IT was after her father, the popular Vicramaditya “Vic” Puran died, that she started disliking Guyana, or for the most part, the existing system.

Mishka Puran says absolutely nothing has ever been done to investigate the true cause of her father’s death. No one dared to venture near the investigation, and it has reached to a point where Mishka and her family feels that nothing may ever come out of her father’s untimely death.
It was around 21:00h on Saturday, October 15, 2012, when Mr. Puran, who would have been 61 years old Saturday, was returning to Georgetown after having visited his pig farm, where he would daily take food for the animals.
Puran, who lived at Barr Street, Kitty, purportedly died after his blue Toyota Tundra careened off the Mahaicony branch road and ended up in a canal at Esau and Jacob, Mahaicony. A popular theory at the time was that he died of drowning after his vehicle went into the canal. But Mishka, having been one of the first persons on the scene, begs to differ.

The things she observed after arriving on the scene convinced her that her father was murdered. For one thing, after the vehicle was pulled out of the trench, Mishka saw that the seats were not wet. “The trench was very shallow and he purportedly spent hours in the trench. I spend half an hour in my bathtub and I come out with pruned skin. His skin wasn’t like that,” Mishka, who followed her father’s footsteps of becoming a lawyer, told this newspaper.
Furthermore, all of the seats inside Mr. Puran’s vehicle were still clean. “You know how Mahaicony murky water is. But his clothes were still clean. There was no sign that it was

soaked in that kind of water; Mahaicony water would have gotten it dingy.”
That was not all. She saw that the blood which emanated from her father’s ear was dry on to his face. “Clearly, if you hit your head and go into the water, it bleeds out into the water. It had to have had some sort of time to dry somewhere to form that layer over his face.”
Mishka feels that her father’s murderer had to be someone he knew. “He never would have stopped his vehicle. I think he would have stopped and this is what happened to him. The windows were up, the AC was not on, his lights were not on at the time. Who drives at night with their lights off? And when I peeped into the vehicle, it was in park.”
Adding to her conviction that her father was not engaged in a mere accident, Mishka said Mr. Puran’s death certificate says that he died of asphyxiation, but it does not state asphyxiation by drowning. “It simply says asphyxiation which can cover many things, including being strangled. It’s very, very wide. Also, there were marks on his skin which could not be explained.”
On the day of the funeral, Mishka could not understand why her father was wearing gloves. “I had never seen gloves on a dead body. Then I figured it out. His veins were as big as pencils which could have only happened before he died. It couldn’t pool up in his veins after he died. So whatever caused your veins to get big would have happened while you were alive because your body is preserved as it is when you die. So it would lend credence to the fact that somehow he was restrained.”
Mishka said despite all this physical evidence was available, the police did not make the slightest effort to investigate the case, even from the standpoint of it being an accident.

Payment will be made
In an interview with this newspaper a few days ago at her Smyth Street office, Mishka said she has come to terms with reality that nothing may ever be done about her father’s death, even as the new crime chief has been recalling old cases.
“Nothing has ever moved off from point A to point B. I saw that old cases were being reopened and I did feel a little hope in my heart that something could come out of it, but I don’t think it would. It’s been over a year and no contact was made with anybody. The country that we are living in right now doesn’t foster that hope. We stand on our platforms airing our voices but we ourselves as citizens do nothing to forward a change.”
Mishka can never forget the last day of the prayer ceremony after Mr. Puran died. The family was asked to pray and focus on one wish that they had for the family. “For me, I concentrated on the word justice. I don’t know what my other siblings prayed for, but I felt I should just keep concentrating on this word so that my message would somehow get to God. And I still do that. But I don’t think I will get the justice that I am looking for or that the family is looking for – that his case would ever be solved; that anybody would ever look into what really happened.
“But I realised that justice in God’s terms is not the same as justice in my terms. But I do feel that at some point, payment will have to be made because that’s just the way God works and the law of nature works. Our bad deeds come back to us in one way or the next,” expressed Mishka.
She said she and her family will never be able to find full closure in the matter because not even the slightest effort was made for her father. “I think if even the slightest effort was made, we’d feel an ounce of contentment. I don’t think that will ever happen.”

No sympathy
Mishka said she believes that one of the reasons the public didn’t clamor for anything to come out of her father’s case is that they feel that because he was a criminal lawyer, he doesn’t deserve the same measure of justice that an “innocent” person deserves.
“So there’s no sympathy for him because they would say perhaps he helped to keep these criminals on the streets. But what people don’t know is that Vicramaditya Puran was a different person when he was not in the public arena…he was very introverted; people don’t know that. When he didn’t wear that Vic Puran hat, he couldn’t even order a pizza. And if you tore away at the outer layers, you would have seen that he was a very good person, and a very loving person. But unfortunately, few people knew that aspect of him because he was very shy.
Furthermore, it was little things that Mr. Puran did for Mishka during her childhood days that proved to her that he was a very loving person. “He wasn’t a person to spoil us. Contrary to everyone’s belief, I own nothing that my dad has ever given me. He never gave me anything outside of the basics. There’s nothing that I own, not a pin, which was given to me by my dad.
But the truth is, he was always there for you when it mattered. Because he was never able to portray to the public his true self, I think that’s why there isn’t that sympathy for him.”
The family has decided to move on, though, because they realised that to keep hoping for something to happen would only contribute to more hurt.
“The reality in this country is that there is corruption, and too many incompetent people in places where they shouldn’t be. We’re always going be plagued with cover-ups and there’s this parallel economy where Guyana isn’t run by any natural resources. Those were things that hit me and I started disliking the system in Guyana. Now who I really pray for are the honest people of this country as opposed to justice for my dad. I think those are the people who really suffer – people who have no reach into the government and into running this parallel economy.”
Mishka remembers her dad as a very smart man who is irreplaceable around the courts. “I don’t think we have managed to replace him, so he will always be relevant until somebody else burst on the scene like a shooting star I presume.”