Dear Editor,
I never played any game of chance, bingo, lotto, card games, etc. I have never gambled. I believe that every morsel I eat, I sweated for it, and that kind of morsel is sweater than manna. Twice in New York, when I first came in the mid-eighties, in struggling to get a foot in, I starved. Once for three days, and the second time, two. Both times I ran out of money and refused offers of loans to buy food. I also do not believe in borrowing money to buy food.
Agnostics would not believe it if I told them about the miracles that saved me both times. On the first occasion I had been living on black tea and a bottle of honey I found. It was the third day, and payday was the next day. Then as work closed for the day, and all the workers left, leaving me to clean up the garbage, I found a fifty dollar note in the flooring of the abandoned house we were repairing. The money was so crisp, it broke like a biscuit. And even then, the first item I used it for was not food, but a tool I needed, and after that, it was Chinese food.
The second time, my boss came into my apartment (the apartment he was letting me live in) and went into the refrigerator for a drink of water. When he came out, he told me his wife had bought some corned beef which he had stopped eating and asked if I would like to have it. The next morning, he brought three tins of corned beef, onions, pepper, and…six hot paratha rotis.
Many years later when my daughter went to college (in Idaho) she wrote and asked me not to pay her school fees anymore. When I asked why, she said she wanted to work and experience and suffer some of the sweetness we endured.
Same with my son. Topping his class, he was chosen valedictorian. For graduation, we bought him a pair of name-brand sneakers. A few days later, he returned it to the store and exchanged it for two pairs of cheaper sneakers – one also for me. When asked why, he said, “my father never wore name-brand, why should I?”
Hard work, honesty, integrity and conscience is everything. These are what separate us from animalistic beings. And it pays higher dividends, seven times seventy more than all the money you can ever steal. I attended Patentia High School for only two months, but I completed my first degree in three years, and my masters while doing two jobs, one full time, the other part time. My wife, my son and I had a construction company of our own, working at nights, even as I moved up from a construction labourer to a director in the New York City Children’s Services, as a writer of policy and procedures for that agency.
When I metaphorically portrayed all this in my novel, The Silver Lining, I was awarded the Guyana Prize for Literature. I was able to retire before sixty, and my wife and I have toured over thirty countries since then.
Today, my grand-children are also begging to work for their allowances.
I am writing this to show how much I empathize with and appreciate Mr. Charrandas Persaud for his historic expression of conscience and honesty which I believe will be the catalyst to convert the course of current politics in Guyana. My blessing to my umbilical home, come 2019. I hope many will also experience and taste the nectar of their own sweat, blood and tears which are true fruits of the Good Spirit.
Yours faithfully
Gokarran Sukhdeo