Cummings Lodge man charged with wounding wife, arson bid

Although her reputed husband has been remanded to prison for allegedly attempting to set their house ablaze and feloniously wounding her, Nanda Latchman is still afraid to return to her Cummings Lodge home.

On Tuesday Munilall Boodhoo, 39, appeared at the Sparendaam Magistrate’s Court to answer to the charges. They were read to him by Magistrate Judy Latchman. The man was refused bail.

The same day police took Boodhoo to court Nanda was released from the Georgetown Public Hospital (GPH). She had been admitted a patient at the medical institution during the wee hours of Sunday morning after Boodhoo allegedly stabbed her to the left shoulder from behind.

For almost 15 years, Nanda had told Stabroek News, she lived at the Lot 213 South Cummings Lodge home with the man. She has shared a relationship with him since her mid-teens and at the age of 37 she is beginning to realize that she’ll have to start her life all over again.

“I know he is in jail,” Nanda said while speaking with Stabroek News via telephone late yesterday afternoon, “but I am still afraid to go back to that house…I am afraid that somehow he will get out.”

Police, in a press statement, had said that Nanda “was reportedly stabbed to her left side shoulder by her husband during an argument. It is alleged that her husband then set the home on fire which resulted in the destruction of some furniture and damage to the walls of the house.”

The fire, according to police, was extinguished by neighbouring residents who formed a bucket brigade.

The woman had further alleged that her reputed husband was under the influence of alcohol when he wounded her. Boodhoo, she’d reported, has been drinking since his early teens. When he sobers up, she said, he usually claims not to remember anything.

In May, after Boodhoo reportedly beat her to the head, he was charged with assault. The case, Nanda explained, is currently ongoing before the same magistrate at Sparendaam and continues in September.

Since her discharge from the hospital Nanda has been staying with her older sister. She has been back to the Cummings Lodge house once but is not ready to clean the place as yet.

Early next week, she said, the stitches from her wound should be removed and after this is done she will begin tackling the issue of moving back home.

“My sister has a large family of her own and there are other relatives staying with her too so I can’t put more strain on her,” Nanda said.

She explained that she was advised by the doctor not to do anything strenuous as her wound is still tender. After the stitches are removed Nanda hopes to return to work. The woman works as a babysitter and domestic for relatives of her reputed husband.

“After this thing happened they allow me to keep my job,” she told this newspaper, “and if I lose this job then I don’t know how I am going to survive because school will be opening back in a few weeks and I have many things I will have to buy for my son who will be a 4th form student at [name of high school] which as you know is one of the best in the country.”

Fear of moving back to the Cummings Lodge house and the need to make her son as comfortable as she can are constantly at war in her mind, Nanda said.

While she will not feel safe in the house again, she stated, she will have to return there because she works in the area and her son attends extra classes there as well.
Being a single parent at this point in her life, Nanda said, will not be easy but she understands that it is important to get both herself and her child out of the abusive situation.

“I talked to him [her son] since this thing happened and he told me that he is stressed from it…he is doing well in school and I need to get him out of this before it affects his education,” the woman stressed.

Her in-laws, she said, have not been very warm to her since the incident on Sunday.

“They tell me that I put him in jail but I didn’t put him there. He put himself in jail,” the woman said.

Nanda wishes to move on with her life and her reputed husband, she insisted, no longer has any part in it. While she will not object to him seeing their son, she said, she definitely does not intend to forgive him this time around.