ANATOMY OF A HUNGER STRIKE

In the beginning it was a spectacle. Who could believe that in a country where so many seemed resigned to the recession of justice, to the intractability of corruption so overt that headlines read like punchlines, that there could be a sane man willing to die on principle? For strangers. At first no-one believed it. But as the days went on, and 52 year old Dr. Wayne Kublalsingh - educated at Oxford, trimmed at Sandhurst (the West Point of England), professor of literature, writer of children’s books - remained stubbornly seated at the doorstep of the Prime Minister’s offices, his body wasting away, people started to believe.

I’d first heard about him on Day 9, a Friday, and by Sunday I’d flown from New York  to Trinidad, back to my country. I wanted to meet a man professedly willing to die for other men. For strangers. I wanted to find where such heroism took root in an ordinary man.  What I found first, was his mother.