Dear Editor,
I refer to the articles titled “Levoy Taljit’s disappearance…Man found with his cellphone 9 years ago now wanted for his murder” (KN April 13) and “Police issue wanted bulletin over murder of Levoy Taljit” (SN April 13). It took me two newspapers and this wait of nine years to see the first glimmers of some movement in this enduring mystery of young Taljit’s abrupt, jarring, and inexplicable disappearance.
The first thing I will say is that I knew him. Not closely, but well enough. As could be gathered in the little occasional reminders over the years in SN, KN, and the Catholic Standard, there was the strongest personal sense that something was terribly wrong, that the authorities were not doing right, or with the fullest scope of what the circumstances required. I carefully refrained from using that ugliest of final words -murder. Or death. Or gone. But we all knew in our soul of souls that he was gone, it was over. Earlier this week, I heard the plaintive plea, the cri de Coeur from a wounded father, and now the absolute worst has been confirmed. Though this moment took so long, the hope is that justice will prevail at long last. It is that some desultory closure will grace the family. The Roman Catholic family of Our Lady of Fatima will breathe a sigh of regretful relief that something has come about from those official heights that manage these sordid affairs that leave all worse for wear. Relief because a lingering, agonizing ordeal is over. Well, almost. And regretful in that matters had to come to this.
Like so many murderous moments in this country, there will be doubt in my mind that the wanted accused acted on his own. For the fallen Levoy Taljit had earned a reputation for being the kind of public servant that we hardly have these days at any level. He was honest. He was clean. He was true to his faith and calling. As I think of him, I am reminded piercingly of another public servant who was blown away in the open on her bridge, but under the skulking, premeditated cover of the usual darkness. The murder of Alicia Foster, late of a state agency noted for the nationally unhealthy, is colder than the calculated manner of her destruction. Her sin, too, was desiring to do the job a certain way, of objecting to the improper that rages across this land of protected men and protecting leaders. For that Alicia Foster paid a bitter price in the now preferred way.
Today, I will neither speculate nor engage in any of those intriguing tendrils of thought regarding why now or how come. There is simply a sense of serenity that somewhere in Guyana there are still those with a soul. In the torn Guyana Police Force. In the tatters that we have for leadership in this country of hated critics, skeptics, and cynics. In this Holy Week, I will not even ask why so long, only that the heavens didn’t fall, but that justice prevailed, and that the interrupted life of Levoy Taljit is graced with a long-awaited new birth. I am sure that his grieving family will take it as it is now making the media rounds, as harsh as this cruelest of moments is, this bitterest of pills that must be swallowed and kept down somehow. This is how martyrs and heroes are made, through the profaning deviltries of others. The first tentative step in a journey long delayed and denied has now been essayed. The next is to observe and ascertain what Guyana’s peculiar system of justice will deliver. Only then, could the story of Levoy Taljit be said to be finally over. But could it ever be really over?
Sincerely,
GHK Lall
