Tony Deyal | No, that’s me over there

“Wait! Wait!” the lady said to me amid the hustle and bustle of Frederick Street, the main shopping drag in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad’s capital city, where at the head of the one-way street with traffic heading towards him, Captain Arthur Cipriani, war hero and trade union leader, waits impatiently on his concrete perch.

He is clearly anxious to resume his job as mayor of the city and deal with the criminals who now seem to have taken it over. Sparrow has a calypso about the statue with the chorus, “A comin dong, ah comin dong,” and unfortunately, instead of Cipriani, the city itself is coming dong. But back to the lady who had stopped me imperiously and now, having brought me to a quizzical halt, was taking in every atom and molecule of my features, looking sharply into my eyes and then going from close-up to wide-shot and back again.

“Let me look at you,” she said unnecessarily. Then she had her Eureka moment. Her eyes lit up and she declared in glorious triumph, “You used to be Tony Deyal!”

The backstory, so to speak, was that when I returned to Trinidad from university in Canada in 1974, the only job available to me was at the Office of the Prime Minister. There, for each month of the next seven years, I produced 20 ‘live’ Monday-to-Friday, 15-minute government information programmes and four 30-minute panel shows every Wednesday night. The panel show was named Issues and Ideas, which my daughter Marsha, then five, converted into Excuse of Ideas.

The shorter nightly shows were Face of the Nation, which, because I produced and hosted them, I became. If Helen of Troy’s face launched a thousand ships, and the water level goes down in every country when there is a commercial break on television, I will not speculate further on what my faced launched except, there I was, almost 15 years after the show ended, being scrutinised and then identified as the television had-been and government centrefold.

‘DOLE’

It happened again several years later. In one of the malls, a man looked at me as if he had seen a ghost, astonishment and recognition fighting for first place in his mind’s eye. “Dole!” he exclaimed. Startled, I looked around hurriedly. While “Dole” may mean a former US senator and presidential candidate, a brand of pineapple, the social-security system in Britain, the act of dispensing little by little, or even a bad word in Hindi or Iranian, in Trinidad it had taken on new and disturbing connotations.

It was the name of a gang leader and reputed drug lord who had recently been hanged for multiple murders. I turned back to the man, worrying now about his eccentricity and my safety. “Dole Kolasingh!” he bellowed, satisfied with his perspicuity and mental acumen. Mr Kolasingh, whose first name was Dale and not Dole, was a television interviewer and producer until his untimely death a few years before. We bear absolutely no physical resemblance except a general East Indian appearance that leaves out my bits of Irish, Spanish and Portuguese.

The man’s certainty that Dale and I were one and the same reminded me of the meek little man in a restaurant who touched the arm of a customer who was putting on his coat. “Pardon me,” he asked politely, “are you Mr Jones of Richmond?” “No, I am not,” the man answered abruptly. “I was afraid that was the case,” said the first man. “You see, I am, and that’s his coat you’re putting on.”

In terms of the use of my name, when I was about 13, a policeman came to our house looking for me. It seemed that a young man was caught engaging in praedial larceny in an orange plantation in another village and gave my name as his. It was clear that the policeman had no intention of arresting the culprit. He wanted some free alcohol and money which, despite my proven innocence, he got.

Much later, there was an incident in Manhattan that I cannot forget. My TV show was well known and watched, mainly because we had only one television station at the time, no cable, Internet or smartphones. I took a few days off by taping some of the shows and left for Manhattan where prices were low and every storekeeper was of Jewish descent and called you. “My friend.”

I entered one of the stores and after I replied to the enquiry about what country I came from, the man boasted, “Yes, yes, we have many Trinidad people here all the time. Dr Williams shops here. Even Tony Deyal shops here. You know Tony Deyal?”

“Yes,” I responded. “I work for Dr Williams and share the same office with Tony Deyal.” Needless to say, it made my day.

I am still mistaken for other people of East Indian descent and wonder whether to some people from Port-of-Spain and environs, we all look alike. Apart from race, I am completely different from an artist and the host of a children’s TV show named Ian Ali (deceased) yet, even now, more than 30 years after, people in North Trinidad still stop me with, “Ian! Ian! How you doing, boy?”

This is like the story of the uniformed man who encountered American humorist Robert Benchley late one night when Benchley had been drinking heavily. Benchley, thinking the man was a doorman, requested, “Would you get me a taxi, my good man?” The man drew himself up proudly and said coldly, “See here, I happen to be an admiral in the United States Navy.”

“Perfectly all right,” Benchley replied, “just get me a battleship then.”

Tony Deyal was last seen being told in a case of mistaken identity, “You look like one of my friends behind.”