Tony Deyal, Contributor

Tony Deyal

Monkey Business was a movie of a genre called 'screwball comedy' starring Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe. Monkey Business is a Czech Funk Band. Monkey Business is the name of the luxury yacht on which United States Senator Gary Hart was monkeying around with Donna Rice and crashed his presidential hopes. Monkey Business is a Marx Brothers movie. It is also how the second Test between Australia and India will go down in history.

But long before Harbhajan Singh and Andrew Symonds, Monkey Business was a small grocery store and rum shop that my father owned in the little village of Carapichaima in central Trinidad. You have heard the term, "Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle!" It is supposed to be an expression of disbelief, something you utter when astounded or astonished.

A monkey's son

It originated during the fierce debate on evolution that followed the publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. Supporters of Darwin's theory were asked, "Which was the monkey, your uncle or your aunt?" In my case, it is neither. I am a monkey's son.

My father, Dipchan, was born in 1919 into a family that worked as labourers in the sugar plantations. From an early age he had to work in the cane fields. However, he loved climbing and his nickname became 'Monkey'. It was not racist but descriptive. My father was a short, light-skinned man of East Indian descent. His father, my grandfather, was Nepalese.

My uncle and father's brother, Karamchan, used to wear a discarded dress coat to protect himself from the sharp cane stalks. His nickname was 'Jacket' or 'Jacket Man'.

This is how the people in the community knew them. My aunt would refer to my father familiarly as 'Monk'. He would call his brother, 'Jacket'. In the beginning my father's nickname might have carried a sting. One can almost hear his mother say, "Why you like to climb tree so much? You eh fraid you could fall down and dead? Stop behaving like a monkey!"

However, subsequently, Monkey became the only name my father had in the community. In the extended kinship community, I was Monkey's son. Even now, when people in the community see me, they ask, "You is Monkey son?". Initially, I used to get angry, but became reconciled to the fact that it was how the community placed me. I was one of them because Monkey was one of them, and I am 'Monkey son'.

Racial abuse

Dominic Lawson, writing in the British paper, The Independent, commented, "Is it racial abuse to call someone 'a monkey'?" Under the modern dispensation, it is if the person so described believes it is.

The International Cricket Council subscribes to this interpretation and as a result has banned the Indian spin bowler Harbhajan Singh for the duration of the current Test series against Australia, after he allegedly called the Aussie player Andrew Symonds 'a monkey'.

The president of the group representing Indian Australians, Raj Natarajan, protested admittedly somewhat disingenuously that "the Monkey God is one of the revered idols of Hindu mythology and worshipped by millions. It is surprising that it was considered a racist term".

Lawson, referring to the huge Indian population, says, "If the cricketing authorities want to insult those billions, then they are free to do so: on the other hand, it is they, as a result, who might end up looking like monkeys."

All should be banned

I have no sympathy for racial discrimination. If this was what motivated Harbhajan Singh to refer to Symonds as a monkey, or Ricky Ponting to complain about Singh, or Mike Proctor to ban Singh, or the Indians to file a complaint about Hogg for calling somebody a bastard, they should all be banned from the sport, every Hogg, monkey and racist.

One interpretation is that the Australians can dish it out but cannot take it. People point to the McGrath-Sarwan confrontation when McGrath is reputed to have asked Sarwan about the taste of that part of Brian Lara's anatomy that is covered by a plastic device known as a 'protector' and Sarwan referred McGrath to Mrs. McGrath who, unfortunately, was having surgery for cancer.

The extremely incensed McGrath is supposed to have threatened, "If you ever (expletive) mention my wife again, I'll (expletive) rip your (expletive) throat out."