– battered man recalls
The 26-year-old man who was beaten by his drinking-mates last Sunday just after 17:00 hours at a saloon at Bee Hive, East Coast Demerara, said yesterday that he had finally remembered the song that irritated the men. Speaking from his hospital bed yesterday, Farouk Hamid said he had been playing the popular Chutney song by the Sugar Cake Girls, “Ya Stupidy, Ya Stupidy, Ya pagalee, Ya pagalee”.
Hamid said, “dem boys [his attackers] din wan de Sugar Cake Girls’ song, dem dey wan bad boys songs but I nah like dah.” The man who had been badly battered was almost cheerful yesterday. “Well I could see through de left eye now and I feeling betta,” he said.
He still did not know, however, if his attackers had been arrested although he had reported the incident to a policeman who visited him at the hospital.
When Stabroek News had visited Hamid, of Ann’s Grove, East Coast Demerara, on Monday afternoon in the Open Ward at the George-town Public Hospital, he was crying out in pain.
He had related that he was at the saloon drinking with two men when “one ah dem sey that he nah like de song playing on me music set and he tell me fuh turn it off”.
Hamid had said that when he refused to turn off his CD player, the man scrambled it out of his hands, ran to the door and threw it on the road. He stated that the other man then got up and grabbed him and when the one who had thrown the CD player into the street rejoined them, the two men picked up a glass bottle each and dealt him several blows to his head and body.
Hamid had also noted that when he fell to the ground, the men continued their assault and one of the men later “bruk a glass bottle and start fuh cut me all over me hands with it”. He said that he soon fell unconscious in the saloon and “I wake up in de hospital”.