By Neil Marks
“The pain can’t come out so easy, no matter what,” Nisha Khan says, with as much pain as she has felt over the last ten years. Who can really understand this mother’s pain?
We met her Thursday morning as she was preparing snacks to offer that evening at the neighbourhood masjid where an event was being held in memory of her son.
Almost every day, she says dua, a Muslim prayer, for her son’s soul to rest in peace. Shazam, her firstborn, was just 22-years-old.
She anxiously brought us photos. There was the one with him smiling broadly at his graduation from nursery school; another was of him just a bit older with a slick hairstyle. Yet another was of him in shirt and tie while he worked at a leading insurance company.
But her favourite is of him in a white t-shirt, posing with one hand in his blue jeans.
“All of us have to go one day,” she reasons, but it was the kind of person her son was that causes her daily grief.
“He was so good; I can’t even explain to you the good of Shazam.”
Shazam was brutally murdered on the morning of January 26, 2008. It wasn’t just him.
Within the space of 15-20 minutes, gunmen carrying high powered rifles, led by the notorious “Fine Man” stormed through this street, then just a mud dam, and killed 10 others, including children asleep in their bed.
It was just about two hours after midnight.
Roberto Thomas, just five-years-old at the time, lost his father Clarence Thomas, sister Vanessa, 12, and his brother Ron, 11, within minutes.
His elder brother, Howard, had come out of the house to use the washroom, but he soon scampered up the stairs to alert the family that gunmen were in the street.
At that time, the family had become accustomed to gunfire ringing out from neighbouring Buxton, so the father came out of the house to investigate.
“When he came out, the men were already on the step,” Roberto recalls.
“They just put some shots in him. He was left lying on the step.”
Mr Thomas was dead. Roberto was without a father that very instant. In the house, his mother was hiding behind a white curtain. The family were all sharing the same space at the time since their house was under construction, but the curtain separated the parents from the children.
Before little Roberto knew it, he was picked up by one of the men and flung to the wall. Some of them started kicking him. He went in and out of consciousness but soon realised he was shot; Roberto struggled to reach for his mother.
“All I could remember at the time was where my mother was and I just crawled to reach her.”
Once he reached his mother, Roberto passed out again.
He next woke up in the operating theatre; he spent over three months in the hospital. He is now fully recovered and says he can run and jump like every other teenager, but especially around the anniversary of the massacre, he has dreams of his father, his sister, his brother, all killed for reasons he is yet to understand.
Two doors away on the other side of the street, we met up with Rajkumar Harrylall, called Bobby. His wife Mohandai Goordat and his two young sons, 10-year-old Seegopual and 4-year-old Seegobin, were asleep when they were brutally killed.
His house still carries the pierced flooring where the bullets passed through after they were fired in the bedroom.
Bobby had just moved to Trinidad to work; the memory that stands out the most for him is the time he spent with his two boys as they helped packed his suitcase to leave.
“I was only in Trinidad for a week and I had to come back to this tragedy. That is something I have to live with as long as I live. I can never forget that.”
Bobby figures that were he at home at the time, he too would have been killed. He has now remarried and is trying to move on with his life.
Just nearby, 52-year-old Shalem Baksh was gunned down, the eight for the night. He was pulled from under the bed he was hiding with his wife and daughter and executed.
The men then moved down the line a few houses away; there, they killed the 56-year-old Rooplall Seecharan, his wife Dhanranjie and their adopted daughter Raywattie Ramsingh, just eleven-years-old.
They were the only ones home at the time and were apparently put to sit in the living room chairs and executed. Their son Vishnu Seecharaan, was nearby and hurried home.
“When I got home they were all lying in chairs with gunshots.”
Vishnu has had to struggle to move on with his life, clinging to memories of his parents and adopted sister while fighting of the cruelty of the bloodbath of that fateful night.
His house was the last of the maddening reign of terror for the gunmen, who later fled in the bushes.
The mastermind of the massacre, Rondell “Fine Man” Rawlins was later killed by the security forces. One of his accomplices later testified in court that Rawlins launched the bloodbath after he accused the Police of knowing about the disappearance of Tenisha Morgan, 19, the mother of his child.
Then President Bharrat Jagdeo had described the men as “sick, demented cowards” and said their action was calculated to spread terror on the East Coast of Demerara.
On Friday evening, residents of ‘Tract A’ Lusignan, East Coast Demerara and others will come together to remember their neighbours who were killed 10 years ago.
On Thursday morning, Nisha Khan, through her grief, had already gathered a parcel of callaloo to prepare meals for those who will visit. She could hardly bear the pain of ten years ago when her beloved Shazam was cut down in the prime of his youth.
“There is no doctor to cure my pain; I didn’t expect my son would have gone like that.”
