RE: Passing of Django (Udho Rambarran)

2023-APR-14-1504Hrs

I mourn at the passing of Udho Rambarran (Django). My year group, 67-69.

Very happy that our group is so wired, that someone was able to find out about this.

Django was a real Mausican. Absolutely Bohemian spirit. Easily the champion Orange field man, perhaps across all year groups. His exploits almost always solitary, and midnight....returning with stocks for the all of the Villa.

Bags- full, deep into the night. Solitary and sometimes bareback.

He epitomised the place....made a mark...one of us...A character.

I have a special sadness about this passing because Django, who was from the Villa, as I said.. along  with Bobby Satram, his roomate, came out at the wrong end of a Fairhaven "take" one night.

I hope he did not have long memory about that...I would understand if he did.

I have a special acquaintance, mother of our daughter, who has not forgotten that Anna Alexander, from Grenada, 66-68, poured starch on her hair during initiation....

Kudos to Carlsbury for refusing to participate in the take of Django on principle. It is true that the "take" was an unwritten rule...Carlsbury taught me that night what maturity in essence looked like...

But in Mausica what would have been the point of maturity? So you want UWI men to be in our fete?

But a rule is a rule....My pardnah Clyde Maurice and I conformed to received oral characterization of rules for a "take".

Martin Brathwaite agreed with us.

First, there has to be some infringement in one hostel by a party from another hostel.

Django, for reasons that I am yet to work out, since we had never had any untoward exchanges......and since he and my roomate Sto never had noise....climbed to our window, second floor.. Haven and threw cow-itch on a bed....it was mine.. He could not have known who  lay in what bed...so it maybe was just a random attack on Fairhaven...I did not take it personally....but it was an attack on Haven.....and there was a remedy according to unwritten hostel rules....

Clyde and I went to the Villa, and got him....hiding in a cupboard....

According to the rules.....he had to be brought back to Haven  for the ceremony....as it were....

Martin Brathwaite was downstairs of us....and had spent that day in the dorm.....and saw the climber use his window sill....

Rodney remembers the night well, because Carlsbury was his room-mate.....and the unwritten rule of a "take" was that if you are a hostel man and there is a "take", which requires application of wet towels, by everybody present in the dorm.....and youb refuse to participate...then in turn....you will have to endure the fate of a take for non-compliance....

Suffice it to say that Rodney was not at all pleased that his roomate Carlsbury was ambushed in the Fair haven corridors....by offended Havenites....by men including deceased Martin Brathwaite....a fellow Red Guard man....and me and Clydee, and a HOST of other towel-carrying men....defenders of Haven....

This is a Mausica story on the death of a Mausican, and I have some guilt that it bears some hint of irreverance, but it seems to me that Death oh Death, Death Oh, When ah me body go down in de grave...den a mih soul go jump for joy...

Mausicans never die.

The death of Django provokes me. I can see him now with a very large bag of oranges, and about 1.00 am, crossing Fairhaven square. We wnet in there together....late August...1967, 56 years ago.

I saw Sahadeo chasing Kenneth Paul with a cultlass  across that square one night, just because he felt like it...and because first years have to be put through their paces if they are to get full Mausica membership.....

This has been my ode to Django.....Udho Rambarran, A true true Mausican. I loved him. A real spirit.

We were forged in that place. Our last chance to be adolescents, before adulthood appeared at the door...at our first teaching practice on those buses, up all night making charts....and then when the real teaching start...after Departure....and no bus coming to pick you up.....No more teaching practice again!....and you on your own....in life.

Udho Rambarran, Django, had the Mausica spirit. A true Mausican he was. But  a man can't just breach Fairhaven defenses without penalty. It was not personal...just a matter of Mausica and hostel honour...it just happend that it was him who breached our defenses....but is could have been anyone else.

We would have followed the, uhmm, law.

Respect and love to his family.

Scratchy.

Theodore Lewis 69

Herbert Garvin 75