A Life on the Fringes of Cricket Madness
Kids playing cricket in Varanasi. Photo: Karan Madhok
Personal Essay: ‘Sometimes I like to imagine a parallel universe in which my brother stayed. In this universe, I continued playing cricket after school, continued following the sport with the fervour of most of my compatriots.’
I was woken up from my Saturday afternoon nap to the raucous laughter of children playing cricket outside the building. It had been a warm October, and this day was no different. The ceiling fan sputtered away above me, sweat slicked the back of my neck, and the curtains over the bedroom window hung listless and still.
It took a few seconds before I wondered why these children were playing outside. After all, the actual Cricket World Cup was on. It was a little after 2 p.m., and I calculated that India had started playing against Pakistan fifteen minutes earlier. Shouldn’t all these children be at home? Shouldn’t they be sharing the sofa with their siblings and their parents and their grandparents, all of them glued to the screen?
Of course, like most questions, this one revealed more about the person asking it than about its subject matter. Why wasn’t I in front of the TV? Why wasn’t I watching the match?
The simple answer, the answer that my still-sleepy brain reached for, was that I was that rare Indian species, someone who wasn’t a fan of cricket. I couldn’t reel off statistics from World Cups past. I couldn’t talk about the finer aspects of swing bowling or what the presence of dew does to a team’s batting prospects. I couldn’t even tell you the names of all the members of India’s World Cup squad.
And yet, as the children continued playing outside and I wrenched myself into wakefulness, I couldn’t help but recall my many indelible memories associated with the sport.
*
This memory is a little hazy, no more than a snapshot yellowing at the edges. It’s a hot summer and I’m standing in front of a TV, an old BPL set with a gently bulging screen. I’m so small, and the TV so big, that if one were to remove the back panel which housed the cathode ray tube, I could easily fit into it. The Indian team is playing and it’s losing, something that happened a lot in that period. It’s a good thing that the curvature of the TV screen makes it difficult to read the score in the corner.
This image is accompanied by a sensory recollection that is far more vivid: a blast of cold air that bathes one side of my body. The source is a noisy air-cooler installed perpendicular to the TV. I want to turn ninety degrees, face the wind head-on, close my eyes, and lean into the comfort it brings. But I’m rivetted to the screen. I can’t take my eyes off the proceedings.
*
When I was a child, it was all very well to own a cricket bat, but if you wanted the respect and admiration of your peers in the neighbourhood, your bat needed to come adorned with the right sponsor stickers. MRF was the gold standard. You could heft that bat onto your shoulder and pretend to be Sachin Tendulkar, striding onto the pitch to rescue your team from a perilous position. Brittania worked too. You would be Dravid—and who doesn’t like Rahul Dravid?
But woe be to anyone whose parents only managed to get their hands on a Four Square sticker. No child looked forward to a day spent pretending to be Nayan Mongia (with all due respect to Nayan Mongia).
We were too old to act as if we would one day emulate the achievements of Tendulkar and Dravid, too old to picture a scenario where sporting greatness was within our grasp. Perhaps it felt easier, and less ridiculous, to pretend to be everyone for a shorter amount of time.
Perhaps this is what growing up entails.
*
Many years after this, my brother and I begged our parents to switch our milk supplement from Bournvita to Milo. We didn’t particularly like Milo, but we wanted to get our hands on the tiny bats—complete with a rubber grip in the green of the brand—that came free with each jar. We spent many happy hours lobbing a watermelon-and-cucumber scented stress ball at each other in the living room and then directing it using one of the miniature bats towards designated scoring spots. Anything above the waist behind the bowler was a six, below that a three. Fours were available on either side of the batter. A one-bounce catch was out. We even kept score, playing entire 11-v-11 matches using the names of actual cricketers, alternating between who would bat and who would bowl.
In many ways, this was the apotheosis of the playing from our childhood. Why pretend to be one cricketer when you can be all of them? But perhaps there’s another possible interpretation here, an altogether sadder one. This is that we were too old to act as if we would one day emulate the achievements of Tendulkar and Dravid, too old to picture a scenario where sporting greatness was within our grasp. Perhaps it felt easier, and less ridiculous, to pretend to be everyone for a shorter amount of time.
Perhaps this is what growing up entails.
*
I can’t talk about my association with cricket without also talking about my brother, for he’s present in most of my memories. My brother was beside me when I pored over a cricket book, one that came with illustrations (all of them, for some reason, featuring a man in a short-sleeved sweater) on how to execute a pull shot or bowl an off-cutter. When I was thumbing through cricket cards, trying to make sense of bowling economies and strike rates, he was there too. Every game of cricket watched at our home had my brother stationed in front of the TV.
He was also present every time I played the sport as a child. Two-player games in a dusty field close to our home in the summer before I started third grade. Three-player games with our father in the yard in front of our house even earlier. Games played with cousins in Bombay, or games that included his circle of friends—a circle that was always larger than mine. And who can forget those mini games played inside the house with the stress-relief ball?
Given all this, it should come as no surprise that I stopped playing cricket when he went off to boarding school as a high schooler.
Sometimes I like to imagine a parallel universe in which my brother stayed. In this universe, I continued playing cricket after school, continued following the sport with the fervour of most of my compatriots. In this universe, when I’m watching a match with my brother, I don’t have to ask him about the form a particular player has come into the tournament with or how the review of an LBW call works. In this universe, I’m a fully-fledged fan.
*
Here’s a rare memory in which my brother is not present. It’s 2008, and I’m in tenth grade, mired in that dreary and endless desert, otherwise known in the Indian academic calendar as the pre-board period. I’m often alone at home, and I have nothing to do but endlessly revise for exams that are still a few weeks ahead. Of all the things in the world that I could have done to chase the boredom away, I found myself turning on the TV to watch snippets of India’s victorious run in the U-19 Cricket World Cup. Dedicated fans of cricket will already know that this was the tournament in which Virat Kohli announced himself to the world.
It feels strange to have witnessed that beginning, unaware that it was a beginning. It feels even stranger to have witnessed it and not paid much attention to everything else that followed: the tournaments he helped the country win, the personal records that he broke, the media interest in his personal life, the dozens and dozens of advertisements that he appears in today. Here is a man who has done more than anybody else in recent times to mould Indian cricket in his image and my clearest memory of him is as a baby-faced nineteen-year-old.
*
When I say that Kohli has moulded Indian cricket in his image, I mean it in a literal sense as well as in a metaphorical one. Look at the Indian cricket squad, the faces shown in the batting order before a game, and you’ll see that most of them look alike. I wrote earlier that I can’t name every member of the team, but it’s also true that I can’t pick them apart from each other in a lineup if my life depended on it. They all seem to sport a similar style these days: the trimmed beard and the medium-length hair as much a uniform as the team jersey. They come with a self-assured look in their eye and if you make them stand in a line, you can almost swear they are all the same height as well. If there’s a finishing school for professional cricketers out there, these are its most distinguished alumni.
It wasn’t always like this. When I was younger, the cricketers tended to look different from each other. Tendulkar’s short stature and Kumble’s tall frame always elicited a few chuckles when they stood next to each other. Ajit Agarkar’s equine awkwardness and Javagal Srinath with his South Indian matinee-idol looks showed that the fast bowlers’ union liked diversity amongst its members.
Even as recently as Dhoni’s early years (which, when I doublecheck, turns out to be not all that recent after all) had him rocking those silky tresses.
But perhaps everyone feels this way about the period when they most watched cricket in their lives. If you ask people who followed the team which won the World Cup in the eighties, they may speak in a similar vein about the Tendulkars and the Gangulys, the Agarkars and the Prasads. It’s the sporting equivalent of people rhapsodizing about how the music from their younger days was unique while all the current chart-toppers sound the same.
*
The other day my wife and I were going to the gym in the morning. She had a smidge of sunscreen on her cheek, and I joked that she looked like Chaminda Vaas. My wife, who knows even less about cricket than I do, was left bewildered. When I told her about the former Sri Lankan bowler and the oodles of sunscreen he slathered onto his face for matches, she wryly remarked that for a man who claims to not be a fan of cricket, I knew an awful lot of random factoids about the sport.
I feel that I’m able to recognize this World Cup and the performances of this team for what they were: a zeitgeist-capturing phenomenon that pulled along people who wouldn’t have shown any interest otherwise in what was happening on the pitch. People like me.
I didn’t know how to respond to this then but having thought about it a bit more, all I can say is that my knowledge of the sport operates entirely at the level of the sub-conscious. My quip about Vaas was instinctive, an off-the-cuff remark that I said as soon as I thought of it. And maybe this is true of many people in this country. We go about our daily lives paying only the least amount of attention to cricket, but the sport still has a way of worming itself into the deepest crevasses of our brains. Before we know it, we’re spouting inane trivia and drawing up connections that surprise us as much as they surprise the person hearing them.
*
There was nothing subconscious about my connection to cricket this World Cup. After I woke up that afternoon from my nap on that warm October, I had the TV on for most of the day, intermittently following the match as India got the better of Pakistan, their old rivals. A few days later, I watched as Kohli hit a century against Bangladesh, adding a bit of drama to a run-chase that was becoming routine. I saw India get past a tricky fixture against New Zealand and then record more commanding victories against England, Sri Lanka, and South Africa. I even watched large portions of the dead rubber against the Netherlands, cheering on as Shreyas Iyer and KL Rahul racked up their centuries. I missed most of the semi-final because I was on a flight, but the first thing I checked on my phone after I landed was the score. The tight ball of nerves that I had been carrying in my stomach for the entire journey unspooled when I saw that the Indian team was on course to make it to the final.
And then heartbreak arrived with yet another final lost to Australia. I watched it at my parents’ home, the entire family getting quieter and quieter as the inevitability of the result dawned on us.
On the late-night car ride back home afterwards, my wife said that someone online had posted that the upcoming T20 series against Australia provided the team the perfect opportunity to exact some revenge.
Which made me think of a question, a question I wouldn’t have even dreamed of asking myself a couple of months ago. It was whether I’d watch this tournament and the ones that came after it, whether this World Cup run had turned me into that most ubiquitous of people in the country: a bonafide cricket fan. I was tempted to say yes but the truth is, I probably won’t. Not because India lost in the final but because life, with its thousands of errands and distractions, will take over as it always does. I’ll read and write and spend time with my family. I’ll watch football matches. I’ll take my Saturday afternoon naps and wake up to the sound of children shouting outside. And then one day I’ll discover that Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli have retired, and I didn’t even know of it.
The prospect of this doesn’t make me unhappy. I feel that I’m able to recognize this World Cup and the performances of this team for what they were: a zeitgeist-capturing phenomenon that pulled along people who wouldn’t have shown any interest otherwise in what was happening on the pitch. People like me. It was a lightning-in-a-bottle moment, and I was just happy watching the lightshow while it lasted.
***
Ajay Patri's works of short fiction have been published in The Bombay Literary Magazine, the Bristol Short Story Prize anthology, and longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. He is also the recipient of a fellowship from South Asia Speaks, a mentorship program for early-career writers. You can find him on Twitter: @ajayppatri.
