They came for my laughing father late one evening. Dad was playing dominoes with jolly friends outside in the yard, as he did most afternoons after construction work, slamming the tiles with such force, the makeshift table that was really a leftover slab of peeling, painted plyboard, shivered for a second, sprung up and settled back down, shaking with surprise.
As a child I loved accompanying my stout father, Mr Big, to the city sea wall for his regular swim after a brisk walk atop the crumbling Fort Groyne.
We would fidget in excitement while waiting outside the rusting gates or staring through the wooden-barred windows away from the shimmering heat, anxiously looking for our faithful kite maker.
An overweight character tells his doctor, “I try to eat healthy.
Insects whirled in the warm glow of the light outside the palapa or palm leaf hut set high on the steep banks of the gleaming white-water river.
Among the dozens of appealing American advertisements crammed in the colourful comic books of our youth was the magic mystery of “The Money Maker.”
The Ides of March having passed six days ago, we are now into the Tides of March featuring the red wave of merriment as Guyana celebrates the annual Phagwah or Holi holiday.
We awakened slowly in the dark, to the loud, lonely song of fast trills and sharp whistles before the morning rays slanted through the windows, cutting across the floorboards.
I first heard Trinidad’s great calypsonian, the Mighty Chalkdust belt out his satirical classic “Three Blind Mice” from our ancient, hoarse radiogram.
A sinister presence lurks in the still depths and murky shallows where clear, coffee-coloured water once flowed, but sick rivers now struggle, reduced to a gasping, mud-choked mess.
Like many young Guyanese men, my tall, handsome teenage brother bravely headed off into the bush to seek his fickle fortune labouring with ambitious friends on a private mining dredge.
With a gnarled trunk of fat knobs and twisted scowls, the sea grape tree squatted over the alley-way, the wrinkled branches laden with slender columns of ripening fruit.
A conscientious Guyanese agricultural worker, with no known underlying medical issues, suddenly develops an unbearable burning sensation in one dark brown eye.
Growing up along the pot-holed paths of south Georgetown, we were lucky to find water unpredictably trickling and sputtering from the shared standpipe in the yard.
As books go, this one hardly appeared impressive. Wrapped in bare red cloth, stored in an unlocked steel cupboard and reeking of the natural insect-repellent citronella, the long, narrow brown leaves opened like a fan in fragile, individual sheets, held through holes by a white cord stretched between crude covers made from bare pieces of wood.
During his career, the Pulitzer Prize winner George de Carvalho reported on the landslide win of a surprise contender, Cacareco, in neighbouring Brazil, who ended up being an unlikely international inspiration.
Inspired by a vivid dream, the best-known work of the gifted violinist Giuseppe Tartini is a haunting solo piece, the “Devil’s Trill” (Trillo del Diavolo) done in several movements.
The Italian Renaissance philosopher and statesman, Niccolò Machiavelli, described as an immoral cynic, a genius strategist and a wicked man inspired by the devil, famously maintained that politics has no relation to morals.
The delicious fragrance of a simmering pot of black-eyed peas cook-up will soon waft through our homes on Old Year’s night as Guyanese continue their comforting compulsory ritual for promised prosperity.
Among my earliest Christmas memories is watching my father carefully open an aged bottle of fragrant Guyanese rum and reverently pour out the first warm capful on to the linoleum-lined wooden floor.
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