You know how it is sometimes-there’s this tune you just can’t get out of your head and you find yourself humming the words or, as in my case, the few words that you know:

’Dinner for one, please James, madame won’t be dining tonight’, one of Nat King Cole’s ’golden oldies’ as the late Bob Gittens used to say.

Incongruous, though, how the song had got into my head in the first place, a friend and I ruminating ’bout how, long ago, murders in Trinidad were signal events instead of the run-of-the-mill routinely regular events they have become (what a thing to have to write!)

I must have been ten when I had my first murder, in the sense of it impacting on my consciousness and here, now, some fifty years later, Nat’s song was coming back to haunt me because you see the trial that followed the murder received front page coverage and, one day, there was this headline:

’DINNER FOR ONE’

It was my father’s reaction that clued me in to its inspired nature, inspiration coming, I heard him say, from the then not-so-old Nat song and to this day, I remember his reaction:

’Now they have him! He cyar get away!’

That ’him’ was one Dr Dalip Singh who was being tried for the murder of his German-born wife, Inge, Dr Singh swearing to judge and jury that he knew nothing of his wife’s murder only to have his butler (or some such help that people have who live well) tell said judge and jury that on the night of her disappearance, the doctor, arriving home, gave the instruction:

’DINNER FOR ONE!’, the jury and the judge, for all I know, concluding that it was the doctor who had done the woman in, cause why else would he not have had his hired help set the table for two as, we must presume, was the norm.

Ah, but that Dr Singh must have been a piece of work, the electronic archives relating how he assisted at Inge’s Port of Spain post-mortem but ’failed to tell the authorities’ that it was his wife whom he, himself, had murdered, the story saying how he had married Inge ’after qualifying in Scotland, but the marriage was a disaster’ and for those too young to know:

’He killed her after a terrible row on April 6, 1954, put the body in a sack and drove 40 miles to Godinot Bay where he threw the sack into the sea. The body, however, came out of the sack and soon appeared on the beach.

’In the morgue Dr Singh said he had no idea who the woman was, but his servants told the police a different story. He was hanged at Port of Spain Prison on Tuesday, June 28, 1955...’ (they still used to hang people back then!)

Murder is, of course, murder but there is something about this one that, five decades on, still takes one’s breath away. Imagine, then, how the country held its collective breath back then, the tragedy having all those riveting ingredients-race, of course, she white, he black (well, brown if you wish), high society-local doctors were not, then, a dime a dozen as they are now-and, then, of course, there was the manner of the murder and the finding of the body, the good, well, bad doctor, perhaps, expecting the body to sink or, perhaps, be washed away to Australia but it coming back and that, of course, was the beginning of his doom.

My ruminating friend would have it that, back then, murders were not so much more glamorous as spectacular, larger than, well, life, as it were, but I looking down the years and recalling some of the headlines (HEAD IN THE FLOWER POT!) could only think about what Suren, he of the Capildeo line, once said about violence being the one value that Afros and Indians here share and, the thinking down the years bringing me to NOW! thinking, then, as a consequence, about the relative tawdriness of today’s killings, black boys walking up to black boys and opening fire, their brand-sneaker clad victims falling to the ground, thinking to their last ’bout the names of their killers, except, of course, for those killed by sneaking black boys approaching from the back, the murders now far more numerous but the case can be-and has been-made that murder, of even the most foul kind, is nurtured in the national gene.