The doubles vendor at the top of the hill where I live in Sunkist, Phillipine, was still waiting for his last sale at 4 pm as people were going home. My good friend Harry from Barrackpore did not go with us on our annual Christmas fish and cook lime in Trinity Hills—something he never missed—because he had to plant his cucumbers “to make a dollar” for the Christmas and the New Year. Hans, another of my good friends from this area, now “ducks” me, having to compete with too many others to be as generous with his cascadoo as he was accustomed to in times of plenty. Even Thacks, one of the biggest cane farmers in the area, must now bend his back to produce a crop of bodi or baigan to survive on the land which was his pride and joy when sugar was king.

Diligence you may say, resilience, commitment! Maybe, but moreso, these are acts of sheer desperation due to the closure of cane and rice in rural communities such as these where, with their pay-packets taken away from them, they must now rely on selling doubles, a heap of ochroes, a pound of baigan, two cascadoo, to survive. Oh so many doubles’ vendors, so many sellers of ochroes and baigan, so many cascadoo catchers, so many mule carts and trailers, skeletal among the abandoned cane and rice fields: a once proud people driven into the dust of marginalisation! And yet hope springs eternal in the breast of the downtrodden, and from where does it come? From the bosom of the UNC and its Guru! And why?

Because it’s all they know, having been nurtured on a diet of racial politics to believe it is either“ they or us”, and who better to lead than the Guru, for always? But in their simplemindedness they do not know that his race has been run and that there is a new star in the sky better placed to deliver them into the promised land. So even as they hope for some improvement to their lives, their unswerving loyalty may just bring about a result on January 24, that will ironically, ensure their continuing marginalisation even unto death. But there is an even handed justice above us, and maybe this time around the fate of the dispossessed will be different.

Dr Errol Benjamin