The modern hero of the popular British crime drama, “Sherlock” ponders in one memorable episode, “When does the path we walk on lock around our feet?”
“When does the road become a river with only one destination?” he reflects during the opening of Series Four, produced for television by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Titled “The Six Thatchers,” for the featured ceramic statues of the Iron Lady, it is a haunting fable, narrated by the brilliant consulting detective, based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s beloved stories and best-known fictional character, the immortal Sherlock Holmes, launched more than a century before.
Sherlock concludes, “Death waits for us all in Samarra” and immediately questions his fatalistic deduction, “But can Samarra be avoided?” He is referring to the famous 1933 retelling by the English writer, W. Somerset Maugham, of an ancient Mesopotamian tale about a Baghdad man’s vivid encounter with the dark angel of death in Samarra, the Iraqi city, that was founded in 5,500 B.C on the banks of the Tigris River.
Across the miles, I think back with a shiver to the creepy calls of the harbingers from my childhood, the “jumbie birds” or Guyanese night jars. Some dread the black smooth-billed “anis” or cuckoos, while Trinidadians fear the signs and sounds of the ferruginous pygmy-owl.
As we contemplate our own inevitable appointments and stare disbelievingly at the smiling faces of five more unsuspecting Guyanese who look back at us, confident, reassuring, warm and alive until a few days ago, we, too, cannot but ask, as we look away from the grainy video of sheer seconds of terror, desperately wanting to halt the footage, and with it turn back time and fate, could their tragic deaths have been avoided? Holmes would perhaps answer “Elementary,” and identify unexplained speeding by the blue and white police vehicle for the head-on collision and ensuing horror at Friendship, last Tuesday morning.
We hear still the screams of grieving relatives and discern the palpable shock of a President and people left numb and searching for answers to troubling questions not only in the mangled wreckage, but through yet another upcoming Commission of Inquiry, this time into a major fatal road accident, amidst national angst following months of parliamentary and political uncertainty.
This month is only halfway, yet certain days of the damned and the lost have meant sudden death found young father and Presidential Guard, Ronnel Barker, 24, at 5:33 a.m. hurrying for an undisclosed reason at the wheel of the flashing police car. In the other vehicle, the fragile threads of life snapped, for the happy newly-weds, Hubert and Denise Josiah, both in their 50s, who lived in the hallmark village of amity nearby and rose early to work hard in their humble jobs at the Diamond Diagnostic Centre; their supportive neighbour Lovern Stoby, 66, a traffic officer at the John Fernandes Wharf; and Stoby’s nephew, Leon Tucker, 34, of 2544 Recht-Door-Zee, West Bank Demerara.
In fiction, Sherlock’s older brother Mycroft discloses the detective is not “keen on predestination” and rewrites the story so that the Iraqi merchant travels to a different city from Samarra, “is perfectly fine” but “then he becomes a pirate, for some reason.”
So too blood-thirsty pirates are believed to be behind the latest murders of at least two Corentyne fishermen, Kawal Kissoon, 36, and Lamar Petrie, 20, whose bound bodies were discovered recently. According to the Stabroek News, autopsies show both men drowned, after they were apparently beaten, suffering severe head injuries, and thrown into the sea. The pair were among a four-man crew that left a private wharf at Number 65 Village, Corentyne, on the “SARA 1” to fish in Suriname on the morning of Saturday, October 5th. They were expected to return 14 days later. However, their boat was discovered floating aback Cromarty Village, with evidence of blood, and the engine and haul missing.
The missing fishermen are boat captain Vishnu Seeram, also known as ‘Kevin,’ 20, and Marvin Tamasar, or ‘Buddy,’ 20, both of Port Mourant, Corentyne.
On Monday, Deon Stoll, 44, a veteran gold dealer died after being shot by robbers during a daring daylight gun battle outside El Dorado Trading, Newtown, Kitty.
We can agonise over the endless “What ifs” before the crash on that empty street, the innocent acts that only appear profound and pivotal in retrospect, such as the kindness of the solider, Leon Alvin Tucker, who stopped for a mere moment to pick up his aunt, on his way north. The Facebook page of the devoted father and husband highlights inspirational religious excerpts and family photographs of his wife Paula Singh Tucker, turned new widow, and their grinning children, now left fatherless and traumatised like far too many affected victims of the ceaseless carnage. A purple floral message he shared reminds us, “Life may not be perfect, but the perfect moments make it all worthwhile.”
In a post dated, 25 July 2015, Tucker wrote, “I just wanna (sic) thank God for saving my life and from broken parts of my body after an accident yesterday morning. God is good and I will never stop serving him, just a slight shoulder pain…”
The Samarra account dates to much older stories, including a reference in the Babylonian Talmud, and later Islamic literature with the city changing to a place that was the “furthest lump of mud in the land of India (Hind).”
Somerset Maugham would rework the finest version into his last play, “Sheppey” about the changing fortunes of a diligent hairdresser Joseph Miller, born on the Isle of Sheppey, in Kent, in the United Kingdom. In the end, Death visits the do-gooder Sheppey who admits to the spectre, “I wish now I’d gone down to the Isle of Sheppey when the doctor advised it. You wouldn’t ‘ave thought of looking for me there.”
Death counters with the classic: “There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, ‘Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.’ The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, ‘Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?’ ‘That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.’”
ID mourns for the hundreds who have died on Guyana’s dangerous streets during the past decade. The World Health Organisation estimated 1.35 million lives were lost to road accidents, globally in 2016, and up to 50 million people injured.
