He was the swashbuckling Prime Minister, swinging his golf club like his lifestyle, running his mouth like he didn’t care, making high-roller friends, accepting their rich givings, and never troubling to check his bank balances.
For discharging this last responsibility, he reposed blind trust in the institution he called The Hindu Wife.
Hardly any anthropologists rose up to endorse the reality or to dispute the relevance of that institution, till then unknown, and unappreciated for its allegedly rightful domain over the financial affairs of The Hindu Husband.
Even when that husband was the Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister, the overarching remit of The Hindu Wife institution ruled.
Around the middle of the last decade, The Hindu Husband, by then the former Prime Minister, sought to gain juridical or case-law validity for The Hindu Wife.
He was on trial then-a non-metaphorical episode, in the dock, facing a Chief Magistrate-liable for penalties incurring loss of freedom and accelerated aging in a cell, denied even a watch to keep his own time.
Though neither called as a witness nor indicted as a co-conspirator, The Hindu Wife haunted the proceedings. She was like a spirit that even British Queen’s Counsel, way beyond the reach presumably of T&T culture or superstition, feared to invoke.
As it turned out, the Chief Magistrate, a Trinidadian, rejected the pleading of diminished responsibility offered on behalf of The Hindu Husband who, as Prime Minister, was credited with an unexpected windfall in a London bank account.
He convicted and jailed The Hindu Husband, and thereby precipitated for both culprit and magistrate a downhill slide of troubles.
The Hindu Husband spent low-quality time in jail, before he was bailed out, but was charged again with bribery. He lost his Parliamentary seat, won it back, but his party lost the election, and he was promptly then suspended from Parliament for a year.
Meanwhile, his once United Congress party split into three parts. His leadership came under, first, severe criticism, then, serious challenge, including by someone herself qualifying as a Hindu Wife.
Meanwhile, too, the Chief Magistrate was himself indicted on administrative charges by the Judicial and Legal Service Commission. His private financial affairs were dragged in the mud of a public inquiry during which he was called, at worst, a liar and bribe taker and, at best, unreliable.
To fight his charges full distance to the Privy Council, the Chief Magistrate was made to spend more and more of his own money. By late November, such was his stress that he took and extended his vacation from the bench turned hot seat.
Maybe the continuing chapter of this T&T saga should be entitled The Hindu Wife. From a former prime minister’s unsuspecting reliance on the institution, the politics over most of the last decade unfolded in decisive sequences.
The implosions inside the once-ruling UNC served to arm and empower the later-ruling PNM. It was from a dissident UNC source that the PNM received the damning data about the London holdings of the Hindu Husband Prime Minister.
Once he was out of office, such data swelled through newly enabled investigation into the prosecutorial dockets that targeted his political well-being, his personal freedom, and ultimately his state of mind.
Strategies and endeavours toward keeping out of prison have so focussed The Hindu Husband now Opposition Leader, as to become his operating principle.
It was politics that had led to this. A political solution must, therefore, be available.
The UNC’s internal politics, in 2007, underwent overnight change when the Privy Council announced that ruling on an appeal by The Hindu Husband would come in early 2008.
At once, he saw the prospect of being able to run without fear of a judgment flung down from Privy Council high into mid-campaign.
Were his party to win, of course, the optimal political solution would have been realized. His election-eve address appealed movingly to be sent off in a blaze of glory.
That didn’t happen. His party and he personally got smaller shares than before of the popular vote. He reverted to his ancient but now distasteful role of Opposition Leader.
He took the result with notoriously bad grace, chastising the voters for their failing support, and grumping ingloriously aloud that they had only themselves to blame for whatever next happened.
The bad mood has stayed.
In the present campaign, he has reserved his fury for the woman in the race-another Hindu Wife.
About the other contender, the man who had fatefully supplied the PNM with the dirty data of 2001: the worst he calls that turncoat is ’a lil flighty.’
Like many of the rest of us, her main critic included, The Hindu Wife in today’s headlines is known to take a drink.
Assuming a born-again sinlessness, however, The Hindu Husband bids to cast the first stone.
He denounces his rival as an ’inebriated egotist’. Then he pretends to counsel and coach her publicly, as if for the passing of a political breathalyser test: ’She has to get rid of that serious problem she has.’
The Hindu Husband born-again as Temperance Crusader.
