"They used to call me Mambo," says Pairaudeau, reaching for a 1957 team tour card to Great Britain.
"Mambo was a calypso song," he explains. "Mambo, hey Mambo, mambo Italiano; hey Mambo," he sings a verse.
Born in Guyana, Pairaudeau joined an elite group including Kanhai, Basil Butcher and Lance Gibbs to fly the region's flag in a scattered country.
He has adorning the lounge wall of his home a photograph of the four of them for having scored a century.
He laughs when asked if he was giving Gayle some batting tips.
"Not really," he says, revealing he was pointing out the flaws of another country's batsman he had seen on TV.
Making the first-class cut for the former British Guiana before his 16th birthday, Pairaudeau scored a century in his third match but few opportunities at domestic level saw him move to England in 1950 to play.
The bespectacled right-hander, who could bat down to No 6, returned two years later to be drafted into the team for the first test against India in January 1953. Batting at No 6, Pairaudeau scored 115 (his only test ton) and put on 219 for the fifth wicket with Weekes. He scored several test half tons, averaging more than 32.
"I should have scored more runs. It's one of the things I've written to Everton in my long letter to him," he says, after handing the letter to the team public relations manager Philip Spooner in the hope he will be able to establish a rapport with his old teammates again.
He also congratulates him on his recent knighthood and revisits some of the old jokes they shared.
Pairaudeau laughs when asked if he feels left out watching his ex-teammates receiving the gong from the Queen.
"Oh, I don't expect to be up there with those fellows."
A "reasonable batsman", Pairaudeau toured New Zealand in 1955-56, scoring 101 runs in six innings in the four tests. The fourth test of the series at Auckland was New Zealand's first historic test victory.
Pairaudeau's test career ended after the tour of England in 1957 at the age of 26.
He emigrated to New Zealand in 1958-59, captaining Northern Districts to their first Plunket Shield victory in 1963 before retiring at domestic level in the summer of 1966-67 with former All Black Don Clarke in the line-up.
"Yes, Clarkey, the big man. He was an opening bowler and he was certainly no mug with the bat," Pairaudeau says of the fullback who was dubbed "The Boot" in rugby circles, who batted around No 7-8.
The late Clarke, he reveals, extracted prodigious bounce on the wicket.
"I remember him getting eight wickets in a game we [ND] won against Central Districts. Yeah, old Clarkey."
Jokes abounded in Pairaudeau's playing days but it didn't pay to cross the line when the time came to pad up and walk out to the batting crease because there was no shortage of teammates to remind it was time to put on a game face.
"We had great powers of concentration, all of them."
He realises the requirements of players have changed considerably from yesteryear and Gayle was a classic example of that.
"We didn't have all the fancy stuff they have now and he [Gayle] hits a lot of sixes.
"When I got the odd hundred I used to hit a six in that innings."
The last time Pairaudeau visited his country of birth was in 1998 when he had a reunion of teammates in Jamaica, with the now late Sammy Guillen whose son Gerard is a physiotherapist in Havelock North.
"They said they would have a reunion every three years but 15 years have gone by and we're still waiting for the second one."
He and wife Gillian have a son, Jeffrey, 51, of Auckland, and a daughter, Antoinette, who died in a swimming pool after a seizure on her 30th birthday in 1995.
