– Couple would have celebrated 5th anniversary in two weeks

By Neil Marks

IT was about an hour after sunset Tuesday that Tarmattie Kumar received a phone call with news she never imagined she would get.Her husband, the teenage sweetheart she had defied her parents’ disapproval to elope with, then later married and with whom she was nurturing their two-year-old son, was shot.

Roland Jodmie, or Vishal as most knew him, the one she shared five years of marriage with, was lying, bloodied, in the driver’s seat. The car, the car which he worked hard to buy and had started to work as a taxi four months ago, was parked in some track at the dead end of the Tuschen new scheme, the East Bank Essequibo sugar plantation that is now a housing development.

Were they sure it was him? Who did it? Why? He isn’t…dead…is he? The questions raced through her mind and she was hoping to get to the scene as fast as she could.

From her mother’s house at Zeelugt, the village next to Tuschen, at most it would take about five minutes to get there. It was only four hours earlier that he had come off the road to have lunch. That morning he had decided not to go to the construction job at Eccles, East Bank Demerara.

The plan was that he would work taxi for the day, starting from around seven in the morning so he would pick up children heading to school. He didn’t eat before leaving. When things slowed on the road he would come home to have breakfast, he had said.

He did come home, at about 10, ate, and was back on the road. He returned home for lunch about two in the afternoon. This home was that of in-laws. It’s where they usually spend the weekend and then return to their home in the Tuschen new scheme. They were there a little longer this week, as their boy, Jairam, is not well and so her mother had suggested they stay on a bit longer.

Her “babe” wanted to wash the car and take a shower before going out back. But there was no water.

He told his “babe,” his Andreina, as he would interchangeably call her, that he would go to Tuschen, have the car washed, take a shower and head back on the road to work.

She didn’t hear from or of him until the dreaded phone call. She arrived at the scene to a throng – neighbours, other taxi operators – gathered around the car. Her feet could no longer take it, but she had to push through, and after what seemed like an eternity, she caught a glimpse of the man she had an eye for ever since she was 13.

There he was, slumped in the car seat, blood flowing from around the area of his abdomen. Instinctively she tried to reach out for him, but others prevented her, telling her not to touch anything until the police arrived.

In between anger and frustration, she couldn’t tell which was greater, she obeyed. The police arrived soon after; someone checked his pulse, and the word went out that he was alive!

She wanted to leap for joy, but she was constrained by the fact that he was still lying there, not moving a muscle as far as she could tell. He was placed in a vehicle and rushed to the hospital at Leonora, West Coast Demerara, a drive of roughly 10 minutes. Before her Vishal got there, he had breathed his last. Gone. Dead.

Less than 24 hours after, the Guyana Chronicle talked with Tarmattie. We asked if she had a family photo, and she went for the album. The photo she preferred was that of them on their wedding day; she in a beautiful white gown and he in a blue suit as handsome as she’d ever seen him.

At the time, she was just 16 and he was 19. He lived just opposite her house, and they had had a liking for each other three years before. They were both young and a commitment and living together was obviously out of the picture. They weren’t thinking of anything of the sort anyways. They just liked each other.

Her parents would have none of it but she was insistent that Vishal was the one for her. They hatched a plot and eloped. Two days later, she was back at home and later plans were made for the marriage as soon as she was legally free to do so.

As she talked about it, the pain in her eyes changed just for a moment, as she blushed of the days he won her over from just across the street. In the years that followed, he proved her right.

“He never showed me a bad face.” Besides that, he was of the kind who “didn’t drink, didn’t smoke.”

“He was always from work to home, work to home. That was his happiness; to make sure everything in the house was good.”

When their son came, her Vishal became a loving father. He would bathe the boy before leaving for work in the morning. In the evenings, he would feed him, and then the two of them would romp until sleep called.

He did mostly construction work and the taxi was just something he did on and off, and so the noise from the joy of a father playing with his son is what characterised their home most evenings.

Now, that would no longer happen. Tarmattie no longer has her beloved Vishal. Their boy no longer has his father. He still thinks his father has gone to work.

Tarmattie and Vishal would have celebrated their fifth anniversary on October 20. She knows she will no longer have his love and his attention. She is not yet ready to start figuring out how she will move on with life from here on.

Her primary concern is justice. She wants to know who killed her husband and why, and she wants them to face the full face of the law.

The Police have arrested one person thus far in the murder of Roland “Vishal” Jodmie. Reports are that he was hired by two men of Indo-Guyanese origin who asked to be taken to the area aback the Tuschen new scheme where they used a gun to take his life.