Son of indentured-labour Indo-Guyanese, dentist trained in Chicago, and the first popularly-elected head of government in British Guiana — toppled by an Anglo-American intervention in 1953 that read his Marxism as a Cold War threat. Spent the next thirty-nine years in opposition, in jail, in dignified persistence. Won the 1992 election cleanly, became President of an independent Guyana, and died in office in 1997 having outlasted nearly every functionary who had once removed him. The single most consequential political figure produced by the Indo-Caribbean diaspora. The case study in what a Cold War did to a Girmitiya-descended democrat. The reason the Indo-Guyanese in Toronto and Queens know the precise weight of the words 'before' and 'after.'