You Must Like Cricket?

by Soumya Bhattacharya

  I had had one previous encounter with Kapil. (As far as Kapil knew, there had been no such meeting ever.) During the Pakistan-India Test at the Eden Gardens in 1980, I had seen him waving at me from the players’ balcony. I could have sworn, despite the distance of several hundred feet, that our eyes met, that he was waving at me. I believed this so completely that I told friends and relatives the story without a trace of self-consciousness, never imagining that they would not believe me.

  I have never heard the end of it. Till then, my parents had not realised I was so far gone. Now they knew. And they made sure that everyone else did too.

  So the chance to actually spend a few days with him (in the same hotel! On the same golf course! I could hear, even while I was packing my bag to leave, the exclamation marks as I recounted the experience) was more than I could resist. I would have photographs this time. (I didn’t, as a matter of fact. When the moment came, I was too tongue-tied to ask.)

  I was thirty-two years old, about to become a father. I was behaving like an eight-year-old looking for an autograph.

  I got to Mauritius a day before Kapil arrived. That first day, I hung around the beach, fretfully kicking at the sand and looking out over the water at the sailboats bobbing like a line of heads nodding in assent.

  I missed my wife. I felt guilty. I could not wait for Kapil to show up.

  I saw him on the morning of my second day. I was hanging around the beach again, giving the sand quite a beating, when, through the window of the hotel’s coffee shop, I saw a face creased in a smile familiar from so many years and so many pictures. The white, even teeth. The thick moustache.

  This was unusual. In July 2001 Kapil wasn’t smiling much.

  In 2000, his name had been dredged up in a probe into match-fixing. He was innocent until proven guilty (he never has been; he was named Wisden Indian Cricketer of the Century in July 2002, and most people soon forgot that any such charge had been levelled) but he was under a cloud. It was a huge story, on the front page of every newspaper.

  In a prime-time interview on Indian television in May 2000, the unexpected happened. As the interviewer kept asking him to put his hand on his heart and say that he had never taken money to underperform, he broke down and cried like a child. He said nothing; he just wept. It made for great television, more riveting than the most compelling of reality TV shows.

  Watching the interview, I felt like crying myself.

  After that, Kapil went into a sort of self-imposed exile. He wouldn’t meet journalists, he wouldn’t talk about cricket. He stopped making promotional appearances, he stopped visiting the grounds of the Delhi Cricket Association and talking to young players. He wanted out.

  From what we read about him, he seemed not only withdrawn and isolated; he seemed angry and bitter.

  I wanted to find out.

  By the end of the day, I knew I would have little chance.

  That evening, we were taken to another part of the island to watch a sega dance performance. Kapil, who had rarely played second fiddle to anyone during his fifteen-year career, was, along with a gaggle of models and Bollywood actors, the supporting act.

  It was hard to reconcile my image of him – arguably the greatest cricketer India has ever had; certainly the most adventurous – with the man who hammed it up on the beach, eliciting laughter that had as much to do with the amount of booze his audience had drunk as with the quality of his stand-up comedy.

  ‘When I went to Australia for the first time in my life as a raw twenty-one-year-old, an Australian cricketer I met asked me, “Have you come here to die?” “No,” I said, “I have come here to live, to play, to win.” But he insisted, “Didn’t you arrive only to die?”’

  The third time the line came around, the audience finally got it. Kapil killed the punchline (‘And I told him that I had actually arrived yesterday’). There was much clinking of glasses. The spilled Chianti gleamed on the sand.

  Perhaps Kapil’s Aussie twang was not entirely convincing. Perhaps this lot just took longer than usual to catch the drift.

  In the bus, on the way back to the hotel, I asked him about cricket. India was about to play a triangular tournament in Sri Lanka. ‘Cricket? I know nothing about cricket,’ he said. In the dark, it was hard to tell how wry his smile was. Or how tinged it was with anguish.

  He wouldn’t talk much; he was wary of journalists. He was friendly enough, though, if I kept off the cricket. ‘Nobody wrote about what I did for the country then,’ he said once – just once – and I knew when ‘then’ was.

  ‘One has just one life. Enjoy it,’ he kept saying. He travelled a lot these days, he told me. He’d just been to Wimbledon; he’d revelled in Goran Ivanisevic’s triumph. ‘He is so charged up, so emotional. Emotional people should win,’ he smiled and the flashback kicked off again inside my head – runs, wickets, wins, losses, a certain imprudent hoick over midwicket that cost him his place in the side, and the breakdown on TV; the indivisibility of a demigod and his feet of clay.

  We were almost back at the hotel now. Fairways stretched off into the distance. The greens shimmered in the sun. I thought of Sydney, Barbados, Perth, Faisalabad – names learnt in geography classes and names which meant nothing till he set their cricket grounds alight. I thought, inevitably, of Lord’s. He gave me perhaps the most intense moment of my life. It was unfashionable – unprofessional even – to tell him all this, but I did. He looked out across the green (did it remind him of another green in another place?), squinted at the glare of the afternoon sun (that same gesture, the way he squinted into the glare when he came out to bat), curled his fingers around a cigar (‘I don’t inhale’) and shrugged.

  On the last evening, I drank the better part of a couple of bottles of Sauvignon Blanc. Walking towards our rooms, my heavy, slightly unsteady tread made soundless by the hotel corridor’s thick carpet, I finally plucked up my courage. I asked to touch the hand that had bowled the best outswinger in the history of Indian cricket.

  Kapil smiled and held out his hand. I stared at the splayed fingers and felt, well, disappointed.

  It looked like a hand in the end, didn’t it? Any hand. But it shouldn’t have looked like that. I thought it would be, well, just different. Everything about Kapil, I had reasoned, was different.

  It wasn’t (how could it be?) And I felt let down.

  Nobody’s fault. Just life.

  * * *

  Alan Ross, the poet and cricket writer, once wrote: ‘I believe that heroes are necessary to children and that as we grow up it becomes more difficult to establish them in the increasingly unresponsive soil of our individual mythology. Occasionally, the adult imagination is caught and sometimes it is held: but the image rarely takes root.’

  Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar’s magic has been that his image has taken root in the adult imagination. He has made men past pimply adolescence rediscover the joys of hero worship. Even the cynics amongst us, those of us ever wary of idolatry, become like awed, star-struck children when he is at the crease. God, on a good day, would be doing well to match his genius, they say.

  Forget the figures: seventy-four international centuries by May 2006 and counting; more than sixteen years of international cricket and counting; an average of 55.39 in Tests and 44.20 in one-day internationals. But don’t forget that he is only thirty-three – far younger than most people care to remember. As I write, he seems to be in decline. Whether this is permanent, who knows. But this is not how I want to remember him.

  To a generation that finds itself on the wrong side of thirty – and beginning to fall into the middle-aged trap of believing that things were always better when we were younger – Tendulkar has shown that a treasured sporting moment need not be culled from the pages of a tattered scrapbook. For those of us to whom arrogance on the pitch meant Vivian Richards lifting Bob Willis over the sight screen, Tendulkar has shown that it is thumping Shoaib Akhtar equally hard over extra cover off the front foot. He has forced us to revisit ideas of sporting gl
ory formed in adolescence. More importantly, he has made us redefine them.

  As our lives grow more complicated, and the setbacks and disappointments more painful, Tendulkar – piercing four men on the offside with that breathtaking cover drive – shows us that sudden, heart-lurching delirium still has its place. Tendulkar has destroyed all our pretences to adulthood in the manner that he has destroyed bowlers’ averages. When he takes guard, our stomachs churn and our hands begin to get clammy. Even those of us who believe in neither gods nor devils find ourselves praying that he sticks around long enough to offer us an innings (another innings) to cherish.

  If I were to pick my favourite Tendulkar moments, this book would contain nothing else. I have tried. I have failed. Should I leave out the century at Bloemfontein in 2002 in which he turned the spooned shot over third man into an attacking stroke? Can I afford to omit that innings against Pakistan during the 2003 World Cup? There are just too many. It would be unfair to make a list which does not contain them all.

  I remember his centuries in successive one-day games against Australia in Sharjah, one interrupted midway by a dust storm. The fielders buried their heads in the ground as the dust, stinging and sharp, flew into their faces. Tendulkar stood at the wicket, staring into the storm. His face was still. He seemed to occupy a different place from those around him. He did. His focus and his concentration had transported him elsewhere.

  I remember his innings, all raw emotion and brutal physicality, against Kenya in the 1999 World Cup when he came back after cremating his father.

  I remember a story Navjot Sidhu, his one-time batting partner, told on TV. The story of a sixteen-year-old boy on his maiden tour against Pakistan crumpling in a heap against the Pakistan fast bowlers and, as the stretcher arrived to take him off the field, standing up, his shirt stained with blood, to say that he would not leave. He would play.

  I remember . . . It is useless to continue.

  Tendulkar has dominated India’s collective consciousness in a way that no other sportsperson (perhaps no other person) has done. He has more than bound a nation. He has bridged the generation divide: grandmothers love him; fathers and sons are united, for once, in their devotion. If Sourav Ganguly is Indian cricket’s Rolling Stones (iconoclastic, hated by parents but loved by the kids), Tendulkar is our Beatles. Ramachandra Guha tells us that when Tendulkar bats against Pakistan, the television audience in India exceeds the entire population of Europe. One reason for that, of course, is that he has dominated his sport in a way no one else has done in India’s history. But that is not all there is to it.

  He arrived at just the right time. The country’s economy had begun to catch fire, creating a new middle class and a new meritocracy. Tendulkar, more boy than man, prodigiously gifted and incredibly mature for his age, embodied all the qualities that this new class treasured: he was a world-beater, a global citizen, smart, well dressed, a self-made man. (And the money he earned – huge sums, unthinkable sums, more than anyone had made before him . . .) At the same time, he zealously guards his privacy. He is an introvert; that, to a nation and a generation that does not particularly approve of public displays of wealth, affection or anger, is what makes him even more of an icon.

  As Mike Marquese has suggested: ‘The intensity of the Tendulkar cult is about much more than just cricket. Unwittingly and unwillingly, he has found himself at the epicentre of a rapidly evolving popular culture shaped by the intertwined growth of a consumerist middle class and an increasingly aggressive form of national identity. National aspirations and national frustrations are poured by millions into his every performance.’

  Tendulkar was his own man. He was a pioneer. He became Indian cricket’s first global brand.

  Yet he has remained true to his roots. One key to Sachin’s incredible popularity is his loyalty to traditional middle-class Indian values: deference to elders, humility, honesty, hard work. In all his years in international cricket, Tendulkar has never been tainted by scandal. He has never let success go to his head. As a youngster, he was always courteous to those who offered him advice. Now he’s a senior player himself (and he became one very early, in his late twenties – he’d played more than a decade of international cricket by then), he has been unfailingly kind and encouraging to the new bloods.

  He was, when he started, the son every parent would love to have. He then became the husband any wife would die for. Now, with two children of his own, he is the father every kid will hold up as a benchmark. And he has become this not by revealing what he is actually like in those roles, but by withholding more and more of himself from prying eyes.

  Unlike David Beckham – perhaps the one sports star with a similar global media profile – Sachin makes the news only for his cricket. When he got married, only close friends and relatives were invited; the media hardly got a look-in. When he became a father, there were no photocalls of him as New Man, changing nappies in public. When he celebrated his thirtieth birthday, he granted next to no interviews – and reams still got written about it. (On his thirty-third birthday in April 2006, he was on the front page of nearly every national newspaper. And this was during an extended form slump and injury.)

  What you get from Tendulkar is what you see of him on the pitch. He gives nothing else away.

  * * *

  I first saw Tendulkar on a cricket pitch when he was sixteen and I was twenty. He was the first hero I’d ever had who was younger than I was. I was completely in awe of him, despite his youth. Since then, I have adored the batting of V. V. S Laxman and gasped at the classical beauty of Rahul Dravid. I have been in thrall to Shane Warne and admired the play of Adam Gilchrist. But none of them makes me feel like I am eight again, and Viswanath is coming in to bat. None of them makes me so vulnerable, so childlike, despite my approaching middle age. It is an uneasy feeling, and I am not altogether sure I like it.

  ‘Heroes,’ wrote Ross, ‘die with one’s youth. They are pinned like butterflies to the setting board of early memories.’ Far more effectively than cosmetic surgery, Tendulkar has made us all young again.

  5

  ‘In the year in which . . .’

  The pillows are puffed up against the bedstead. The TV, a newly acquired black-and-white set with a varnished, wooden body and a long aerial that gets in the way when we negotiate the narrow bit of floor between the bed and the TV, sits on a table with a wobbly leg. I am sitting on the bed between my parents, twitching, barely able to keep still. They shush me as I start up my own running commentary. They’re excited too, but they’re trying not to let it show. The house is silent. The walls can barely contain the quietness.

  25 June 1983, Saturday. Every Indian cricket fan remembers exactly how he watched the Prudential World Cup final between India and the West Indies at Lord’s. It is central to the life of anyone who follows cricket in India.

  We lose the toss, and are put in to bat. Gavaskar is caught behind off Roberts. 2 for 1. No one thought we would get this far; we’ll never get another chance. Now it looks as though reaching the final is as good as it gets.

  As Gavaskar walks back, I suppress an urge to stand up and cheer. Since Viswanath’s career ended, my antagonism towards Gavaskar has intensified. I swallow a snigger every time he fails. Though that does not happen too often, he’s had a poor run this tournament: 19, 4, 0, 9, 25 and now 2. I’m pleased, but this is tantamount to being unpatriotic. (At the Eden Gardens that winter, I barely escape being thumped by a clutch of young men in the stands when I gleefully shout ‘Yes!’ after Gavaskar is out first ball against the West Indies.) I can’t help it. Gavaskar is the establishment personified, dour, safety first, always correct. And yet he is so popular. For a fourteen-year-old, nothing can be more shocking. (With age, I can see that iconoclasm for its own sake is worth nothing. Over the years I have come to recognise Gavaskar’s greatness, to understand that without him there would have been no Tendulkar or Dravid. It is a pity that it took me so long to see it. It is too late now. You can be fourteen only
once.)

  Krishnamachari Srikkanth plays what will become known before long as the shot of the final: on his knees, taking Roberts from well outside the off stump and sending him rocketing to the fence. In 1983, Indian cricket is sufficiently immature – and sufficiently diffident about itself – for a fan to remember a player for just the one shot. Twenty years later, it’s hard to see Srikkanth making today’s one-day side. (It is a wonder, given his inarticulacy and his tendency to be as irresponsible with his words as he was with his bat, that he has become a television commentator. Or perhaps it is not such a wonder after all, given the state of TV commentary in India.)

  We’ve had to take the bedroom curtains down. A couple of dozen kids from the slum across the way have begged us to. Now they’re outside on the street, clambering over each other’s shoulders to catch sight of the game. This is 1983: even many middle-class homes are still without TV sets.

  Each time I turn around, I see a new face. These young men have a rota system going, I realise. They perch on their friends’ shoulders for a certain number of overs, then swap places. Their cries drown the cheering of the thousands of Indian hopefuls at Lord’s. ‘Guru, guru, jio jio!’ Come on, come on, you are the kings.

  Srikkanth isn’t listening. He cracks six more boundaries, then he’s trapped in front of the stumps by Marshall. 59 for 2.

  Mohinder Amarnath, for long considered India’s best – or at least bravest – batsman against genuine pace, puts together a stand with Yashpal Sharma. Amarnath is playing the sheet-anchor role, but he needs to press on. They’re plodding. Sharma carries a calculator in his head, they say; it must be on the blink today. Outside, the boys have fallen silent, apart from the odd swear word. My mother gives them dark looks.