Dear John...

BitDepth#1220

YOU DIED last week. Dr John D Belgrave. Gone.

I cannot think of anyone who was more fearless and simultaneously more vulnerable in the face of danger than you were.

Born with a skin condition that made your soft flesh easy to cut, haemophilia, which made your blood hard to clot and some double joints on top of all that, you cut an unusual figure on that first day of first form in Trinity College in Maraval.

Most notable was your arrival in long pants, when the boys were expected to wear shorts until third form. Your mother, a stern and fierce protector of your health, insisted on it.

It also meant you couldn’t be caned, so your inclination to mischief meant that you wrote a lot for atonement, quickly graduating from “The way of the transgressor” to an ever deeper pile of exercise books transcribing the Bible. By the time you hit sixth form, it seemed that you’d written most of The New Testament.

So naturally we became friends.

When I had my 12th birthday party at a beach house, my mother grudgingly visited your mother to discuss safety.

You were right alongside me when we performed as The Deranged Dancers at a school talent competition. You were always comfortable playing the fool, but never in a way that would allow anyone to take you for one. In the end, even with my own considerable appetite for absurdity, I couldn’t keep up with you.

Whether it was exploring the woods above the school, a region declared absolutely out of bounds, or snorkelling among particularly vicious rocks at Macqueripe, you were always out front, urging the timid and sensible onward.

You were my friend from the day we first spoke in grey and white until the day you died. We didn’t speak often, but we spoke deeply when we did.

Your work as an energy consultant based in Calgary took you around the world.

One evening you called, your voice buffeted and overpowered by a squall of screaming, hammering sound.

“I’m in Kazakhstan! I just wanted to check this was still your number. I’ll check you when I’m there.”

The thing was, you always would. Trinidad mattered deeply to you. The friends you’d made at Trinity were a touchstone.

When the college nominated you to its Hall of Fame, your brother told a group of classmates last month that you wept.

The two things that kept bringing you back to Trinidad were your ailing mother and the local energy industry, which couldn’t hear your plans and proposals, informed as they were by current industry realities. I’d listen to you fulminate colourfully about pointless meetings and pointed ignorance. After her passing, TT saw much less of you.

It’s something I’ve often considered, this country’s inability to keep track of its best minds working abroad and to make use of them.

In my Trinity school year alone, a group that rather archly dubbed themselves the 69ers, are computer scientists, mathematicians and linguists whose experiences working in the world might have informed generations. So many of these brilliant young men would visit, like yourself, look around, have a few abortive and frustrating conversations and then go back to their lives abroad, unable to find any point of entry in a country so determined to contemplate its own intellectual navel.

You will never be back now. You’ve gone on ahead without me again, this time to the undiscovered country.

I’d honestly have preferred that you’d waited a bit, but I imagine you’ll make good use of the headstart on the carousing.

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there