Tony DeyalIN TRINIDAD, faced with mischief from our juvenile male prodigy, we justify their behaviour by saying tolerantly, 'Boys will be boys.' In Guyana they say, 'Byes will be byes.'
This is one of the reasons I went to the Bourda Oval last week, during the Test match between the West Indies and India, to hear how my Guyanese friends would pronounce the word 'bye' and its plural 'byes'.
Jamaicans, for instance, add the letter 'h' to certain vowels so that we have words like 'hegg' or 'homelet'. Courtney Walsh, commenting during the recent Guyana-Jamaica cricket match, pointed out that the bowler needed to give the ball more 'hair which 'e' actually did and almost got 'imself' the prize wicket of 'Ooper', the Guyanese Captain. 'Owever' 'Ooper' remained not 'hout'.
Grenadians and Guyanese have in common that they pronounce 'dog' as 'dag' and 'box' as 'bax'. In my last visit to Guyana when my friend complained, "Alas alack! it turned out that he had lost a padlock for the kennel in which he kept his dag. At least one Grenadian woman I know finds herself sliding out of bed while sound asleep. Or so I thought. She told me, during a conversation about the garments which we wear (or don't wear) when we go to sleep, "I slip in my sleep." It turned out that she sleeps in her slip.
But, as the cricket commentator says, "Back to Board-ah," aptly named because of its wooden pavilion. In the context of cricket, a 'bye' is a run scored off a ball not struck by the batsman. It is allotted to the team as an 'extra' run and not to the individual batsman. A 'leg-bye' is a run scored after the ball has hit the batsman's leg or some other part of his body, except his hand, without touching the bat. A Guyanese 'leg-bye' is a phenomenon that I don't ever wish to contemplate.
As I entered the upper area of the crowded pavilion, unable to see anything, I heard someone shout 'Bye!' I figured that the Indian wicket-keeper who, in the warm-up game against a Guyana Eleven, seemed to be using a doughnut rather than a glove, had allowed a ball to pass him. However, his Captain still elected to pick him, in spite of considerable opposition from his other team-mates. It was a matter of letting byes-gone be bygones.
When Sachin Tendulkar had melongene or egg-plant for lunch, I was told it was a matter of letting baigans be baigans (the Indian word for melongene). As regards that particular 'Bye' it turned out to have been uttered by a rather large gentleman trying to attract the attention of a waiter. Later, as I settled down, I heard someone declaring loudly, 'Me buy!' I thought he was asserting his determination to purchase or pay for a round of drinks, copious amounts of which, aged five, ten or 15 years old, were being consumed in alarming quantities all around me. Those ages, five to 15, would for the human species, particularly those of the male sex, qualify their possessors to be described as striplings or mere 'boys.' However, in terms of alcohol, particularly at the rate at which the Guyanese imbibe beverages containing that particular mind-numbing commodity, they are not just old but lucky to have survived so long.
It turned out that I had misjudged the situation. The gentleman in question was addressing someone he knew quite well and had not seen for some considerable time. I hoped it was not a leg-bye.
By and by, I found out that by and large my Guyanese friends pronounce 'boy', 'bye', 'by' and 'buy' the same way. However, even though I had gone to the game merely to assuage my curiousity about Guyanese pronunciation, I cannot be a by-stander at cricket or stand-by while an injustice is done.
In Trinidad, from my boyhood days, there was a brand of shirt called 'Elite'. I later learnt that elite was more than a shirt. It was a term for the most powerful and gifted. The two umpires chosen for the Guyana game are part of an eight-person 'elite' panel selected for adjudicating all Test matches. What I discovered, almost as a by-product of my original research, is that the umpires in the game, while 'elite' were not wrinkle-free. In fact, there was a hole in one. This might be good for Tiger Woods, but not Brian Lara, who was given out to a ball which did not touch his bat, by the Umpire representing Australia on the elite panel. Perhaps for a moment the Umpire might have thought that he was back home and his team was bowling. Had that particular ball, like many others, passed the wicket-keeper, it would have been a genuine bye. Instead, the Umpire raised his finger and it was 'good-bye' to a disappointed Lara.
What was interesting is that there were many people in the crowd who knew that Lara was wrongfully, though not maliciously, given out and who seemed happy about it. Some came to me later to declare, seriously and loudly, that without the Guyanese the West Indies would not have made any runs. There was a kind of happiness for some people when Stuart Williams and Junior Murray failed. It is not unique to Guyana. I saw it over the last few days in Trinidad, a kind of glee, particularly among the sports reporters, when there was the likelihood that Mahendra Nagamootoo of Guyana, who performed brilliantly during the first test match, would be replaced by Dinanath Ramnarine, who was on standby.
When will the day come when we rally whole-heartedly around the West Indies? When will we behave like big- hearted men instead of spoiled little byes?
As I left the Bourda Oval, I told one of the Gate Attendants good-bye.
'Who you carlin bye?', he shouted at me as I beat a very hasty retreat.
Tony Deyal was last seen at the Queen's Park Oval shouting 'Four byes!? A Guyanese man said, 'Yes, is true. Sarwan, Chanderpaul, Hooper and Nagamootoo.
