Trinidad woman says she was…
. . . two years jail for Guyanese husband
TRINIDAD EXPRESS – Battered wife Reshma Abdool was stabbed several times by her husband while holding the couple’s baby in her arms. The assault was one of many suffered at the hands of Gafoor Abdool, the Guyanese national she married four years ago.
On Wednesday, Gafoor went to court charged with maliciously wounding the mother of his two sons.
He told the magistrate he was trying to assist her in her suicide pact.
However, Abdool told the Express on Thursday her husband’s courtroom story was a lie.
“I didn’t have a knife. I had the baby,” an emotional Reshma said.
She said she was sitting in a hammock with her 16-month-old son, Aaron, at her Hermitage Village home last Saturday when her husband came around midday.
Reshma said he visited them the previous day to spend time with the baby and their other child, Javid, three.
Around 12.30 p.m., however, Gafoor approached her with a knife.
Reshma was stabbed twice in her left hand and on both sides of her neck.
Gafoor told relatives he wanted the knife to cut ‘pommecythere’. He had earlier asked his brother-in-law for a cutlass but was refused.
San Fernando Senior Magistrate Annette McKenzie told Gafoor he was lucky the charge was not attempted murder. She sentenced him to 730 days in prison.
Reshma said she hopes Gafoor is deported to Guyana after serving the prison term.
The couple’s life was not always this shaky though. They met during a lime “down the islands” four years ago and were soon married.
Reshma took care of the children; Gafoor worked as a painter.
Gafoor’s love for alcohol, however, affected the relationship.
“He was always drinking, drinking, drinking,” Reshma’s mother, Kalawtee Rattan, said.
The couple then lived at Rattan’s home.
Rattan said she asked Gafoor to leave because of his drinking problem. Reshma, however, soon followed and took their children to be with her husband in Freeport. Recently, she returned to Hermitage Village after the abuse recurred.
After last week’s stabbing, she said the love is now gone.
“I just want him to go back (to Guyana),” she said yesterday.
Should Gafoor be found to be in this country illegally, he will be deported after serving his prison sentence.
Reshma said she will now continue to heal her broken heart and her injuries. The ligaments in her hand were torn in the attack, and she will require therapy to have full use of her left hand once more.
Rattan said the children will be assisted by relatives, even as Javid is set to begin kindergarten next week.
With her husband serving the two-year sentence, Reshma said she believes justice was served.