CHANDRA’S VOICE FROM THE GRAVE
Dr Chandra Naraynsingh was shot to death 12 years ago in 1994 by a self-confessed killer named Shawn Parris. Her husband, Dr Vijay Naraynsingh, his third wife Seeromani, and San Fernando businessman Elton Ramasir, who had been charged with the murder, were all freed. The brutal killing of this beautiful woman has engaged the public’s attention for years and more so since November 2004 when Vijay, Seeromani and Ramasir were charged. Since being freed, Vijay and Seeromani have appeared on several television and radio programmes, the last being Friday morning, giving long interviews about themselves. As they talked, a third voice has emerged. It is the voice from the grave of the dead Chandra. Her words have come to light in the recent amazing discovery of a tape recording of one of her last conversations with Vijay, her husband. Chandra, who was involved in divorce proceedings with Vijay at the time of her death, had taken the extraordinary action of tape recording what is believed to be the last exchange between them. She took even greater precaution of securing the tape in a safety box at one of Republic Bank’s branches. There it remained all these years until last month, as the murder trial progressed. The bank, under the cover of legal advice, opened the box. Among the items secured they found the tape. There was no date on it, but the conversation showed that Chandra who was in Canada telephoned Vijay in Trinidad. The Bank notified the police and a warrant was taken out and executed on the bank. The tape is now in the hands of the police. Sunday Newsday cannot positively verify whether the voices on the tape found in Chandra’s safety box are those of Vijay and herself. That is for the experts to say. The fact, however, is that the tape was placed by Chandra in her bank safety deposit box and its contents tell of a woman fighting to save her marriage to one of the country’s well known surgeons. Vijay, Seeromani, and Ramasir were charged in November 2004 with Chandra’s murder, Shawn Parris the main witness stating that he was hired by them to do the job. At the preliminary inquiry before Deputy Chief Magistrate Mark Wellington in the San Fernando Magistrates’ Court, Vijay was freed, but Seeromani and Ramasir were committed to stand trial for the murder. Two weeks ago, Seeromani and Ramasir were freed in the San Fernando High Court after Justice Herbert Volney surprisingly invited the jury to stop the trial if they wished. The jury did. Volney had also swiftly refused the DPP’s application to re-indict Vijay after the preliminary inquiry. Volney had refused to recuse himself from hearing the trial although he had been the judge who presided at the Shawn Parris trial and had sentenced Parris to life imprisonment. He refused to transfer the trial to Port-of-Spain. Volney had also gone down to San Fernando in December to set the date for the Naraynsingh trial in January, the month he was assigned to South. And now, in the wake of the trial and public reaction for and against, Chandra’s taped telephone conversation with her husband has emerged like a voice from the grave. Chandra, then in Canada, appears to have telephoned Vijay in Trinidad. What does this tape of the dead woman tell us? CHANDRA: Do you feel I did not meet up to your expectations, honey? VIJAY: Clearly, it is the other way around. You disapprove of my customs, what ever else I would say, it is the other way around. CHANDRA: Do you feel as a couple, we should never have had conflicts, that we should never have had differences? VIJAY: I never felt so. CHANDRA: Yet you were saying to me that I had to be always pleasant, so that I could keep this relationship with you. VIJAY: There is nothing like always, and nothing like never. They are words I don’t believe in. CHANDRA: Do you feel we have had conflicts and differences in the marriages? VIJAY: Sure. CHANDRA: Did you think how we could have overcome these conflicts? VIJAY: This is real difficult to deal with issues like that. When your perception of reality, and my perception of reality are very different... CHANDRA: Are there any two people whose perception of reality is the same? VIJAY: Oh yeah. It is very common where people’s perception of reality is the same. I am not saying it is always so, I am saying it is extremely common. CHANDRA: Are you saying that our perceptions of reality did not have any commonality in it? VIJAY: I would say most times it was not common. CHANDRA: What percentage of times? VIJAY: 90 percent of the time. CHANDRA: That is a very high figure to take. VIJAY: Yeah. You want me to go percentage. I go percentage. I don’t like to go percentage, it is either never, always, more common, or less common. CHANDRA: When you married me, or you were about to marry me, you had made certain deep statements. I want to remind you about it because I want to understand them clearer. You said you waited all your life for me. You have told me there would be no more pain in my life. You used to say if I die, you would never re-marry unless I was unfaithful. You said all you wanted for me was me. Do you feel there has been a change in these sentiments towards me? VIJAY: Of course, of course, that situation does not apply. You have elected to walk out at that time. The situation no longer applies. CHANDRA: Those sentiments were based on you not having any experience of living with me, so to speak, or having conditional sentiments? VIJAY: Of course, it was conditional, suppose you walk out, pick up a fella and walk out of here, you think that..... CHANDRA: But I did not do that. VIJAY: I am just saying, it must necessarily be conditional, that is all I am demonstrating. CHANDRA: So love is conditional then? VIJAY: Of course love is conditional. CHANDRA: I see. VIJAY: If you go and kill my child, or something like that for whatever reason, you think love is conditional? CHANDRA: Do you feel you made the wrong choice in marrying me? VIJAY: That is a loaded question, like the question you asked about pride. That is too faceted and loaded for me to declare. CHANDRA: Do you see the differences that we have had as unforgivable or unreconcilable? VIJAY: I would say that they are not unreconcilable. What make them extremely difficult to reconcile is that we aa things, but about apples and oranges. What makes the issue very difficult because when we are discussing a particular problem, you are discussing an apple and I am discussing an orange. Your perception of a given event, a given occasion, a given issue, is radically different usually from my own. If we are talking about that door, you are saying that door is open, though it is broken. I would say it is intact or it is closed. It is not the same issue. It is extremely difficult to resolve that. If we both said that door is broken and that we go and build and fix that door, then that is reconcilable . CHANDRA: Would you prefer that I fake my perception so that we could relate? VIJAY: You can’t fake your perception. CHANDRA: Oh, people can, people can. VIJAY: No, you can’t fake your perception, because you won’t know what to fake it to. CHANDRA: Do you see me as an irritant in your life? VIJAY: It is not like the day to day event, you go out to dinner, everything is fine and jolly, you go to the beach. It is not like that, it is one way. Would you be willing..... CHANDRA: Are you the kind of person to let me just slip out of your hands without a fight from your side? Would you be willing to let the five years we had together, having a child also, just disappear? VIJAY: I do not deal with too much theoretical business. I try to deal with the reality as it is. I am dealing here with choices. It is not theoretical choices. If you elect to stay out there as initially you had appeared, you gone up there (Canada), you stay in Hamilton, you get a job there, you sought out your licensing, everything is in order, you start to work, I can see how you moving. CHANDRA: You are just observing. You are not feeling like you want to be a participant in any of this. VIJAY: I have never been. That is a strong word. I often have not been. CHANDRA: Is that by choice, or is that by infliction? VIJAY: I think, I have gone over this with you. I deal with the realities. You decide you are going to India, Thailand, Singapore and Hong Kong. You decide you carrying Anamika with you. You wrong. I don’t know about this, but it happened. CHANDRA: When I left we had little communication, the kind of pressures I was living under. I needed time to reassess this relationship with you. I did not have any notion of permanence. I felt I needed to temporarily step aside from the situation I was in. I needed time and more clarity. I want you to know, I don’t know if you understand this, I did not walk away from my marriage to you. VIJAY: It will take a lot of reasoning to convince me otherwise. Down to the photograph I have of Anamika on my desk. If you look at men all over the world, including people who have no feelings, they have pictures of their wives and children, as I had there, and mine is gone. CHANDRA: There is a reason for that, it had nothing to do with that I did not want you to remember her. VIJAY: Anyway, I don’t want to get into that. Even the picture of Anamika on the wall from the Divali magazine. I have been left in a house with not even a photograph of my child, you understand. CHANDRA: But you have the negatives, you can get copies. VIJAY: I don’t even know where they are. CHANDRA: You can ask. Any way, I want you to know also that my focus and my intentions have always been to improve our relationship, not to create waves, or hurt or pain anybody. It has always been with an intention that we must have a better marriage, a better relationship, there must be greater love, there must be greater care, and greater understanding. I don’t know if you understand that. I am telling you that, because I want you to know that. You have always told me that whenever there is an instability in your life, you tend to make a decision and you move on. What stopped you from making a decision concerning us? I mean, like you didn’t decide to go with somebody else, or you didn’t decide to..... VIJAY: I make a decision to move on, you know. CHANDRA: There is someone else in your life? VIJAY: No, I am not referring to that, about what I am doing. I am going to be running a programme island wide for underprivileged children. I got a car. I decide how I am going to live, where I am going to live and so on. I am moving on, I am not going to sit down here and mope. I have limited time to do the things I have to do. I know there are men who sit down and mope for five years, have sleepless nights, can’t do this, can’t perform, can’t get on with their lives, go to alcohol and running down women. Me ain’t in that. A decision on me finding a woman or not finding a woman is something that I will make eventually. I just have a priority decision at this point in time. I haven’t seen this as a priority decision. I have made it clear to you. I have not made a decision to close the door on you. CHANDRA: Why haven’t you made a decision on closing the door on me? VIJAY: I just decide that I ain’t make a decision on that yet. CHANDRA: You must know why. Are you the kind of person who will feel uncomfortable if I see something negative in you? VIJAY: No. CHANDRA: Do you feel that I would love you less if I see your weaknesses? VIJAY: No at all. CHANDRA: Yet you repeatedly remembered the instances when you felt I had pointed out certain negatives or weaknesses in you. VIJAY: We talking apples and oranges again. I do not sight any small things. When I am talking I am sighting fundamental things. CHANDRA: Do you feel we can salvage this relationship? VIJAY: I think it is very difficult quite frankly. (Tape becomes inaudible). CHANDRA: So when you came to Canada to see me four weeks ago, was there any notion of reconciliation in your mind? VIJAY: I came there, I see you in this job, you working there how many hours and Anamika, she going to school, and how you going to take care of her. I deal with the reality. CHANDRA: Did you think that there are provisions that we have tried to work out in the situation we are in here? It is not that everything is going honky dory, that we don’t need you, that we don’t need a life with you. Like you say, if you are in a position, somehow you have to survive. What you say wasn’t the ideal situation of survival. Did you want to see that we were kind of dragged down or living.....How it is that we are trying to cope be interpreted that we have gone on. VIJAY: It is not that you have gone on, it is that you have clear... CHANDRA: They are not clear, it is what I had to do for the time. I had no income, I had no support. It is not that I had made a decision, or that I had moved on. It is what arose from a temporary condition. Vijay, I need to ask you point blank. Are you presently contemplating the possibility of another relationship with another woman? VIJAY: No. CHANDRA: I needed to know that because I wondered if this is why you feel you needed time. VIJAY: Not at all, not at all. CHANDRA: I just want to say a few things. VIJAY: Let me extend to that. The answer to that is not at all. There is no consideration of that in my decision making. I can only start that consideration when I close the door. That is not a component of a consideration. I cannot say if that will become a consideration. Meaning, I am 43, I don’t know how I am going to live the next 25 years of my life, you understand. And whether I am going to make the next 25 years alone, which I could well do, or may well do, or may do that with company or however. The point is that is not an immediate consideration. My immediate consideration is a decision to be made how I am progressing in life. CHANDRA: So you are saying that during this time that you need to take your time to consider whatever, I could get a phone call from you stating that you have closed the door and you are now going to consider someone else in your life? VIJAY: I will say that is possible. I have no consideration at this point in time, I have to think what I am going to do. CHANDRA: What criteria will determine whether you are going to close the door or not? VIJAY: I can’t say that I can define criteria for that. CHANDRA: Would it matter to you, or how would it feel if I could also phone you up at any time and say that the door is closed, and that I was considering somebody else? VIJAY: I don’t see a problem in that. CHANDRA: Would you be happy about that? VIJAY: Being happy or unhappy is irrelevant, you know. I will have to deal with the reality that occurs. I am not happy that Anamika is there with you. I have to face the reality that she is not here with me. Similarly, I have explained to you that I would have wanted Anamika to spend some time here with me. You didn’t want that, you didn’t approve of that. I am equal to that too. I am not going to mope and cry and can’t sleep over that, that is the reality. You have to understand clearly. CHANDRA: You stated quite clearly your desire for her to be with you. What about your desire for me to be with you? Continued tommorrow
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"CHANDRA’S VOICE FROM THE GRAVE"