You Must Like Cricket?

by Soumya Bhattacharya

  What must it be like when you know that the cameras are zooming and a billion people across the world can see your private anguish? It happens only to sportspersons, perhaps, this live beaming of torment to the homes of so many strangers.

  Giles’s spell is coming to an end. Yuvraj – who is playing with a chipped bone in his finger – picks Giles’s last ball early and carts it over midwicket for six. Twelve overs after the two came in, Tudor gets the treatment from Yuvraj: another six over midwicket. Things suddenly explode. Flintoff goes for three consecutive fours in the next over and Tudor is pulled again for six in the over after that.

  Runs are coming in a flurry. So are the text messages. Channel 4 is showing the game in the UK and Indian friends who live there now are getting into the act.

  The six-year-old in the house next to ours – you can see their living room through our window – is squealing, little fists punching the air and then slamming down hard on the divan on which he sits watching.

  Chirantan is yelling, giving the springs of our old sofa a hard time. ‘Chalo, chalo, chalo! Shesh kore dao!’ (‘Go, go, go! Kill them!’)

  What is it, this paradox of watching sport, of turning an essentially passive pastime into something so active? In no other form of entertainment are we so much on the margins while being so much at the heart of the action, so utterly powerless to do anything about anything out there and yet so engaged with it, so keen to shape the course of events with our enthusiasm. Can you imagine going to a play and exhorting (insert your favourite actor’s name) to act better? Could you seriously believe that your urgent plea will actually have any effect?

  Kaif drives Tudor between cover and extra cover. Neither fielder has the chance to move as the ball rockets to the fence. Yuvraj pulls Paul Collingwood to the fence off the front foot, and then does it again to Ronnie Irani.

  I am silent, a stone-faced counterpoint to Chirantan’s stomping, screaming optimism. My stomach is constricted, the wall of my chest seems to be pushing upwards. It hurts. I always feel uneasy on these occasions. I cannot share my friend’s hopefulness. V. S. Naipaul pinned down this anxiety most memorably – although in a completely different context – in his novel The Enigma of Arrival. He called it ‘a dream of glory together with a general pessimism, a wishing to hope and a nervousness about hoping’. And so it is with me. I fear that if I dare to hope, what I fear will come to pass.

  But the target has shrunk to less than sixty. I pump my fists and do a little jig for the first time. Not hoping for a miracle, not being carried away on the groundswell of this enormous optimism, is hard to resist.

  No sooner do I sit down than what I fear happens.

  Collingwood holds one back a little, Yuvraj picks the length wrong and tries to send it sailing above midwicket. The ball arches upwards in a parabola, Tudor gets underneath it and hangs on. The spell is broken.

  Fifty-nine runs to get in fifty balls.

  If you were to make a list of guys you would trust to bat for your life, not one of the men to follow would be on it.

  I’m cursing myself. The rest of the room is quiet. Through my window, I can see my little neighbour sitting quite still. Only my lawyer pal is busy with the keypad of his mobile. The message arrives as Harbhajan takes guard. ‘Do you still believe in miracles?’

  I believe in Mohammad Kaif. The young man is so unfazed tonight, he maintains his composure with such grace that I won’t be surprised to learn that he had an ice bucket strapped to his head beneath his helmet.

  He rotates the strike, scampers the singles, keeps talking to Harbhajan, finds the gaps. India are inching forward. The gulf between the runs to get and the balls in which to get them is closing.

  Harbhajan sticks around for a while, stodgy and cavalier by turns. Then Flintoff shatters his stumps. Kumble goes for a duck. Zaheer Khan is in and, with Ashish Nehra to follow, India have twelve to get.

  Kaif is unperturbed. ‘Mohammad scales the mountain’, the Wisden website will report the next day and Kaif is up there, where the air is rarefied and breathing is difficult, just a few steps more to go before he can plant the flag at the peak.

  And then we are in the final over and with four balls left and four runs still to get, Kaif finds the gap on the off side. We hold our breaths for the moment that the ball speeds across the green. It reaches the fence. Chirantan has knocked me to the ground and Sourav has leapt up, taken off his shirt and is waving it wildly, now he is on the field and on top of Kaif, the firecrackers are going off all around us in the streets of Kolkata and the noise of the supporters at Lord’s is deafening.

  A text message is coming in but it’s not my lawyer friend. He has phoned. I’m on three phones at the same time – the one in the living room, the one in the bedroom and the mobile – and I’m saying the same thing, ‘Yes, yes, it’s fucking crazy, it’s Lord’s again, like nineteen years ago,’ and the anguish and the agony of all those lost finals, the label of ‘Chokers, again’, are buried beneath the exultation and the tumult and all those voices from all those parts of the world saying ‘We did it, we did it’ over and over again.

  * * *

  Now, in the stillness of the morning, as I hear the water from the shower hit the tiles on the bathroom floor and watch my daughter turn over on her back and look as if she will wake, now is the time to think of things beyond the pitch, beyond the rerun of the images which have filled my wakeful night.

  For a cricket match is nothing without its subtext. Its backstory is always a part of the real story. How about this for starters? An Indian captain takes off his shirt, and standing bare-chested on the balcony of Lord’s he waves it with wild abandon. It’s a gesture of reprisal directed at Flintoff who did much the same thing in Mumbai a year before. But the media will choose to see more in this than was perhaps intended. They’ll question whether it is ‘proper’ for the skipper – an ambassador for a billion people – to do what he has done.

  But hell, Sourav is an ambassador for a new, young generation of cricketers and cricket fans; he is tough, aggressive and articulate. He is unlike any of his predecessors. He is not humble, polite, undemonstrative, middle class. Indian cricket has always had about it a sense of elegant puckishness; about splitting cover and extra cover without either fielder moving. It has always been about silk. It has taken Ganguly to put the steel into it.

  He sticks by his men and makes hard choices (dropping a bowler like Anil Kumble, who has taken more than 450 Test wickets, if he feels he has a better – or more effective on a particular day and under particular circumstances – spinner at his disposal). And if he swears at his guys on the pitch, they know that he bears them no grudges off it. His men know he will never sell them down the river at a selection committee meeting.

  These are assets that are historically rare in Indian cricket. Cricket teams in India have always been riven by factionalism; factions of class (in the 1930s, when the Maharajah of Vizianagram was the skipper, he is said to have treated players from lesser lineage like little more than his personal attendants), of regions, of loyalties.

  Here now is the emergence of a new meritocracy. For the first time we are seeing a captain stand behind his players and the players stick up for the captain. Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi, one of India’s most successful and adventurous skippers, once memorably said that a captain can either lead from the front or push from behind. Sourav has managed to do both.

  If one can’t recall any Indian captain waving his shirt from the Lord’s balcony, one also can’t think of any other Indian skipper who would throw his match-winning player to the ground in a rugby tackle and proceed to squeeze the breath out of him in a delighted embrace. Sourav has fostered a rare sense of togetherness. Watch this team play volleyball before the cricket begins. Notice them go into a huddle after the fall of every wicket. And you will begin to get a sense of why this side, when it is at the top of its game, is greater than the sum of its parts.

  Here is another coincidence. At the very ground at which
India won the 1983 World Cup final and first announced to the world that it could be as good as any nation in limited-overs international cricket, we now see them proclaim that they have a new outfit of spirited young guys who will be the future of the sport in this country. (To make the coincidence sweeter, the two who took India to victory – Yuvraj and Kaif – had won an Under-19 World Cup for their country not so many years before.)

  For someone like me, who has grown up watching India lose more games than they have won, it is not just the victory itself that matters. It is the manner of it. It suggests that India are beginning to play their cricket differently. That they can absorb pressure, believe in themselves, be dauntless and ruthless.

  Fans tend to make too much of one win (just as they tend to make too much of one defeat) but somehow this one really does have about it a sense of things to come. It means a lot to people like us who first started following cricket in the early or mid-1970s. It also means that my daughter or her friends, when they begin to watch India play, are likely to see a different India play.

  If it lasts – and will it? That we can never know, only hope and see over the years – it implies a paradigm shift. (Already, in the spring of 2006, as this book is being wound up, the star cast of Indian cricket has changed. Ganguly is no longer captain. Tendulkar is not the player he once was. The narrative of cricket is continually evolving.) It is impossible to see things coming. Things change, the reality changes. But for fans, these individual moments of joy remain like reference points of truth and beauty within a larger story.

  * * *

  Cricket gives me – has given me for as long as I can remember – a sense of time: a certain feeling or event in my life is referenced with the memory of a particular game. It also gives me a sense of place. This may be an extraordinarily blinkered way to look at the world (and you have to be extraordinarily blinkered to have Queen’s Park Oval flash across your mind the moment someone says Trinidad), but I think of cities in terms of their cricket grounds. It is the most enduring geography lesson I have ever had and it brings closer and makes familiar places with which I have little acquaintance. It is, I have found, something which gives my life a coordinate, a kind of centre amid the changing clutter of daily life with which it is so tough to keep up.

  But most of all, perhaps, cricket gives me a sense of myself. They say you only get a sense of yourself when you see yourself in relation to another. Cricket is that great other.

  It’s like a relationship, this thing between the fan and his sport, some say. Well, only those who are not fans say that. Because it is not like any relationship that I’ve ever known. (It may be odd to be thinking about all this on the day after a historic win, but then historic wins are, well, historic because they don’t come along too often. Usually, there is the routine stuff. And given that we are talking about Indian cricket, the routine stuff does not involve much winning.)

  On the average day, it is a relationship that is too full of shame and humiliation, too unrequited and too committed at the same time, too like a one-way street. If my wife had let me down half as many times as India have on the pitch, I would have walked out on her. But when it comes to the game, I can never, however great the disappointment in the last match and however certain I am of impending doom in this one, bring myself to turn away.

  Can you?

  If you can, you are not one of us. Which, come to think of it, is not such a bad thing. Because you are spared the painful pleasure of being a masochist. All fans – the ones like me who need sport to give a sort of shape to life – are masochists. What else can you be when you switch on the TV at three o’clock in the morning knowing that your team is going to get a pasting – again?

  For those of us who are too far gone, gone far enough in fact to embrace torment (we lost three-nil against Zimbabwe? No matter, throw us a defeat against Bangladesh. We’ll still watch. We’ll be able to take it), it’s not a choice. It’s a compulsion. Addiction does not have rationality at its heart.

  The pact between a fan and his team is sacrosanct. It cannot be broken. It is not like the colas or the cars or the credit cards or the car tyres the players endorse. Don’t like it? Flush it down the toilet. Sell it off. Exchange it for something better. Buy a new one.

  When things go wrong on the pitch, some of us go on mock funeral processions. Some of us threaten players’ families. (The first gesture is banal; the second despicable. But morality or ethics is not the issue here; it seldom is when you are talking about addiction.) Still, few of us can stay away when our players walk out on to the field. Were we able to do that, TV ratings would slip and channels would not pay millions for satellite rights, companies would hesitate before pumping in billions to sponsor the team and soft-drink majors would worry about putting their money where the nation’s heart isn’t. The fact that they have not suggests that there are millions out there like me. Sometimes it feels like a brotherhood of misery.

  Every fan realises this: feeling miserable is part of the deal. But riding the misery and sticking with it is the deal. You can’t support another team (Namibia?), or suddenly be passionate about another sport (ice hockey?). It’s this or nothing. And nothing is so much worse.

  The morning after winning, though, is different – perhaps because it is so rare.

  * * *

  My wife emerges from the shower, draped in a couple of king-size towels. Her hair is lank, plastered on her skull. She looks achingly beautiful. I have never told her this though I suppose I am telling her now. Smell of soap and shampoo and body lotion. She catches me staring at her in the mirror. ‘Are we going out for lunch or are you going to watch the highlights?’ she asks. She thinks this is normal now; she has allowed for – and accommodated – the kink into the rhythm of this Sunday.

  Before I can answer, the mobile begins to trill.

  ‘Feels like a hangover.’ Another friend.

  Oh no it doesn’t. I smile to myself. I type out my response quickly. ‘Feels like nothing else on earth.’

  2

  ‘How does Sachin Tendulkar pronounce his name?’

  In the autumn of 1993, I spent a while as an intern at the London Times’s offices in Pennington Street. A friend of a family friend of ours in Kolkata, a veteran cricket writer, had given me a letter of introduction to the paper’s Sports Editor. I was in London nearing the end of a journalism course and this was an opportunity like no other to gain what everyone in India called ‘invaluable experience’.

  It was one of the most memorable periods of my time in London. I revelled in the sense of self-importance it gave me. (Afterwards, I would often say, ‘At The Times, they would have sweepstakes during an important football game’; or ‘At The Times, some of the writers often work from home’; or ‘At The Times, they always asked me . . .’ – statements which were sometimes true, just as often made-up, but always prefaced with that phrase, ‘At The Times’. This practice stopped only when I realised that a) people thought I was a crashing bore, and b) they didn’t give a damn about how things were done at The Times anyway.)

  I loved the hum and the busyness and the clutter of the office, the talk of well-connected, experienced journalists and the subsidised canteen where I would have my lunch with plastic cutlery. I loved, I now admit with more than a fair amount of guilt, the array of telephones from which I could make frequent calls back home – a rare luxury which seemed more delightful because it was so furtive.

  And of course I loved the assignments I used to be sent on. Finally, after the mock-ups I had had to do at journalism school, this was the real thing.

  That autumn, Nigel Short was playing Garry Kasparov for the world chess championship. I was sent to one of the games to write a colour piece. I arrived outrageously early at the Savoy in my eagerness to get my first ever accreditation card – a blue name tag with black typed letters. I stood there in the foyer fingering the card’s edges.

  Suddenly I saw a small, lean man, familiar from his photos on the dust jackets of the
books that lined the shelves of my room as a student. I couldn’t believe my luck. I shuffled towards him.

  ‘No, they haven’t left any message, sir,’ the thickset man from across the counter was saying. ‘We don’t have your name on this list. But I’ll check again. Who did you say you were again?’

  ‘Martin Amis.’

  ‘Ah.’ Thickset sucked the end of his ballpoint pen. ‘Any proof of identification, sir?’

  Amis shrugged. He looked bored. Then he produced his driver’s licence.

  As the official prepared Amis’s name tag, I sidled up to him and extended my hand.

  He was friendly and kind and looked pleased as I babbled something about how I’d read everything he had written. ‘Oh, The Rachel Papers. I feel a little embarrassed about it now. But I was young then, only twenty-three, Soumya,’ he said peering at my tag to get my name.

  Soo-me-ah. That’s how he pronounced it.

  ‘It’s pronounced Show-mo,’ I said. ‘Not phonetic.’

  ‘Oh. Sou-mo.’

  ‘No. The “s” is soft. As in “sugar”.’

  ‘I see. And is it always like that with Indian names?’

  ‘No, not always.’

  The tag was ready and Amis was clipping it on.

  ‘So how does Sa-shin Tendulkar pronounce his name?’

  ‘Sachin. You’ve got the “s” right. But the “ch” is different. It’s like in “champion”.’

  Amis smiled. Already, even while we were speaking, I was rerunning the sequence of events inside my head, planning how I would tell it in my letters home to my friends. I was also, at the same time, running on fast forward, imagining how Amis and I would become best friends and have a drink together after a game of tennis. This was experience, I thought then. This was what I had come to London for. Later in the evening, he even gave me his telephone number. Over the following weeks – to my shame – I even called. On several occasions. I invariably got his answering machine.