Indranie Deolall

As the April sunshine blazed and the days grew drier, the boisterous north east trade winds swept in from the restless Atlantic and our schools closed with a sigh in a tired haze of dust.

For most of my early Guyana life, suckers were merely the plain, pointed side shoots that perennially popped up in a clump around the pseudostem of the banana and plantain trees which towered in many crowded backyards, providing cool green shade and sweet, filling provision.

As children, we dreaded the regular cathartic “clean-outs” our determined parents deemed necessary for holistic health and harmony.

The Greek classical scholar, Aristophanes of Byzantium, is hailed as the patient father of punctuation for his pioneering efforts to sort out the complex comprehension and proper pronunciation of his native language 2200 years ago.

One fine Sunday evening, three months ago, Sri Lankan carolling churchgoers were stunned into sudden silence when they eagerly picked up their Christmas music sheets at one of the country’s biggest Catholic services, in preparation for reciting a beloved prayer.

Packets of vivid powders would lie on the kitchen table like scattered pieces pulled from a pretty patchwork quilt.

Gaping mouths and ghastly sockets scream silently of nothingness, as the phantom heads float high, trailing suckered tentacles in all ghostly white swathes, sardonic symbols of a post-apocalyptic grim world titled “Sailors on an Exotic Isle.”

  “Absolute power corrupts absolutely” is the famous quotation used by English Catholic peer John Dalberg-Acton, Lord Acton in an 1887 letter opposing the move to promulgate the doctrine of Papal infallibility.

The Mighty Sparrow complained bitterly “it’s a shame, it’s a shame” in his classic composition “Pay As You Earn (P.A.Y.E)”

As a young child, I loved accompanying my stout father, “Mr.

Less than a fortnight ago, the new United States leader publicly repeated a startling phrase that had become common enough during his blunt and divisive campaign to reach the White House.

American journalist Steve Coll describes an illuminating exchange in 2001 between then President George Walker Bush and the Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

A slim, greenish brown band in a layer of clay clearly separates two key geologic eras all over the world, showing abnormally high microscopic concentrations of iridium, a rare dense, brittle element that best resists corrosion and bears a beautiful silvery burnish.

The Little Guyana strip of Queens, New York runs for about 25 vivid blocks, with the thriving storefronts a feast of wild colours, bustling with immigrants sporting a range of distinctive musical accents that mark their origins in faraway tropical villages with rather strange names ranging from Ankerville to Zeelugt.

A slender, supple magician behind the shaky wooden counter, the venerable spice master spoke in soft swishes of silken sound, silvery smooth like his slick hair separated at the side, but with eyes smouldering behind thick glasses.

Edward Ricardo (E.R) Braithwaite never lost his distinctive Guyanese but clear, crisp accent even though he spent most of his long life away from his South American birthplace.

My Auntie Daro’s black Christmas cake was heavy, smoky and heavenly.

The public belief of a cover-up and conspiracy in the 1976 Cubana Flight 455 twin bombing persists – fuelled by the preferential American treatment of the two prolific terror masterminds and their shielding from justice.

Unable to ever forget her mother’s anguished sobbing and shrill screams a sleepy Wednesday afternoon, Roseanne Persaud Nenninger finds it deeply distressing even now to speak of her brilliant older brother, Raymond Persaud, 19, one of the six teenaged medical students who won a coveted Guyana Government scholarship in 1976 but was killed on the way to Cuba.

Thousands of eager Guyanese turned out to greet Cuban president, Fidel Castro on his whirlwind trip to Guyana in September 1973, while Prime Minister Forbes Burnham mused that the United States could get rid of three troublesome Caribbean leaders in a master stroke by sabotaging the Soviet-made airliner carrying them to a Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) meeting.