The Eighteenth Parallel (2 page)

Chandru had managed the Bund without much effort, but the slope near Bashir Bagh found him out of breath. With just fifty yards to go, he was straining every muscle. It must be past four-thirty now. He didn't know for certain, he had no watch. Father wouldn't buy him one yet—'I bought you a bicycle last year, didn't I?' But buying a bicycle for him last year had actually meant a saving of six annas a day, ten rupees a month. And the cost of a new one? Just a hundred and thirty rupees for a 'war quality' bicycle. They sold war quality bicycles in Hyderabad though it was two years since the World War had ended and India had become free. Freedom hadn't come to Hyderabad though. Only vast hordes of immigrants. If these people actually undertook to live in these hovels with occasional practice drills and bamboos for rifles, the life they had left behind must have been terrible indeed. Wasn't there a special name for them? Ah yes, refugees. Re-fyu-jee, was that how you spelt it? Must look up the dictionary.

Chandru pedalled furiously in through the college gate. The playground wasn't yet visible. Once he crossed the Science Block, the grounds came into view. Also a few heads, but not on the near side. The boys were all on.the far side of the ground where a practice net had been provided. Chandru had been there only a few times last year, and that as an onlooker. He had even watched Nasir Ali Khan play. Today for the first time he was going to play there as an accredited player of the college. He made a detour to the other side of the ground as cycling was prohibited on the playfield and found that a sizeable crowd had collected there. Was it always crowded there, he wondered, or was it because it was the first day of the season. If he were to wait until all of them had had a turn, at the net, it would be well past seven. Maybe he wouldn't get a chance to play at all today. But then he'd come late and had no right to grumble. All because that boy had let the buffalo loose. It could of course have been worse. The buffalo had somehow been found, thank God, or he wouldn't be here at all.

The look that Nasir Ali Khan gave Chandru was not the friendliest. Sundar Singh was there. So were Nizam Yar Khan and several others whose faces were familiar but whose names were not. These boys had high-schooled at the Madras-e-Aliya, the school for princes, right there on the college campus, a school run specially for the sons of nobility. Two of the Nizam's grandsons were in the school now. For boys such as these, college did not mean a break from school. They all wore white shirts and trousers and cricket shoes. A boy from the history department was batting now. Three boys bowled to him in turn so that there was no break in the bowling, and they had three balls to bowl with.

Nasir said, 'You're very late, dost,' but he didn't look cross at all. Then he picked up a ball and handed it to Chandru. Chandru hesitated for a moment, then he returned it. 'I'd rather not bowl today,' he said.

Nasir passed the ball on to someone else. He said something to Chandru which he didn't quite catch. He had already resigned himself to an evening of nothing but fielding. Nasir repeated what he said, this time in English. 'I said pad up.' Chandru was taken aback. He picked up a pair of pads from the cricket gear piled there and buckled them on to his legs. Then he chose a bat, the best seeming of the lot, and stood waiting his turn. Most of the players must have felt that the captain unduly favoured the newcomer. Just arrived, and he gets a chance to bat already!

2

Before I embark on a history of my cricket, let me tell you something about the place we lived in. Moving house was an annual ritual with us until I was twelve. It was then that we finally settled down in a house which, unlike the ones we had lived in until then, was situated quite far from the centre of the town. A mile or a bit more lay between us and the railway station, the market and the nearest school. The fact of the matter was that my father had at last been allotted government quarters. The place was called Lancer Barracks. At first I found this name with its faint ring of a swear word an embarrassment. A vast stretch of rugged terrain, more than ten acres, with a three-foot brick wall to mark off its boundaries and two long tile-roofed structures in the middle, each partitioned into twelve sections one behind the other, thus making twentyfour houses in all—well that was Lancer Barracks for you.

Although I can't say for sure when these barracks were built, there's one thing I know. They were meant for giants ten foot tall. You had to stand on a chair or a stool to fasten the top bolts of the doors. The roof must have been a good twentyfive feet at its peak from where it sloped down on either side. The walls couldn't have been an inch less than two feet thick. Just to look up at the roof in half-light gave one the shivers.

I found out the following from the dictionary:

Lancer Barracks must therefore have been built for the British soldiers armed with lances. I wondered if these soldiers were expected to carry their' lances all the time. Quite likely. And their lances must have been rather long. Perhaps that explained why they needed such high roofs. The lances would otherwise have scraped the roofs. These barracks must somehow have come into the possession of the Railway Department and been converted into living quarters for their employees. And here was my father, settled at last in this haven. It turned out he had waited fifteen whole years to move into these houses.

For that matter, all the other occupants of Lancer Barracks had been on the waiting list equally long before they were allotted houses there. Our line of barracks housed two Tamil families including ours, three Anglo-Indians, four Muslims, one Parsi and two Naidus. There was only one Tamil family in the row behind ours. The rest were again Anglo-Indians, Parsis, Muslims and Naidus. The Naidus had me speculating. Could it be that all those who spoke Telugu were called Naidus? .

Our barracks, as I said, was quite far from the city, though there were a few buildings even beyond ours. There was a church and a few small houses in a large compound next to ours. Further afield were four large bungalows in a row. A Christian cemetery lay separated from the church by half a mile. None of us had ever seen this cemetery being used. The gravestones and memorial slabs were thickly overgrown with weeds. My little brother and I sometimes climbed over the wall and explored the place, our hearts racing. Most of the graves belonged to the nineteenth century, though an occasional tombstone spoke of the twentieth, and all the dead had been in the British army. Apparently soldiers had died in large numbers in our barracks, which meant that they had lived there in large numbers to begin with. Some of the inscriptions had more than thirty names. All fallen in battle perhaps, or fallen prey to the plague or smallpox which were endemic to Hyderabad-Secunderabad in those times. But for our barracks, the church, the row of bungalows and the cemetery, this stretch of country" was deserted, rugged moorland. There were a few hills and hillocks in the far distance. It was a place for ghosts rather than humans. It wasn't a bad place for grazing cattle though.

Now, there was no dearth of wide open spaces within our barracks compound, but very little of it was level ground and the only stretch that was somewhat even had already been appropriated by the adults for badminton. And so when Santanam and I went looking for a pitch for our first ever game of cricket, we had to be happy with a patch of bumpy ground, comparatively less up and down than the rest. Santanam, you see, was the boy from the last house in our row. He was in my class and like me, he had a younger brother. I had sisters who were both older and younger, but Santanam had only a brother. Only the three of us – Santanam, his brother and I – played cricket. My brother was too young for the game.

We drew vertical lines on the walls for our wicket. A strip of wooden board served us for a bat, and our ball was a tennis ball. These descriptions can be quite misleading, I know. In case you've gained the impression of many years of cricket played this way, let me hasten to set the record straight—we played this sort of cricket for no more than two months at the most.

Though we were only three players, we drew lots as to who should begin: Number 1 or Number 2. Santanam's brother was the permanent third man. When Santanam won the draw and went in to bat first, his innings would be over in half an hour. If I batted first, however, we would still be playing to the end of the day with the end of the game nowhere in sight. This is not to say that I played exceedingly well. Rather, it could be put down to the quality of Santanam's bowling.

A map of India would be useful to illustrate Santanam's bowling graphically. As you know Delhi is due north of Secunderabad. Imagine me then batting from Delhi. Secunderabad is the other end of the pitch that Santanam is bowling off. Santanam's run up was an outrageously long affair. When he finally did release the ball, it would take off east towards Calcutta or west towards Karachi; never north to me. He favoured Karachi mostly, perhaps owing to some built-in bend in his physique. To hit the ball, I had to chase it all the way to Karachi. Then the ball would soar in the direction of the African continent, and Santanam would begin to haul his brother over the coals: 'Here I am, straining every nerve, bowling my life away, and there you stand rooted to the ground. Can't you do some fielding, you fool?' He didn't seem to care about my predicament of having to bat my life away after his bowling. It was beyond the realm of possibility that his ball should ever strike those black coal lines that served for wicket. The only way then to dismiss me was to catch me out. A catch was a catch even if the ball struck the ground before it was caught. Actually, it qualified for a catch even if the ball had been pitched a number of times. Our game had only a vague resemblance to cricket. Santanam's long pre-bowling sprint followed by my running after his ball, followed still later by Santanam's brother's run in a third direction to retrieve the ball—it was altogether more like a track event. Only, instead of starting simultaneously, the runners ran in sequence. True, I found Santanam's Karachi-ward bowling extremely irksome, but I wouldn't have stopped playing with him for just that. There were other reasons why we couldn't continue for long, namely, the other boys in Lancer Barracks.

There were ten or fifteen Muslim and Anglo-Indian boys in our own line of the barracks, but my problem was that I couldn't speak their languages, Urdu and English. Santanam and I became play companions mainly because he was a Tamil boy like me, and like me, he spoke no Urdu or English. For the first two days our strange cricket proceeded without a hitch. Then the Anglo-Indian boys along with the Muslim boys started to watch our game, sitting on the compound wall of the Barracks. They found every bit of our show uproariously funny. Santanam's tortuously long run, my pursuit of the ball, the loud abuses showered on Santanam's brother—everything was a rare treat for them. It has to be said that I would have found it a rare treat too if I'd been sitting with them. They would yell 'Bomman! Bomman!' at us. Anyone who spoke a different language was a bomman. Santanam was 'Bada Bomman' and I was 'Chota Bomman'. As the jeers rose higher and higher, Santanam's performance plummetted to new depths until even I who had never protested until then, shouted at him—'Try to bowl straight, will you?' To which he replied, 'Don't you see me bowling my life away?' But the more he stepped up his efforts in this 'bowling-unto-death', the greater was the harassment from the Anglo-Indian boys, mainly Morris. Morris was the resident bully who even dared to smoke within the barracks premises. Morris would imitate Santanam; he would twist himself into knots and bowl a stone at me. One day he snatched the ball from Santanam and bowled it himself. As if on cue, the other boys ran in and tried to snatch the batting board from me. I raced round the Barracks, but the boys were bigger and had little trouble wrenching it from me. Then they started to play. I must admit though that they played a better game than we did.

For a few days Santanam and I played where they couldn't get at us. But a game like cricket is not easy to conceal. Finally our bat and ball were confiscated by Morris' group. The bat didn't last long under Morris' savage strokes.

Santanam came home and threatened me—I must replace the bat or else he would ask his father to beat up my father. I would ask my father, I said, to kick his father. Our fathers never ever came to blows, but that marked the end of my relationship with Santanam. After that day we never spoke to each other, though we continued to be neighbours for several years. In fact I didn't see Santanam play any game after that. He started to wear spectacles. That could have been one of the reasons why he didn't play, though there could be several others.

Unlike Santanam, I found it impossible not to play. I joined the Anglo-Indian boys in their games of marbles, monkeys-on- trees and tip-cat. I went with Morris to every Tarzan film that came to town. I swung through the aerial roots of the two banyan trees in Lancer Barracks with a jungle yell like Johnny Weismuller's. And sometimes I played badminton and carrom with the adults.

Two new factors now emerged on the scene to effectively dampen the exuberance of those times. The first was a she-buffalo we bought; the second was the boys of a Tamil family which lived in the second row of Lancer Barracks.

It was not as if Father had ever wanted to buy a water buffalo. It so happened that he once gave our milkman Chotu a loan of sixty rupees of which he barely managed to collect fifteen. Chotu disappeared shortly after that, but presumably on his instructions, his wife brought us an old water buffalo, hitched it to our gate and left. Within the next half hour, the buffalo had moved on with the gate in tow. Father and I went round asking if anyone had seen a buffalo with a gate attached to it. Most people found the question a little beyond their comprehension. Then fallowed a wide-ranging search which led us to the church compound, and we entered it for the first time in our lives. We were given our buffalo back along with some advice from the padre that a rumbustious beast like ours was not meant to be hitched to a gate. After a great deal of trouble, we managed to drag the animal home and shut it up in our bathroom. 'Ayyayyo!' cried Mother in panic, 'We forgot to take the boiler out!'