed the final rites for two fishermen, Mahendra ‘Rub’ Ompertab, 27, and Kanhai Madramootoo, 41, who disappeared at sea nine weeks ago.
But the men’s families are still finding it difficult to accept that they may never show up alive.
The only trace of the men who left home around 6.30 am on August 19 was a pile of fishing line attached to a “salt-bag” that fishermen found out at sea. Madramootoo’s wife, Shielawattie Ramotar told Stabroek News that “it gat to be that something terrible went wrong wid them that’s why dem never came back.”
She feels that “some time some foul-play musse play out wid dem bai life, something had to go wrong because dem find some engines in Essequibo.”
She feels that they were returning with their catch when pirates attack them. But she is faced with the grim reality that she would never know the truth.
Although it is her wish that her husband would show up alive, the woman has come to terms with the fact that “is nine weeks already.”
She said only one of the two “fishing lines” that they went out with was recovered while there was no sign of the boat, engine and other articles.
She said her daughter refuses to believe that her father could be dead and would say that he is out working.
“She tell me one day that she daddy na dead and me tell she leh she pray for him. She miss him and she does sleep wid he shirts,” Ramotar said. Her daughter also told her that she dreamt of her father and he told her to “be careful.”
Ramotar had told this newspaper that the “last thing he tell me before he left was that he would slash the yard when he come back.” She had also cooked his favourite, cook-up rice for him the same day he disappeared.
With no one to provide for her, she has already found a job and is trying to make ends meet. Ramotar said she too is becoming more distressed when she sees her husband’s clothes.
Unlike Ramotar, her sister-in-law, Debbie Edwards said she would “never give up hope” that her husband, Ompertab, the owner/captain of the boat and her brother are alive.
“Me na have the feelings like me husband [and brother] dead. People lost for months and they come back… Me mind still not at ease to know if he dead. But me still does get hope that he would come back.
“It might take me a couple of months fuh me believe that.”
She cannot find the strength as yet to seek a job and in the meantime her brother is maintaining the home while she receives a small help monthly from an organization.
Edwards said her two older children miss their father but they are “taking it light” while the youngest, a boy, keeps saying his father is working at sea and would return home.
