The Postcard
Personal Essay: ‘My mother handed me the postcard… I couldn’t believe my eyes…Tendulkar had written to me, addressed me by my first name, acknowledged my whole existence with a single thick piece of rectangular paper.’
I was five when I fell in love. Sachin was sixteen. It wasn’t the familial love reserved for my parents or my brother, or the love of close friends, or romantic love—which I didn’t even understand then. But this love felt unconditional, too, the type of obsession that other kindergarteners reserved for biggest heroes, for Mickey Mouse and Superman. He was my Superman even before he became the superhero of an entire country.
We have never met.
I may have been eight or nine when I wrote the letter to Sachin Tendulkar. I penned it on lined notepad paper, stuffed with details telling him about his accolades—as if he needed a reminder—but it was my way of showing how close I had followed his young career. I boasted about the ledger I’d kept of every innings he’d played for India. I told him I was his biggest fan.
I don’t remember if I mentioned the ‘Tornado Tendulkar’ poster that hung in the bedroom I shared with my elder brother. He donned a blue jersey in the poster, swinging his bat down the leg side for one of his electrifying shots down the ground. I don’t remember if I wrote that, whenever I played cricket with my sibling and cousins—choosing fantasy All Star teams with the best players in the world—he was reserved for me alone; no one else could dare even pretend to be Tendulkar in our backyard. I don’t remember if I thanked him for endorsing that brand of flavoured chocolate milk powder, which had naturally been my milk supplement as well, in hopes that I could also unlock the secret to his talents. I may have mentioned that, even though my own birthday fell in October, I celebrated a second time every year on April 24th.
I continued keeping the ledger of his international scores in my notebook for years. I kept lists of other things in my notebooks, too: my favourite songs (Hindi and English), favourite films, top-ranked pro-wrestlers, and the title and author of each book I’d ever read. My bedroom and bookshelves were filled with tiny, private notebooks, for no one’s eyes but my own.
Only my mother knew that these notebooks existed; she would have them bound or rearranged on my shelves, and she would preserve them for decades. But she knew that I wouldn’t want her to read my personal jottings; and so, she never did.
It was December 1989 when Tendulkar played his first One Day International cricket match for India, stepping out in Pakistan’s Gujranwala Stadium against the home team. Earlier that year, he had already become the youngest Indian to play in a Test match, also in Pakistan. At age 16 in Gujranwala, he became the youngest to do so in a One Day match, too.
He faced just 2 deliveries on his ODI debut, and got out on the second. He didn’t score a run. It was a ‘duck’ in cricketing nomenclature, the type of embarrassment that broadcasters in the 90s highlighted with an animated weeping duck that accompanied the player in their long walk back to the pavilion. India lost the game.
I hardly remember the exact content of his message: maybe there was gratitude for my fandom, or other words of encouragement. The handwritten blue ink that floated off the page, with words that formed mesmerizing, vague clouds of disbelief around me.
He got better. Soon he would score his first fifty. They would call him ‘Boy Wonder’ and ‘Child Prodigy’. He would become the youngest in 25 years to score a Test century. The dam seemed to burst open: over the next couple of decades, he would score more 100s than any international cricketer in history, play more matches than anyone in history, win dozens of major international tours, break damn near every batting record there was, and become one of the most-recognized people alive, adored—almost unconditionally—by the nation of a billion.
But before all that, back when he was still a teenager himself, I wrote him a letter.
A few months later, a postcard arrived home to Varanasi, addressed to me. The front was a photograph of Tendulkar—in that iconic blue India jersey—hitting a cover drive on the back-foot. My mother handed me the postcard. It was signed by Tendulkar himself.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I had never received anything in the post addressed to me before. And here was correspondence written by my idol, a response to my letter. Now, I hardly remember the exact content of his message: maybe there was gratitude for my fandom, or other words of encouragement. The handwritten blue ink that floated off the page, with words that formed mesmerizing, vague clouds of disbelief around me.
The specifics of his message, after all, were never important. Sachin Fucking Tendulkar had written to me—a random child in a random Indian city thousands of kilometres away—addressed me by my first name, acknowledged my whole damn existence with a single thick piece of rectangular paper.
The turn of the 1990s ushered in revolutions, an economic liberalisation in India that helped many families—like mine. The liberalisation brought a faster pace of communication. Public enterprise gave room to private entrepreneurship. The technicolour tinge of media which had draped over much of the previous two decades suddenly exploded into a rainbow burst of colour.
We had had our own technological and scientific revolution, made our own promises of economic grandeur, and could imagine the future rushing to us, a speeding bullet train, overlapping the cautious, tepid pace of the first four decades of our Independence. We were ready for the world, but was the world ready for us? Until then, the global face of India were our politicians and freedom fighters, the Nehru-Gandhi family and its scions. And, of course, Mahatma Gandhi: an icon of peace, morality, and inclusion, but, hardly a figure of dominance, strength, or the future.
Little would we know that that figure would come in the diminutive form of ‘The Little Master’. Tendulkar stood 5-feet-5 with shoes on, with a childlike puff on his fair cheeks, curly hair, bright, innocent eyes, a frail frame with the frail voice of an adolescent afraid to face puberty. He played a sport of ‘gentlemen’. He burst into a world that had already seen the exceptional forces of nature, the tallest, strongest, and fastest: Jordan, Ali, Lewis, Pele, Gretzky.
By the mid-90s, Tendulkar became the heart and soul of cricket, a weekly front-page headline, hours of highlight packages on our sports channels, the topic of conversation at chai-wallahs and barber shops, an unlikely hero that somehow united this diverse country that seemed otherwise hell-bent on ripping itself further apart. Office workers took extended lunch breaks when he stepped to the crease, students bunked school to find a TV in the neighbourhood, temples became shrines to cricket’s biggest little god, much of the country came to a standstill. We all wanted to stick around for the chance to witness some magic.
He was the batsman who smashed fearsome opposing bowlers out the park with a mere flick of his wrist, who often single-handedly carried India’s substandard teams to mediocrity, who allowed many Indians to finally have a role model, signalling our ancient culture’s confident rise into the new millennium.
The last leg of drive up the mountain from the valley below was particularly painful, with my mother oscillating between hugging me and puking out the window out of sudden altitude sickness. She wiped her face but her eyes remained welled up with tears.
My mother had a ‘prayer room’ next to her closet, a small space that smelled of her skin, her silk saris, and the incense of occasionally-burnt agarbatti. This was the closest that my atheist worldview ever came to requesting for some spiritual intervention: whenever Sachin took the bat in the biggest games—the World Cups, the Sharjah Cups, any match against Pakistan—I would reach out to a conglomerate of gods, Krishna and Ganesh and Hanuman and Laxmi, hedging my bets to bring him all the blessings he needed on the TV.
I boasted about the postcard for weeks, for months, to my cousins and friends. Nobody, however, was allowed to look at it; I was possessive and paranoid, unable to trust my prized belonging in the wrong hands, even the hands of my loved ones, even the hands of my mother. I stored it carefully in a shelf with my other collections: rare stamps, foreign currency coins, comic books, and superhero stickers.
It was so precious that I hardly took it out again; until, as time passed, I’d forgotten where I’d kept it in the first place; until, as time passed, I’d forgotten to even look for it.
Soon, the memory of the postcard drowned in fast-running currents of a thousand more little memories of childhood, of playing with He-Man action figures with my cousins, of collecting pro-wrestling ‘Trump Cards’, of the taste of the bhelpuri sold outside our school gates, of family feuds and home relocations, and of many, many more exciting cricket matches.
Until the day came that there was a tectonic shift that turned the chapter between the first decade of my life to the second, that blurred all former memories into a technicolour past, replaced by a sharp new colour contrast.
Boarding school.
For my parents, sending my brother and I to a ‘hostel’ was the only solution to the educational limitations of my hometown. At age ten, I was left untethered from them in a dorm-room full of strangers in Mussoorie, the picturesque Himalayan town thousands of kilometres away from home in Varanasi. The last leg of drive up the mountain from the valley below was particularly painful, with my mother oscillating between hugging me and puking out the window out of sudden altitude sickness. She wiped her face but her eyes remained welled up with tears.
I cried often in the first two months. I cried into the phone to my parents, on the one call we were allowed home every week. I cried in bed into the pillow, already damp with the mould of the monsoon’s humidity. My tears wet the corners of the lined sheets of paper on which I wrote letters back home to my mother.
I would get restrained responses from home in my mother’s handwriting. I know now that she was holding herself back, to appear strong for me: She knew that she had to help me accept this new reality, to not show any weakness.
Time passed, and I became a lot more restrained too. It was the law of the jungle in a school like that, especially in boarding halls filled with boys where the only way to survive was to make good friends and toughen up.
Then, I grew older and changed boarding schools and made a set of close friends. When I returned home for the summer and winter holidays, I often wished to be back in school instead. Mother cried at every goodbye, a couple of time a year, while I—now a self-conscious teenager suddenly too cool for public emotion—could only shirk away, eager to drift away as soon as possible into the crowds at trains stations and airports.
By this age, I’d also lost interest in cricket. There were other sports—basketball, football—that I found far more dynamic instead of cricket’s slow, plodding pace. The only saving grace for the sport was Tendulkar: if he was on the crease for India, I would tune in, and then, switch off the moment he surrendered his wicket. I watched him carry the team to the final of the 2003 World Cup, watched his disastrous turn as national captain, watched him bounce back in style, watched him become the first player in the One Day format to score a miraculous double century, watched him finally achieve his dream of a World Cup victory in 2011—after playing for more than two decades at the international stage—as he was carried on the shoulders of the next generation of Indian stars he had inspired.
Tendulkar retired soon, leaving India as the world’s most confident cricketing nation. The sport was now the heartbeat of the culture, where the domestic league became as lucrative as any sport anywhere in the world.
The game and its biggest stars shone as bright—or even brighter—than even India’s other national pastime: Bollywood.
In 2007, the Aamir Khan-directed film Taare Zameen Par hit theatres, immediately becoming a rousing critical and commercial success. Exploring the imagination and roadblocks faced by a young dyslexic child, TZP was a sharp left turn from the usual Bollywood plotlines— those same old romantic tales of love found and lost and found again.
I watched TZP with my parents in a movie theatre, my mother seated right next to me. In a particularly memorable scene, the parents of the child Ishaan (Darsheel Safary) dropped him at a boarding school—leaving him sobbing alone in a strange, new habitat—as they drove away into the night. The sorrowful song “Maa” followed, in which a child sings to his mother for attention, for care, for love. The song began:
Main Kabhi Batlata Nahin
Par Andhere Se Darta Hoon Main, Maa
Yun To Main Dikhlata Nahin
Teri Parwaah Karta Hoon Main, Maa
[I never say it,
But I’m afraid of the dark, Mother
I never show it,
But I care for you, Mother]
All this, while Ishaan isolated himself from other students in the school, while he broke down into tears in the toilet, while he had no appetite to swallow his meals, while his mother (played by Tisca Chopra) back home sifted through his notebooks, feeling the hollow shape of her son’s sudden absence.
The scene brought back a sharp reminder of the first few times I was dropped at boarding school. Of those nights spent choking in my own tears, of the meals I couldn’t swallow down a clammy, dry throat, of those times I wondered if I was being punished by my parents.
In the movie hall, the sound of soft, yet unsubtle sobs directed my attention to my mother seated on my left. Tears gushed down her eyes and her cheeks, rivers of sorrow, snot down her nose, and soft sighs out her mouth. I had seen her cry in many movies, but never before like this. She reached over and grabbed my hand, pulling me closer into a side-hug.
I was 24. Between boarding school and college, I had lived away from home now for 14 of those years. ‘Home’ was now a vacation—a few months in the year when school broke for holidays—and time spent with my parents was a bonus round, a little ‘drinks break’ between long innings of a cricket game.
And yet, I wasn’t impervious to the emotion of this moment, of the “Maa” song, to the tears in the eyes of the abandoned son on screen, his guilty mother, and the sentimental mother who sat next to me, now holding me tight as if she wanted to pull back all the years that we had lost between us. My hands were oily with the buttered-popcorn, throat dry with salt.
I wasn’t impervious to the emotion of this moment, of the “Maa” song, to the tears in the eyes of the abandoned son on screen, his guilty mother, and the sentimental mother who sat next to me, now holding me tight as if she wanted to pull back all the years that we had lost between us. My hands were oily with the buttered-popcorn, throat dry with salt.
But my eyes welled up, too. Although I didn’t share the little boy’s condition, I shared the emotion of separation from one’s parent. I shared memories of the dorm-room scenes, with bunk-beds lined up in rows next to each other. The dining hall with metal cutlery and unappetising-looking food. The drive up to the mountain where I would hug my mother to get her full scent—before that scent would be denied to me for months on end.
I don’t remember what sparked that memory, but it was around the same time that I reminded my mother of the postcard. I told her that I could hardly believe that Sachin Tendulkar—that Sachin Tendulkar, who would soon become one of the most-famous humans alive—had responded to my silly little letter. Wasn’t that crazy?
I don’t remember the conversation, but I remember the vague, cloudy gist of it.
Oh that? My mother said. I wrote that.
She sounded almost flippant in her response, in the whole smallness of this moment.
You wrote that?
Yes, she nodded. I thought it will make you happy. A postcard from Sachin. But it was my handwriting. I thought you knew.
My mother is an ocean of complexities, an over-sharer of every emotion and piece of gossip that comes her way; while simultaneously, forgetful about decisive moments from her own life. Earlier this year, while we watched the film ’83 at home—the story of India’s first One Day cricket legend Kapil Dev, and the national team’s 1983 Cricket World Cup triumph—my mother casually shared the detail that she, too, was close to playing cricket for India’s women’s team in the late 70s. “I got the call-up to the probables training camp,” she said. “But then, I got pregnant with your brother.”
She had been 18-years-old. By 23, she had me, a mother of two boys. She told me she was a pace-bowler. No, an All Rounder. “Like Kapil Dev,” she added with a smile.
And then, this woman who I’d known better than any woman in my life, this woman who had first been a maternal figure, then a woman at work—seated in her office or taking rounds of the schools where she was director—and then, the woman who sang and danced with a twinkle of youth in her eyes even as she aged: now, suddenly, she was a new woman. She was an athlete, an aspiring young sportsperson, a woman denied her ambition, a deeper layer in that complex ocean.
By 23, she had me, a mother of two boys. She told me she was a pace-bowler. No, an All Rounder. “Like Kapil Dev,” she added with a smile.
After college, after spending over twelve years primarily living away from home, I had found myself drifting back home, now as an aimless young adult, waiting to discover what to do next with my life. I moved back in with my parents again, and soon, found a job in Varanasi. For the first time in over a decade, I was reacquainted with living with my family full-time. It was an experience that came with the full gamut of its ups and downs: the joys of watching films with my mother, the teeth-grinding annoyance of being answerable to my elders.
Loved ones, I had decided, were best in small doses.
Soon, old inclinations kicked back in. I felt the itch to leave home, to be outside the predictable comforts of family again, to be away on my own once more. I took off with a backpack to travel the country alone. I travelled around India for the next three months, sleeping in trains and buses, staying at hostels, cheap hotels, or with old friends on the way, and keeping myself mostly-disconnected from my parents. I went from the desert hills of Pushkar to the Tibetan-refugee Himalayan hamlet of McLeodganj. From beaches in Goa to ashrams near Bengaluru. Sometimes I would visit popular tourist attractions, like the Konark Temple or the Umaid Bhawan Palace. Sometimes I would go on hikes or stroll at the beach. Sometimes, I would meet friends; often, I would be alone.
At one point in this trip, I got off the train in Raipur, before taking a bus seven hours south to Jagdalpur, in the tribal district of Bastar. I stepped out on a dusty bus station late at night and checked into the first hotel (Two star? One star?) across the street. After a drink and some chilli-chicken at the bar next door, I found myself curled up early for bed that night.
It was too early to sleep, but I had nothing else to do. No company, no internet. I read a few pages out of the novel I’d been carrying. And then, just me and the cable television.
There was an international cricket match in progress—live, from some part of the world. I don’t remember if Tendulkar was batting down on the pitch. Or even if it was India playing that evening. But during the commercial break, I channel-surfed again until I landed on a familiar film a few clicks later. Taare Zameen Par. Little Ishaan had bunked school to take a walk all alone around Mumbai. Soon, his frustrated parents would send him away to a hostel.
And while a part of me wanted to check back on the cricket score, another part tugged me to leave the remote control alone. To stay with the movie.
My solo-travel so far had provided a gamut of emotional highs already: exhilarating new sights, conversations with other musafirs on the road like myself, a couple brushes with danger, and an elation of freedom that had fuelled and moulded my personality ever since. But, in this indiscriminate hotel in this new town, this quiet, mundane night remains smeared in my memory in sharp focus.
Soon, Ishaan was dropped at his hostel, and the song began. “Maa”.
I’d left home, simply unable to deal with the avalanche of love from her. I remembered my mother, the real ‘tornado’, seated next to me in the dark movie theatre. My eyes grew teary, crying because she’d cried.
I remember her now, the near-international cricketer who chose motherhood instead. I remembered her cheering me on as I cheered on my favourite cricketer.
And I remember the postcard, written and signed in my idol’s name, in my mother’s handwriting.
***
Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose creative work has appeared in Epiphany, Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, The Lantern Review, F(r)iction, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, Fifty Two, FirstPost, and more. Karan’s debut novel A Beautiful Decay will be published by the Aleph Book Company in 2022. You can find him on Twitter: @karanmadhok1 and Instagram: @karanmadhok.
