DEEP LOSS -- Sherry Singh (centre) at home yesterday with her children, five-year-old Sheron, left; 11-year-old Terry, 2nd left; and nine-year-old Shelly, right. In background is Singh’s grandmother, Bibi Hamida. (Delano Williams photos)

An employee with the Guyana Sugar Corporation (Guysuco) for more than two decades, Dhanai was the rock of his family, a man who would come home after a hard day’s work and go straight to playing with his children, she says.

Since his disappearance – along with co-worker Hardat – Singh has been at a loss regarding the direction her life should take, if any.

Without the help of her neighbours and her family she says that she would have already gone mad with the stress of waiting through the hours since her husband vanished.

“We never,” says Singh, “never had cause to wonder where he went or anything like that. He never used to stay out without telling anybody.”

For her eldest child, an 11-year-old boy named Terry, a sort of resignation seems to have stepped in when it comes to his father’s fate. His mother says that he has spent a large part of the past few days simply playing with his friends around the village.

Sherry’s nine-year-old daughter has been far more expressive. During the first two days after her father didn’t come, Shelly Dhanai spent a lot of time crying hysterically and rolling about the yard, tearing the grass out.

Dealing with her youngest child Sheron is a particularly painful task. Squirming in her solemn mother’s lap, the child believes that her father is simply at work.

“We tell she that her daddy gone in the bush,” says Sherry’s grandmother Bibi Hamida, “We tell she that he gone and bring back nuff (a lot of) money.”

The fear in Non Pariel, also on the East Coast, is virtually palpable – its effects apparent almost everywhere.

On one street a mostly-finished house, windows and all intact, is spray-painted with a cryptic blood-red “For Sale” sign. Across the street from the aborted attempt at a home is Takur Abdul’s struggling liquor store.

The seating area in front of licensed liquor looks like it would fit in almost perfectly in a Spaghetti Western type ghost town. At near three o’clock in the afternoon, the already scarce benches and tables are still strewn carelessly, as if by afterthought, around a dusty floor. A maribunta (wasp) nest hangs untroubled from the low roof. Peculiar for an East Coast Demerara rum shop, Abdul’s stock looks virtually untouched, with bottles of rum and high wine forming perfect, seamless rows along his shelves.

He points across the road to a row of empty house lots.

“People got the house lots but they refusing to build there. They prefer to sell them back just to get back their money.”

The village is a case study in communal tension and dread, a place where an almost voiceless terror stalks. The community according to residents has been plagued with crime, invasive attacks into the village during which the most valuable loss seems to not be measured in personal property but peace of mind.

Resident, Puran Parbhu has seen the toll it has taken, first hand. Taranauth was Parbhu’s neighbour at the time he and Sawh vanished while cleaning trenches behind Vigilance. When the Guyana Chronicle visited the Taranauth home his wife and three children were not at home at the time. Parbhu, however says that ever since her husband disappeared, Kamini Taranauth has had a hard time coping, depending – like Sherry Singh – on the support of friends and relatives.

The circumstances of the disappearances – ordinary sugarcane industry workers disappearing without a trace – have caused tremors within a community which has virtually grown up on the sugar estates.

“About fifty people usually fit in one of them estate truck that does drop them [Guysuco] workers, and about five or six trucks usually come out of here on a morning,” Parbhu says.

He recalls seeing a group of confused and frightened trench cleaners earlier in the week, standing around not far from where he lives arguing about who would be going to clean which section of the backdam trenches: both Taranauth and Sawh were trench cleaners.

A goat farmer, Parbhu says that he fears going to even cut grass at a spot less than 500 metres from his home. Even then, his wife usually stands some distance away, straining to keep an eye on him, dreading the worst.

For those at the house where Maikhram Sawh once lived, the worse has already come and gone…and come again.

“I visit,” says Sawh’s son, Dharmo, “them people round so [Dhanai’s family] where the man disappear the other day and as soon as I reach the gate I start crying. Is just like when my father disappear.”

For his mother, Jaswantie, the loss of the man she was married to for 28 years has been particularly painful. Ever since her husband’s disappearance, the grieving woman says, she has lost the feeling in both arms, from about halfway up her forearms to her fingertips.

Sitting beneath the family’s home trying to talk to us, her words trickle out slowly – as if trying to keep pace with the tears she struggles to keep from shedding.

At the Sawh house the sense of loss seems as fresh as one might expect it to be four months ago. Dharmo says that his father was a hard worker, loved by his family and appreciated even now among his co-workers.

“I been to the estate just the other day and them man telling me that ‘Maikhram was a good man’,” he says, barely doing better than his mother in restraining his own weeping.

“When my father and the other man disappear, we seh that it gun happen again, before long it gun happen again. It happen again and it gun happen another time.”

In Annandale, several villages away, another son is wondering what might have happened to his father. Suruj says that he doesn’t have any clues regarding what might have led to the disappearance of his father and his co-worker.

His father, according to Suruj, left for work as usual the day he disappeared and simply didn’t show up when he was expected to return.

When Suruj speaks to us, it is the first time he has spoken to the media since his father vanished while on guard duty with Sookram Danhai. He doesn’t trust the media he says since one paper, Kaieteur News, “twist-up” a relative’s words.

And he accuses one television newscast of featuring an unidentified person in an interview during which details of his father business dealings – some of them unknown even to the family – were discussed openly on national television. It is his father’s business affairs which present an added dimension to the most recent disappearances.

Suruj acknowledges, as was reportedly said during the interview, that his father was involved in sugarcane farming at the back of Buxton, but sold off his lease a few years ago. He however argues that the anonymous interviewee’s assertion that outstanding money issues led to Hardat’s disappearance and alleged death at the hands of kidnappers is false.

According to Hardat’s older brother and Suruj’s uncle, Khemraj, the practice of farmers from Non Pariel and other predominantly Indian areas leasing the fertile lands behind Buxton at one time brought prosperity to several villages along the East Coast. This was practically brought to a close during the race riots of the 1960s, says Khemraj, but a few farmers still did it.

Hardat’s nephew, Budzo, who worked his uncle’s land along with other hired hands up to a few years back, said that the now-vanished man had about roughly 40 acres of land under an annually renewable lease from the Buxton Village Council. The land was cultivated with sugar in half-acre beds, then harvested and sold to Guysuco. Business was fairly profitable until two years ago when another farmer was kidnapped and murdered.

After that, Hardat took the decision to give up farming on his leased land, selling off his concession to, Budzo says, a Buxton resident.

The murdered farmer was Ginga Mohabir. Budzo was there when a group of young men kidnapped Ginga, subsequently murdering him. For Ginga Mohabir’s relative – the one who now occupies his Annandale home – life has been hard since the old man’s death. Ginga was not only the scion of the family but the risk-taker, the initiator, the entrepreneur who was planning to start importing goods for sale into Guyana.

Two years after the old man’s death, a huge bond attached to his house holds nothing but emptiness and echoes.

The man says the village has become lifeless, haunted ever since coming under attack from criminal elements operating in Buxton for the past three years or so. The Annandale streets bordering Buxton are evocative of some sort of lesser Palestine.

Ginga’s relative says that there are huge zinc fences – like the one he has erected in his street – in every street in the village that borders Buxton. Whereas he remembers a time when people were comfortable leaving their doors and gates unlocked, today people are afraid to even peep outside of their homes.

But even these security precautions have their limits. The man related that he had installed a streetlight next to the fence – which separates his street from a big, open field that lies between Annandale and Buxton proper – when two young Buxton men paid him a visit. While one calmly explained to him that the streetlight was too bright, the other climbed up the pole, removed the light and carried it away. He was forced to place a light further away from the fence.

And what about Ginga’s lands? The man says he has no idea what has happened to the roughly 100 acres of land that the old man farmed. When he attempted to continue the lease – the family’s major means of income – he began to receive threatening phone calls and messages to leave the land alone.

He collected his last crop during October, 2003