Vindhya Persaud: an unauthorised profile

May 24, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – I lodge this position right away in this first sentence: Vindhya Persaud is a decent daughter of Guyana.  Dr. Vindhya, if I may be allowed the presumptuousness, is also a medical doctor, with both Hippocratic and personal oaths binding her to certain standards.  Of care and compassion.  Of a mind clinical, but with a heart propelled by wisdom about the voids that hurt. Impeccable, they must be, notwithstanding the reality of human limitations, human follies, human vulnerabilities.

I understand that Vindhya, using the privilege of age, is a woman stepped deeply in timeless spirituality, the leader of a devoted religious community.  Man! Does this woman of Guyana have plenty on her shoulders, with her footsteps, the works of her hands, freighted by great expectations.

The children of Guyana see a mother.  There is no politics in such reverence from the young, simply the trust of the innocent. The women of this battered and bruised society look for a protector, and in Vindhya all of this should reside with grace and grit. With doggedness to scale any obstacle, from deep within her circle or on the outside where the clamor for a head is always about the unrelenting. Indeed, her portfolio-official, personal, national-is a manual consisting of many pages and chapters.  Some of them, too many of them, about how the distressed, the naïve, and callow in this country can be deceived, taken advantage of, endangered, and shredded of precious dignity.  Their inviolable rights harmed, and that power of citizenship, which neither man nor woman nor beast should interfere with, profane, rupture.  For what is enrapturing to themselves.

I pause.  For those who are rubbing their hands in anticipation that I am writing today about Ms. Vindhya with an eye to Arthur Chung, I must disappoint them.  Why desecrate our consciousness and consciences, why pierce some more the honour of this country, and its women, my sisters all.  Today is not for pounding anyone, most of all Vindhya.  It is searching, struggling through the thorny thickets of our existence, our times, our dismay, for answers, for a partner.  For anyone and anything that I fervently believe offers a spark of hope, some iota of confidence, that there can be a better Guyana.  A Guyana gifted with more than lush natural resources. A Guyana graced with human resources that are formidable and admirable because such are, at the individual molecules and cells that make life what it is, of quality and character that are immaculate.  At least, there is trying for that ideal.  Today I look to Dr. Vindhya Vasini Persaud, minister, panditai, and most of all a woman who must, due to the demands of our circumstances, do more than rise to her potential in all those capacities.  Vindhya must soar beyond them.  I think she has all the tools that are so direly needed here.  Now she must have the heart of a lioness, one that dares to take those steps that just could take us as a people and as a society to somewhere that is profoundly different.

If I may be forgiven for venturing into sacred space, her family has given much to this country. Vindhya must not falter, for her roles must be that of a groundbreaker and a difference-maker.  She must stand for something, those things that always are outside the grasp of our fingertips.  The restraint is that too often the fingers are not even unfurled, much less outstretched, reaching for what could be.  All the gifts in the universe.  There must be some guts to go along with those. Vindhya has to rise and deliver.  A shaper of her times, a daughter that Guyana weeps for when the grim traumas of the seasons compile and multiply.  I think she is capable of being so and doing so.  One of these days, I promise to essay something textured for Anil Nandlall, Irfaan Ali, and Bharrat Jagdeo. And certainly Aubrey Norton.  I wish there were others on the horizon to whom I could look, share a handshake, even lean forward to embrace.  If I don’t have it in me, then who could, would?  If I don’t even try, then who is left in Guyana?  My Lord, my God, there must be a knitter, a healer.

From her learning and training, from her lineage and the age in which she lives, Vindhya must show the world that she is a woman of substance, one with latent storied mileage.  At the barest minimum, she must drag herself to manifest the majesty of spirit that could come to mean so much for this country, and none more than the women.  I write today not as scribes do.  I write as a neighbor, as a fellow sojourner, as a believer and, most of all, as a helper to the afflicted and outcasts of this country.  By assignment, by identification, much has been placed in the hands of Dr. Vindhya Persaud.  It is my duty to deposit still more within the cup of her fingers. She must clasp them and run with them, as if her life depended on them.  Not the kind of life in which silence and hesitance feature prominently, but one that glows with virtues that no man can question, for they stand unchallenged and unconquerable.  If some think this is hoping against hope, it is asking too much, I have a simple answer.  First, the question: if not, then what else have we got, to what is life now reduced?  And, finally, think of the possibilities, as charted by a new kind of man and woman in this Guyana that is new.  And unknown.  I think those other portraits must be started.

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• follies, footsteps, Guyana, human, Vindhya Persaud

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