Dear Editor,
Those who witnessed the anguish, the sheer outpouring of pain, from the mother of 14-year-old Rajiv ‘Ravi’ Dharamdial the day she buried him, could not help but share in her grief and her sense of despair.
Knowing that the Dharamdials were originally from Guyana made Ravi’s death a topic of intense conversation in the homes of many in Toronto’s large expatriate Guyanese community.
This wasn’t another senseless murder that had occurred back home. It had happened here right on our doorsteps and it was tragic.
Ravi was only a month into the first semester of his first year in high school when he was viciously attacked on his way home from school in mid-October. He was stabbed seven times allegedly by fellow students at his school who had intimate knowledge of the route he normally took from school to home. And as they left him bleeding in a deserted area, Ravi managed to dial 911 on his cellular telephone and pleaded for help. When help did arrive it was too late. Ravi died in hospital later that same day. Police say there was no apparent motive for the attack which took place in Brampton, a booming suburb north-west of the city of Toronto.
I live a few blocks from the Dharamdials and my teenage children attend a similar high school where danger, they tell me, lurks in the shadows of the very corridors where they walk, talk and laugh with their friends.
Like my children, Ravi was born in Canada. He was one of thousands of the second generation Canadian children of Guyanese immigrants who have come to love the game of hockey more than they do cricket and who dream dreams their parents would never have imagined possible.
To allow their children to dream must have been precisely the reason his parents fled Guyana for a new life in Canada. Ravi’s parents say their son aspired to attend university and become an engineer. His teachers say he was an intelligent and promising student.
Guyanese tend to see violence in the country of their birth − a daily litany of murders and robberies − as merely news flashes from a land fewer and fewer of us feel obliged to refer to as home. Acts of violence happen in Guyana not in the safe and prosperous neighbourhoods of our adopted homeland.
In her distinct Guyanese accent, so difficult to shake even after years in Canada, Ravi’s aunt condemned Canada’s justice system for cuddling young offenders. Her fear is that the 14 and 15-year-old students who have since been charged in connection with Ravi’s death, will get off lightly if found guilty. Ravi’s mother demands that her son’s killers be brought to justice. And her attempt at closure, if at all possible, is a resolute conviction that Canadian authorities act decisively to ensure that other parents are spared the anguish of having to bury a child whose life was snatched away so viciously.
And that’s a challenge not only for those in positions of authority, but for all of us to find creative ways of ensuring that our children, particularly our youths, travel a path other than one littered with rage, violence and the reckless abandon of human life.
Yours faithfully,
Nazim Baksh
