Dear Editor,
I know not the people. I know not, nor do I wish to know, the merits or demerits of respective contentions. But I cannot help but noticing what I share with my Guyanese brethren of all walks, what I seek indulgence in daring to call the Shanta syndrome and parallel. I ask pardon to use their clashing, unhappy circumstances as context.
The entity is approximately three score years old; so too is this independent nation. There is skill and quality and sustained excellence in presence and products. Guyanese know from sampling the fine fare. It has been one of those joyful and illuminating experiences, repeated over and over again, because of the confidence, the promise, and the living up to all of that by earning it. The enriching aroma and atmosphere of a restaurant that rarely faded. Now it must come to end soon, as I understand. I regret that. The icons fade one by one. Fast food, fast people and their fast times encroach and take over.
But that is now. It reflects Guyana in so many ways. There has been existence, one laced with undercurrents of who should get what and who should have the whole hog or no hog. The forlorn story of Guyana; two peoples in the same space at the same time. As scripture relayed to us, it could be two siblings, as in Esau and Jacob. There was Cain and Abel, too; I do hope that matters for country and citizens do not reach that climactic state of brothers up in arms, be such judicially, environmentally, or otherwise.
Bigger and better places and societies have diminished into straws and shadows because of such all too human promptings. It didn’t have to be; still doesn’t. But it is not the way of men, strong or weak, bright or believed bright. I say this because there has been war, too. War in families. War in the family of Guyana. We own the commodities; we have the story that mesmerizes and brings to the table in stirred anticipation; we have everything going for us. And then…. And then, we have not just the story, but the history, too.
It is a history that impassions, embitters, and cleaves, a house on fire from within, the unquenchable flames that linger and simmer and scorch. And, last, that chars into the unrecognizable. Many times, I wonder what prevents that final pebble on the precipice that is this place called Guyana from crumbling. For here is a country and society that is a tapestry of embedded contradictions, which overpower the transcendent gifts of the earth, and dissipate always the potentials of what could be, what could have been, but what never is.
As outsiders, we look at Shanta’s and the juices flow. The outsiders beyond the boundaries study Guyana and the yearnings flash in trajectories that glimmer globally. Like all of us, they want to go. For us, it is to Shanta’s, that sparkling ambience of company, cuisine, and times creole at a cozy corner in the city; the essentials of which will soon be a memory of great times, good food, and the reminder that certain things don’t last forever. For them out there and over there, it is to go to Guyana and taste the nectar of that oil, that alchemy from the ages; we are so rich that even gold loses some of its glow. For us, what will it be?
What will it be, now that the wisdom-once torturing, now still tormenting, droplets of a trickling profoundness-did come for a chair and a date and thence to someplace? The courts are exhausted; though not said, exasperated and likely expletive-filled, too. Over food place and national space, it is the same sorry pass. Make a choice, call a card, and close the quarrels. Oh, but if it were only that easy!
It must be unimaginably painful, at bottom and despite the hard, sharp passions that pulsate. That’s for merely a family and one family only. In the extended family of communities and societies that make up this gravely injured, excruciatingly hurting land, there are all those other regrettable stories. Of loss, of agony, of the bitter poisons of who should have done what and when and how.
It is a little late in the year for the people at Shanta’s. I wish them the best, in the hope that the grace will come to revisit things and see them differently, perhaps approach them differently. As I look (yet again) beyond date, past that existential count, I ponder as to where and how Guyana will be, this family of me and all the rest of you out there. I sense more of the searing and piercing and separating. Division comes easily, doesn’t it? Nobody has wanted to let go to this point; none will do so, until it just may be too late. Wiser men and more blessed men have manifested time and again, that whatever flares up the nostrils, ends up blowing the mind, and blinkering the vision.
Time and again, the biggest losers have been those who wanted all, gambled all, and lost all. Somewhere in there are countrymen and comrades. What will they have left, other than the memories of what was promised? What could have just been possible…
There are no winners; only those searching for a way to go on. Whether family or country, be they mighty or paltry, the road ahead looks long. It is. It doesn’t have to be.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
