“I married my hero”
Published: February 13, 2005
Couple wed after he rescues her from bandits.
Back in 2003, they were brought together by failed relationships, enjoying each other’s company with no plans for a future together.
But one dark night in September of that year, they stopped a car to travel home, and ended up fighting for their lives against bandits who wanted to rob and kill.
Dale Ramnanan was stabbed and told to run if he wanted to live. He chose to confront death instead, chasing after the car in which his girlfriend was being driven away, diving onto the vehicle, battling to get the door open-all the time a wailing Lystra Ramkissoon looking him in the eyes, willing him on.
Dale saved his girl that night, and last October they wed.
“I married my hero,” Lystra, 24, told the Sunday Express yesterday in an interview at their home in Central Trinidad.
“Our love grew. We became more attached. How could I marry someone else after that?” Dale said.
This love story began with the couple working side by side at a restaurant, taking no notice of one another.
Dale was and still is a chef at Imperial Garden Restaurant at Grand Bazaar, and Lystra was a cashier.
“It started really when I was done with my ex-(girlfriend) and she had broken up with her boyfriend. Some of the workers at the restaurant had a beach camp in Manzanilla,” he said.
“It was the 25th of September, 2002,” Lystra recalled.
Dale said: “Before that we never talked much. We just knew one another as workers. But that night, we were sleeping in the same tent, the breeze was strong, the post holding the tent fell, and I reach across her and “brakes” the wood from falling on her.”
Dale continued: “The next morning, we started to talk about our lives. She was going through some rough times. We walked the beach, I taught her to swim.”
“That night,” Lystra said, “the sky was full of stars. I made a wish to find the right person to love me for who I am.”
Back at work a few days later, Lystra said she slipped her telephone number to Dale, and there began the dating game.
It was on the night of September 29, 2003, that they faced death.
Dale said: “We had just finished work around 10 p.m. and waiting for transportation on the highway. It was hard getting a taxi. I wanted to drop Lystra home. A car pulled up.
“I sensed something was wrong even then, even as I was getting into the car. We sat in the back seat, I in the middle, a man on one side.”
Dale said there was a front-seat passenger in addition to the driver.
He said: “We were driving along the highway and I watching these three guys, saying something wrong here. Suddenly, the guy in the front seat nod his head to the man in the back and push back his seat, pinning Lystra, and put a knife by her throat. The man next to me put a knife to my head and push my head between my legs.”
Dale said he never panicked.
The bandits stopped in the isolated farming community of Carlsen Field.
Dale said: “The man next to me come out the car and drag me out. He say ‘run boy or I will kill you’. But I was just coming at him. His knife was long, and he was running into me and I was stepping back. I didn’t want them to go with Lystra.”
He said the car moved off, and the bandit outside the car leapt in.
“I tell myself I not giving her up. I ran to Lystra’s side of the car. The (window) glass was halfway down. The car was speeding. I hold on to the door post and lock myself to the car. I was bumping off the road, so I climb a little higher, and put my hand in trying to open the lock, and the men only stabbing me on my arm to let go.”
Dale said he had no intention of letting go.
Lystra told the Sunday Express: “I was just whispering my prayers for the entire thing. When they stop the car and take out Dale, I see him coming back for me and dive on the car. I could see him trying to get the lock open. I heard this voice saying ‘Lystra open the door and jump’.”
And that is what she did.
Dale said when Lystra fell from the car, he too threw himself off.
He said: “As I hit the road, I got up. My little finger mash up but I ran to her. We started running, then she tell me her foot break, so we dive in the bush. The car stop and then the men ride out.”
Only then, Dale said, did he realise that his girlfriend’s left foot had been twisted out of the socket with the bone protruding from the flesh.
“I couldn’t believe she run. She was bawling in pain, and I was trying to push the bone back in. When the car gone, I put her on my back and continued the journey.”
Both battered and bleeding, the couple still had a long way to go.
Dale said: “The houses down there were miles apart. When we came to one, it was locked up tight. No one answering, so we kept on going. We reach a flats (house) and started to call.
A lady put on her light and bawl ‘what allyuh want?’. I said ‘just one phone-call please’. I see the light switch off and she gone back to sleep.”
Dale said he started begging this time around, and when the woman’s husband came out and saw their bloodied condition, he relented.
The bandits were never caught, but the people who helped the couple that night got a personal invitation to their wedding, held last October 31. At the time of the bandit attack the couple had no plans to marry and made the decision last year-just two months before the date they set.
After the attack, Lystra spent two weeks at hospital and has a permanent limp from her injuries.
Dale has the knife scars on his arm and wears them like a badge of honour.
“I would do it all over again if I had to,” he said.
Dale’s father, Narais Ramnanan, 57, is proud of his son: “What my boy did was very brave to stand up to them and defend his girlfriend. It was love in his heart. They (the criminals) pushed him out of the car but he did not run. Love brought him back to rescue her.”
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