You Must Like Cricket? (5 page)

My stories, I now realise, were a means of escape. I was expected to narrate – excitedly – tales of charm and fervour and clean, wholesome enthusiasm about cricket on the subcontinent. And that is what I had done. I had been playing my part by conforming to the notion of the stereotype. I had chosen the easier route. (In a place so far from home, with people I knew so little about, it had seemed the
only
route.) By trying to present the stereotype, I had become a stereotype.

In a sense, of course, I'd been deluding myself. But it had been partly because somewhere beneath the threshold of my consciousness, I had wanted it to be true. Just so. The correspondence between the ideal and the reality.

But that night at home, with the delirium of the victory just beginning to wear off, in the familiar darkness and the comfortable shadows of the room in which I had spent so many years of my life, I knew that things were not quite what I often made them out to be.

It was a great help, that realisation, that ticking over of the scoreboard of reality. Because when in later years the Eden officially fell from grace – again and again – and when crowds stopped play and the idea of this being cricket's paradise in the subcontinent was gone for ever, I was ready for it.

I had been waiting. But when it came, it was still hard to take.

* * *

The bunks are slatted planks of rough wood from which the paint has long peeled. The lights – the few of them that have not been stolen from behind their wire casings – do not work. The floor is so strewn with the detritus of unhealthy mini meals – greasy paper packets, bits of decaying raw onion, squidgy dices of tomato, decapitated shells of peanuts – that you have to pick your way gingerly to get to the toilet, the door of which swings open with every judder of the train.

Second-class travel on the Indian railways is all about endurance and stoic fortitude. And about not having enough money to go first class or in the air-conditioned compartments.

It is the autumn of 1989. Along with a few resilient and intrepid friends (all as short of cash as high on the desire to go backpacking), I am returning to Kolkata after a fortnight of travel in the hill stations of north India. The train trundles through the heart of Uttar Pradesh, India's largest state. We have, all of us, slept fitfully. We are, all of us, tired of the slumming of the past fortnight and of each other's company.

For once, we are looking forward to going home.

A group of six young men gets on at one of the stations. Before we can react to their intrusion, they have pushed us aside – the shoulder thrust is admirably effective in such circumstances, especially when it is combined with the surprise factor – and occupied most of the space that had been allotted to us. They are travelling without reservations. Aggression, we soon realise, is the only capital they have. They want to cash in on that.

Pushed into corners, bristling with impotent rage and eager to retaliate without having the means to do so, we attempt a feeble retort or two. They elicit more aggression. It is the rule of the street fight. (Only, there's hardly any fight here. Or at least not much of a fightback.) Get the first blow in, keep up the pressure, instil fear in the heart of your opponent. Fear will be your strongest ally. If your opponent fears you, you can get away with pretty much anything, never mind whose side the law is on.

We are terrified of this rowdy bunch of north Indian men, barely older than us but appearing so much more formidable, so much more menacing and well equipped. It's hardly a contest. They abuse us for no other reason than that they can. They keep pushing us, keep squeezing us out of our seats so that eventually we feel grateful for a few square centimetres.

And then, one of my friends performs a miracle. I still don't know how he managed the manoeuvre: bending forward and extracting a transistor from a backpack without toppling off his precarious perch. But he does – with rather a flourish; I remember the flourish – and begins to twiddle the knobs.

India are playing England in a one-day match at Kanpur, not very far from the area through which we are passing. The commentary comes on.

The effect is spectacular. I don't know if you have seen those films in which explorers win over tribes by showing them colourful trinkets. The effect that the radio had on our unwanted guests was exactly the same.

Thank heavens for Chetan Sharma. I have never otherwise – either before or after this particular incident – had cause to say these words. (And by the way, thank heavens for not having had to say ‘thank heavens for Chetan Sharma' ever again.)

Krishnamachari Srikkanth, as mercurial in his captaincy as in his batting (and not even as occasionally inspired), had gambled by sending Sharma in at the fall of the second wicket.

Which was when the commentary came on in our crowded compartment, amid the unequal battle.

Everything goes quiet for a while. It's hard to tell what has more surprised our fellow travellers: that we have managed to conjure up a radio; or that a penultimate-over slogger has walked in at the fall of the second wicket.

Then, as Sharma puts on 105 for the third wicket with Sidhu (sixty-one from sixty-seven balls), our invaders begin to behave as though they are our guests. They back off and create space for us to sit (one of them actually squats on the floor – a gesture that is accompanied by a request to turn up the volume of the transistor) and before long we are behaving like an amiable bunch of teenagers listening to cricket commentary at a street corner.

By the time Sidhu is run out and Vengsarkar comes in, India have reached 170. Sharma is on his way to an improbable century. He hits, he misses, he is dropped, he narrowly escapes being run out.

One of the young men is unscrewing the cap of a bottle of cheap rum and holding it out for me. That sort of rum raises quite a stink but it is possible, now, to pass it off as the scent of victory.

Vengsarkar sticks around long enough to bring India within a boundary of triumph. Kapil Dev, ever the buccaneer, sends the first ball he faces rocketing to the fence. Scores level.

One of the youths is doing the bhangra. I am clapping. So are my friends, though it is not immediately clear – and still is not after more than a decade and a half has passed – whether it has more to do with the relief of approaching victory or with the relief of having defused a particularly nasty situation.

With a four off Gooch, Sharma reaches his century – off ninety-six balls with eight fours and a six – and wins the game for India.

We pass the bottle around. Before they get off some hours later, the six young men give us their addresses and phone numbers. They leave us with standing invitations to look them up should we ever visit their hometown.

* * *

Perhaps sport's biggest gift to its followers is the sense of belonging and togetherness that fandom engenders. All through the 2003 World Cup, I thrilled to the notion of following the cricket on the internet with people from different time zones, people who were mad enough to want to catch the latest news of Pakistan and Holland at seven in the morning and exchange comments about the proceedings. This sort of behaviour (I mean, a New Zealander following Pakistan versus Holland at seven in the morning?) lies at the heart of being a cricket obsessive. And the fact that there are so many of us makes us all feel that much better.

A hankering for this sense of togetherness makes us want to go to the stadium. It's why watching a game at the pub has always been so popular in England; why watching it with a lot of others in restaurants or bars or on the street in front of a television propped up on cardboard boxes is becoming just as popular in India.

Feeling part of a tribe makes us feel less odd, less mad, less of a curiosity. It makes waking up on match day with an empty feeling in the pit of the stomach seem, well, normal. Being an addict is only fun when people around you aren't on the wagon.

* * *

Everyone says cricket is like a religion in India. It isn't. Religion led to the partition of India (into India and Pakistan) more than half a century ago. It led to riots in Mumbai in which thousands of people died. It led to a pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat in this century.

Religion has led to some of the deepest scars that India carries in its heart. Cricket is the balm that heals.

Cricket is not like a religion in India. But if there is something – hypothetically – that makes the nation one, that thing ought to be likened to cricket.

At one time, it was Hindi movies. Assemble a roomful of Indians. Carefully select your candidates so that they come from different parts of the country, have different mother tongues, dissimilar backgrounds and belong to social classes that are so different that they will find it impossible to imagine the life of the man or woman sitting opposite. Once upon a time all the disparities would dissolve as soon as the topic of the latest Amitabh Bachchan blockbuster came up. (As a matter of fact, in such circumstances, the subject of the Amitabh Bachchan movie would never casually
come up
; it would be deliberately raised because it was the only thing both sides would – could – ever have in common.)

All that has changed since the late 1990s. Bollywood movies are no longer as inclusive in their appeal as they once used to be. Many film-makers tailor their films according to the audience they want to reach. The movies that are a hit with the educated, affluent urban audience who go to watch them in gleaming multiplexes are not the movies which have successful runs in the small towns and villages. Both kinds of cinema belong to Bollywood (they are both mainstream, popular, mass-market entertainment) but the one sort has next to nothing in common with the other. As the young actor Zayed Khan admitted in a newspaper interview, ‘There are people who pay Rs20 to watch a film [in the hinterland] and people who pay Rs200 [in the urban multiplexes]. They can't possibly like the same sort of film, can they?'

These days, what your roomful of Indians will have in common will be a game. Cricket, already a consuming – and ever growing – passion, has swallowed up the space that Bollywood once occupied in India's collective consciousness.

But cricket isn't
like
Bollywood. And it certainly isn't
like
religion. Cricket is unlike anything else in India. It is its only analogy.

T
hree reasons why
cricket bats and balls made of paper are just great: their source is inexhaustible; they require no investment (they are just about free, actually); and they do their bit for recycling and the environment.

My parents are not the most eco-friendly of people (my father is the sort of man who drives to the park for his morning walk and thinks that ‘going green' is a polite way to talk about jealousy) but it was paper bats and balls when it was time for my cricket education to begin.

I was a little over four years old then and we lived in a subsidised first-floor flat on Bolsover Street in west London. It was close to the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, where my father was working for a year. The address was posh but it wasn't really a reflection of our bank balance. My parents later told me that they had to scrounge for everything that year. There was little money for luxuries. There was so little money, in fact, that buying a small cricket bat for your child seemed like a luxury.

Hence my mother's brainwave with used sheets of paper.

Making the balls is simple enough. You need to scrunch the paper up tightly, turning loose ends inwards and packing them in so that the ball becomes as airtight as possible. Then you tie a piece of twine around it, taking care to snip off loose ends of the thread. The bats are more complicated. The paper is crushed and twisted to make the grip. It has to be broadened further down for the blade. And then the ends need to be smoothed and lightly cut to attain the shape of the bottom of the bat. Three decades on, my mother can still make those bats. They look strikingly real. And they aren't half bad for thwacking a paper ball.

This was my first encounter with cricket. And that Bolsover Street flat – so close to Lord's – was where the encounter took place. Unlike most other Bengalis, my father did not perform the initiation rites for me: he was away at work most of the time. My mum did. The other, more compelling reasons were that my mother was – unusually for most middle-class women in the pre-satellite TV generation – an authentic cricket freak: and she needed to give me something that would keep me quiet.

I insist I remember the flat – especially the strip of carpet between the sofa and the TV which became my first pitch. My parents, however, tell me that I am passing off as memory what I remember of the stories they have told me over the years. (Have they ever told me about the indentations on the carpet where the previous occupants must have kept some item of furniture – a heavy-legged stool or table, perhaps? Or the corner of the room where the wallpaper, just above the TV, was a shiny rectangle because our predecessors had hung a picture there?)

For me, the television itself was an object of fascination. I used to stare at it, unblinking, even after it had been switched off, watching the screen lose its glow, become a dimming pinpoint of light and then turn utterly blank. There was no television in India at the time – that you could press a switch and get moving pictures and sound simultaneously seemed magical. And it was through the TV in the summer of 1974 that I was properly introduced to cricket.

Watching the cricket on TV with my mother (trying to match it to the game she'd taught me on the carpet) seemed like an immensely important thing to do. It wasn't like having
Play School
or
Scooby Doo
on – mum would watch with me but I knew she was doing it out of a sense of kindness or duty. When cricket was on TV, she genuinely
wanted
to watch. Sitting there side by side (before or after practising in the living room) was an activity that drew us together like no other. When we watched
Play School
it seemed as though my mother was stooping to my level; watching cricket gave me a sense of expanding, of rising to the occasion and growing (growing
up
).