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Cast your bread upon the waters
Feb 15, 2015 Features / Columnists, My Column
A few days ago I got the news that some young gunmen stuck up pathologist Nehaul Singh, took his money and his phone, then locked him with others in a bathroom. The mental picture brought many memories flooding back.
For one, Nehaul has been dealing with death almost all his adult life. I didn’t ask him how he felt when he had a gun to his head. I suppose there were the nervous jitters, but I am told that he even had time to laugh during the episode. Perhaps he concluded that one day he would be standing with a scalpel in his hand about to dissect the person who actually threatened him with death.
Life is like that. I remember going to a man for a favour many years ago and the person looked on me as though I had filth smeared all over me. It hurt back then, but as I walked away I heard my mother saying to me, “What goes around comes around.”
She must have been clairvoyant, because not too long after this very person came to me for a favour. I looked at him then asked, “Do you remember me?” When he had ignored me, he was a senior government officer. He had power, or so he thought. He said that he did not remember me, so I refreshed his memory. His eyes bulged, then he swallowed. And I sat there, not even offering him a seat. I heard my mother’s voice again, “What goes around comes around.” The anger left me and I helped the once arrogant brute.
I have seen him a few times since then, but I always try to avoid any long conversation, because the anger always comes flooding back. And so it will be with Nehaul. What goes around always comes around. I remember a former employee of the then Guyana Telecommunications Corporation named Neville (?) Bastiani. He once lived at Bartica.
He too was arrogant. He mistreated his wife and some said that he even kicked her once. Lo and behold, I saw him in a wheel chair rolling down the streets of Georgetown. He had lost a leg. Worse, he had lost his home and family, and was then a resident of the Palms. He got beaten there and as he showed me the marks he burst into tears. What goes around comes around.
There are many such cases, too numerous to recall. Some people call it retribution. When I was a young man I thought that retribution was something that visited you after you are dead; that it was something for which you paid in the afterlife, if ever there is one. But I came to the grim reality that retribution visits you in your lifetime.
As young men we try to play the field, sometimes making a mess of some poor young girl. Retribution then steps in some time later. We end up with a woman who plays us more than necessary. Some of us kill, some of us turn to drinks and hug the pavements, and some of us simply sit and cry.
It is not that I am trying to preach morality or anything like that. It is just that my mind keeps harking back to the little things that some of us take for granted.
Cast your bread upon the waters and it will come back manifold, they say. Well if you cast your bread on the water it will swell so large, but you wouldn’t be able to eat it. Yet there must be something to this thing about giving to get. I see people who give to beggars getting so much more. But I would advise against rushing out to give to any and every beggar. Some of them are richer than you are. Some simply want a drink or a smoke.
When my son died last October, I couldn’t believe that there were so many people in my corner. They propped me up and they still keep me going. Had I been an uncaring soul I would have been left to suffer on my own.
I always remember my early days when I got. I have tried to give back to some of those who helped me, but it is almost impossible to do that, so I try to reach out to others. I recall a young woman who came to Glenn Lall for help to complete her legal studies. Today, Mr Lall seems to be reaping the blessings, although at times he does not feel that he is getting any blessing.
I couldn’t help but notice that many who dragged him before the courts have backed off. It must have had to do with other people whispering in their ears. The other day, though, he must have felt that the gods were against him. He got caught in the blizzard that pummeled the East Coast of North America. When I spoke to him on Skype I was shocked. He looked as if he had pushed his face into a pot of boiling water.
I wasn’t surprised when he nearly cried that he wanted to come home. Perhaps he cried when he was outside my eyesight.
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