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TIMES POSTCARD
We have to give Mervyn an Alu Banduna
By Rajpal Abeynayake
“Alu Banduna”.
A wag it wasn’t who said that there is a cricket series going on called the Alu Banduna series. The Alu Banduna series??
It is another name, it was later clarified, for the Ashes.
It’s noteworthy that what are simply “The Ashes’’ came to be called the Alu Banduna series in the Sinhala translation.
The linguists will say it’s a transliteration.

But Alu Banduna for ‘Ashes’ is a way of transliterating upwards. It’s to make arrack look like small beer.
Here is why: the Ashes are evocative of a tradition that cannot quite be transliterated or translated. But yet, it’s all about a minor matter.
The ashes of the stumps used in the first England-Australia cricketing encounter are ostensibly entombed in the urn that is the trophy awarded to the winners of any Australia-England test series.

It’s a simple matter. But the Ashes are suddenly teleported to the status of Alu Banduna. It goes one better than calling getting out Deveeyama.
Deveegiya has a burning out connotation to it. Does the batsman get burnt when he gets bowled?
Getting out can be done with a pyromaniac’s zeal, as batsmen are wont to display nowadays, but still – Deveegiya??

It’s a term that keeps lexicographers happy that they have invented something that will not signify the action of getting out. They have invented, instead, something that they will be remembered by. Anyone who hears Deveegiya or Alu Banduna on the commentary, will think of the kind of queer that invented the word, before he thinks of the batsman who ran himself out or got himself plumb l.b.w…..

So, Alu Banduna, Deveegiya- These assail you -- over the radio and the television these cricketing days, and one thinks that nothing can be nearly as cock-eyed…..

Then along comes Mervyn Silva on the television screen.
Talking Mervyn Silva and cricket is like taking chalk and cheese -- but even Alu Banduna compares brilliantly with what Mervyn says these days -- and the way he says it.

But we do hand it to him. Mervyn Silva needs no caricature - - he is one.
He doesn’t have to star in a parody about a politician who is batty as he is obnoxious.

He is already starring in one that’s called “the life of Mervyn Silva.’’
He beats Alu Banduna and Deveegiya by miles. He beats the corniest, battiest lexicographer by 20,000 leagues. His words mirror a mind that sees being garrulous as gambit..

But he eminently doesn’t make an ass of himself. Au contraire, the ass seems to have been made of him…. Any other way you could explain a man defending his son’s indiscretions with a performance that betters the son?? We have to invert that usage: like son, like father.

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