DEVINDRA DOOKIE
HEATHCLIFF WITH A SENSE OF HUMOUR
Attillah Springer
Trinidad Guardian
Features Section
December 19, 2001
Page 1
Actor Devindra Dookie, who had suffered from mental health problems, committed suicide last week. Dookie, who was from Carapichaima, will be cremated at 1 pm today at the Caroni Cremation Centre. Here Guardian feature writer Attillah Springer, who knew him since she was a small girl, recalls happier times with Dookie.
I cannot cry for Devindra Dookie. It is hard to associate such a man with sorrow.
Until this year, my memories of him were of a wild, crazy, funny kind of man, a Heathcliff with a sense of humour.
My memories of his heyday as an actor are dim; I couldn't have been more than five or six when his Alternative National Theatre was in its embryonic stage.
But I do remember hearing lines and odd moments from so many plays, repeated and workshopped and drummed into my six-year-old brain while I tried to stay awake through long rehearsal hours, before finally collapsing into dreams that echoed with Shakespeare and Selvon.
I remember my mother's constantly repeated to the heavens "When will Devindra learn his blasted lines?" litany. I remember falling in love with Naipaul at Devindra's reading of B Wordsworth from Miguel Street.
In those days I was fascinated by the bigness of them all. It was not that I understood the finer points of acting.
They were larger than life, the theatre people, like my other life, which I had a suspicion most other children my age were not privy to. The hours of rehearsals and the rap parties and the impromptu readings were the kind of experiences I couldn't share with my school friends.
But Devindra was one of those uncles I couldn't take seriously enough to call "uncle". He was always Devindra. Or Dave.
He was the kind of uncle who would bribe me with soft drinks to be quiet during a Gayelle shoot in San Fernando.
Or take advantage of my way of being awake when I really shouldn't have been to do things like teach me to mix a good rum and coke.
To say Devindra lived the drama is an understatement.
He was always performing. He had a way of making us laugh. He was almost always "forming the fool" and then feigning distress when we laughed at his antics and his attempts at a boof.
To a child he was excitingly foul-mouthed, but always apologetic, punctuating his apologies to the offended child with another four-letter word.
Until this year that childhood fondness remained intact. He would still meet me and call me "Child" in a typically Devindra way; starting off with a Trini inflection and suddenly remembering the d, so that the word seemed a lot more splendid than it actually was. It was one of those strange little things about him that you had to love.
And then earlier this year, I was awakened somewhere around 4 am to a familiar voice that carried a kind of anguish that I never in a million years would have identified with him.
Standing there outside my front gate in my half-sleep, again I heard him weaving a tale too fantastical to be true, too much like a play to be the real-life experiences of a man for whom the world was a stage.
But even in his madness he retained that painful hilarity, he remained jokey enough to soothe my alarm at his state. I thought to myself, "What scene he really one?" and then laughed at the stupidity of the pun.
The last time I saw him, I was trying to escape another St. Ann's patient with whom I didn't have the time to spend 40 minutes.
I saw Devindra and he spoke to me in his same cross-bred Trini with a hint of London Academy of Arts. He still called me "Child".
And I was terrified. I didn't laugh or cringe in mock embarrassment at this antics this time. I smiled a wry smile that was all I could muster to hold back a flood of tears at the loss of such a brilliant mind. Because there was no longer a chance that my laughter could save him from whatever I didn't know I was saving him from when I believed in him.