Dear Editor,
In a distant, dusty place, the quiet of the night was shattered by a sound, then more sounds. What is happening in places faraway and near that men and women tremble for fear of speaking? Remember that solitary sound that pierced the still of the night apart? Well, it is not going away. It is going somewhere in the ether of blankness where some desire it to take up eternal residence. Except that it won’t. Oh, but only those who care about these things, have the honesty to look at God in the eye and say: what is going on here? Why is this so, Master? Now it takes a lot of courage to do something like that, but some actually do. I do. It is called simple decency and human dignity, those silly little things that don’t matter anymore in this great society called Guyana. They put a name on it: integrity. Do we still have that around here anymore?
There is the Office of the President. It makes one wonder…. The same tearing and invading and tingling searching covers the whole body: the Guyana Police Force, the Director of Public Prosecutions’ Office, the Integrity Commission (bless the name and stone the crows), the independent media? What about integrity and honour in civil society? So why are our individual and collective consciences not screaming in tortured agony? That sound in the now rapidly fading night will not let go, but shake like a wet, ragged dog. The red dawn comes. The echoes recede, save for one tiny sliver of sound. It is of a new widow. The first sound, the one that rent the night apart was that of a man dying, then dead. It’s a lovely, truly unholy democracy, isn’t it? By the way, that single nocturnal rupture and rapture, was the sound of a gun firing. And the place goes by the Moors of Dartmouth. Oh, just in case some Guyanese are interested, the man had a name when he was alive. It was Orin Boston. And the place goes by the Moors of Dartmouth.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall