You Must Like Cricket?

by Soumya Bhattacharya

  I am thinking of the exam I am supposed to sit on Monday. It has been a disastrous summer for studying. For the better part of the past month, I have been glued to the telly, following India’s fortunes. At the beginning of the tournament I didn’t think we would go far enough to upset my revision schedule. I was able to avoid studying without feeling any guilt about it. ‘Enough time, I’ll stop watching the cricket after India have been knocked out.’

  By the time India came up against England in the semi-final, it was clear that wasn’t going to work. Now I argue to myself, with a fair degree of persuasiveness, that if we win, I will do well in my exam despite my evident lack of preparation. If Kapil gets his hands on the World Cup, it has to be a year of miracles.

  Michael Holding pegs back Amarnath’s stumps to make it 90 for 3. The cavalier Sandeep Patil is in next – he took six fours off a Bob Willis over just a few days ago. And then there is Kapil. When he is out there, really, anything is possible. The atmosphere in the bedroom has picked up again.

  Twenty-one runs later, India have lost Kapil, Yashpal and Kirti Azad. Patil does not believe in hanging around. He is nudging singles and twos, going at nearly a run a ball with Roger Binny at the other end. India bat deep, down to their number ten –wicketkeeper Syed Kirmani – but the ebullience of the afternoon has evaporated. The young men at the window are getting wistful: it would have been nice to have put up a decent fight, they murmur.

  I am worried about my exam, really worried. Being faced with the prospect of flunking isn’t funny. And it seems a certainty now. According to my theory of miracles, if India lose on the pitch, so will I in the examination hall. Because I have not put in a stroke of work.

  At 153, Patil is the eighth man out. Kirmani and Madan Lal try to mount a rearguard action, but batting through the allotted sixty overs is beyond them. In the fifty-fifth over, India have folded for 183.

  We don’t have a whiff of a chance. I spend most of the lunch break playing a percentage game: given the hours I have left tomorrow, what exactly should I try to cram?

  When the West Indies innings begins, Balwinder Sandhu bowls the ball for which he will be remembered for ever. Pitched outside off, it holds its line and then cuts back sharply off the seam. Greenidge shoulders arms. He turns around to see his stumps shattered. No one can believe their eyes, least of all Greenidge. (Later, after Sandhu had returned to the obscurity he came from, an uncharitable and probably apocryphal joke did the rounds: the ball hit a worm, a pebble, an umpire’s counter; that’s why it moved off the pitch. It certainly couldn’t have been Sandhu’s doing.)

  Viv Richards, the Chewing Gum Champion, walks in and finds his rhythm: savage yet languorous, he cuts, drives, pulls the bowling to shreds. It is getting very bloody indeed. I catch my breath despite myself. There is something about this sort of batsmanship, about its sheer imperiousness, that makes you marvel even if you are being hammered. Richards in full flow is all about violence made beautiful, about fearful symmetry.

  Haynes is holding up the other end. The West Indies are running away with it.

  My mother has not cooked dinner; it is her small way of giving herself a treat. I am asked, considering how things are going, if I will volunteer to fetch naan and a curry from a nearby restaurant.

  I am getting terrified about the examination. It was stupid not to revise. One can push one’s luck only so far. It is not the year of miracles. Unable to bear the torment – and unable to stand the continual reminders of my impending doom – I agree to go out.

  That is when it (like everything) happens.

  The Kwality is a middle of the road sort of place that serves a decent curry. On a Saturday evening, it’s normally full of boisterous, middle-aged men who have told their wives that they are busy in meetings. Tonight there are only a couple of waiters standing next to a radio at the bar. I plonk myself down on one of the sofas and try to catch their eye.

  It is no use.

  ‘Score?’ I ask, in a voice which at high pitch has begun to crack embarrassingly.

  ‘55 for 2.’

  ‘Really? Who’s out?’

  ‘Haynes.’

  ‘Oh. Makes no difference. Will butter naan and mutton do piazi take very long?’

  One of the waiters glowers at me and stalks off towards the kitchen, pushing the door that separates it from the dining area so hard that it keeps swinging, to and fro, in large, rapid arcs.

  The other waiter slumps on the bar. The radio plays on, not loud enough for me to hear.

  Suddenly, the waiter lets out a whoop. He lifts the radio, holds it to his chest with both hands, then puts it back on the counter again and, yelling ‘Richards! Richards!’, arms outstretched, head steady, body tilting from side to side, he begins to imitate a little boy miming an aeroplane.

  Other waiters come running from the kitchen and soon I am in their midst, all of us going round and round in the empty restaurant, each screaming our own crazy yawls.

  So there you are. The defining moment of Indian cricket’s defining game – and I didn’t even see it. I was running round in circles with a bunch of waiters, waiting for a takeaway curry.

  Later, I will see this moment millions of times – on the news, on videos, on documentaries about Indian cricket and great matches (in this part of the world, there is one every week on some channel or another). Somehow, even after so many viewings, the thrill of the instant, its unexpected, heart-lurching happiness, has not been sucked dry.

  Richards pulling Madan Lal, miscuing it a fraction, only a fraction, and the ball tracing a parabola, destined to fall into a region where no fielder can be seen, and then Kapil running backwards, running, running with the sun in his eyes and, I’m sure, his heart in his hands, till he has it in his cupped palms. Had Kapil not hung on, Richards could have told him that he had dropped the World Cup.

  The waiters can’t wait to be rid of me. Before long, the naan and the mutton come packed in a white plastic bag. Grease runs down its seams. As I walk out, I see the two men slouched over the bar. The radio has got louder.

  By the time I have half walked, half run back home, swinging the plastic bag with an expression of triumph that suggests I have taken Kapil’s catch myself, it is 66 for 5. Madan Lal has picked up Gomes and Kapil has taken his second crucial catch of the game: Clive Lloyd off Roger Binny. The champions are on the ropes.

  My family, like the rest of country, I imagine, is too dazed to speak coherently.

  ‘Richards, Gomes . . . Lloyd!’

  ‘What a catch.’

  ‘Kapil.’

  ‘Madan too.’

  ‘They won’t get out of this hole.’

  ‘Don’t speak too soon.’

  ‘Here, take the curry,’ I say. ‘We ought to eat it before it gets cold. Can we have it on the bed?’

  We dip our naan into the curry, wiping off the gravy from the tinfoil. Bits of it dribble on to the bed. We’re all stuffing our mouths without looking at where the food is going.

  Sandhu returns. He snaps up Faoud Bacchus, caught behind. It is 76 for 6.

  Jeffrey Dujon and Malcolm Marshall begin to put together a partnership. Knowing them, and knowing how small a target they have to chase, I know it’s too early to celebrate.

  I keep looking at my watch. It’s as though I am sitting in a cinema and it will tell me how much longer there is to go. I cannot bear to keep watching the match. I want it to be over, one way or the other.

  Amarnath, trusted, reliable Amarnath, helps me out by bowling Dujon. 119 for 7. The boys at the window have started a chant; fireworks are going off all over town.

  The rest of the match is a bit of a haze. Amarnath gets Marshall, Kapil traps Roberts in front of the wicket and I am waiting, we are all waiting for the moment. And then it comes: Holding swivels and turns away and Amarnath is running down the pitch and there is Kapil and Yashpal and Patil all in a mad scramble for the stumps as thousands and thousands pour onto the ground and the players weave in and out, afloat in the
sea of people, on their way to the pavilion.

  The spray of champagne from the balcony, the droplets catching and refracting the late afternoon June sunlight. A group of men smiling as they have never smiled before. It is hard to make oneself heard at home. Everyone is talking at the same time and the crackers are drowning us out.

  On Sunday, I sit with my head between my books and up in the clouds. Scraps of conversation drift in from the adjoining room; my parents, uncles and aunts are discussing last night’s game, reading titbits from the day’s papers to each other. I plough on with my studies. Even miracles need something to work with. There is too much to revise; there is too little time.

  I take the exam on Monday morning. It is as disastrous as I fear. The results appear a fortnight later. I pass. It must have been the cricket, I think. There was simply no other way I could have got through. Who could have expected otherwise in the year of India’s World Cup triumph?

  * * *

  How did it happen? I have wondered about this so many times over the past twenty-five years. And why has it never happened again? India was certainly not the most talented side in the 1983 tournament. (And we’ve had several better teams since.) No one picked it as a dark horse. It did not have a decent track record. It had had far less practice in the abbreviated form of the game than teams like, say, England or Australia.

  So how did we do it?

  We had great players like Kapil and brave, committed ones like Amarnath. They were lucky. They were plucky. (Remember, India beat the world champions not once, but twice.) But more than anything else, everything came together for India that summer in a way that things sometimes do in team sport: when all the units in a side weld together, when one player inspires the others, when the cliché of one for all and all for one becomes a demonstrable reality.

  The World Cup victory changed Indian cricket. It gave us the confidence to believe that we could compete, that we could actually pull off the improbable.

  It also made one-day cricket the more popular – and often the more important – version of the game to fans in India. Previously we’d been hopeless – pathetic – at the one-day game. (The achievements that we could claim were laughable. The slowest innings of all time? S. M. Gavaskar. He batted through sixty overs for thirty-six not out. I love the not out. With victory, we discovered that we’d hated limited-overs cricket not because we were purists but because we had been so bad at it.

  Now, everything was turned on its head. All of a sudden, we were the best team in the world. (At least, that was what the record books said.) A few years later, we won the Benson & Hedges Cup. Okay, so it wasn’t as impressive as winning a world championship, but the tournament featured all of the game’s leading sides. Before we knew it, all these titles – many of them inconsequential in themselves – became crucial to the Indian cricket fan. We never won the Robert Mugabe Cup or the Idi Amin Championship but had we done so, we would have talked about them for years.

  As we got better, and the one-day game became ever more popular, we played it more and more often. Before the mid-1980s, few international tours featured anything but Test matches. As attendance for ODIs skyrocketed, visitors were soon playing one-day series and no Tests at all.

  The Prudential Cup triumph arrived at just the right time. Flat, dead pitches and negative captaincy were turning Test matches into a travesty on the subcontinent. When England toured India in the autumn of 1981, they played a six-Test series. India won the first, low-scoring match. The next five were all drawn. Often, less than 200 runs were scored in a day. After that first victory, India took only fifty-eight wickets in the next five Tests. Play was not so much attritional as mind-numbingly boring. It may well have been the most boring Test series in the history of the game.

  And this was not a one-off. Nearly every series played on the subcontinent at the time followed the same, dreary, pointless pattern. Spectators began to stay away; they felt cheated. Test matches in India had literally lost the plot; they had been stripped of their most attractive quality: their unfolding narratives.

  Under the circumstances, one-day cricket, with its promise of a result, and continuous action in-between, was a godsend. It brought people back into the stadiums. Once satellite TV arrived, it drove viewing figures and advertising. India had become a cricketing nation that was to be taken seriously. And all because of that win at Lord’s on 25 June 1983.

  But what I remember most about that day, of course, is wheeling around with the waiters at the Kwality.

  * * *

  My daughter was born the year we beat Australia at the Eden Gardens after following on. It is one of the greatest Test matches India has ever played. It is one of the greatest Test matches anyone has ever played.

  It’s a nice way to remember the arrival of a child, I think. Not everybody else agrees.

  It’s like this. In mid-2002, I am at a bar with a few friends from university. Most of them have left Kolkata now. By chance their visits home have coincided. Every one of them is married; most of them have become parents. As the evening progresses, we switch from talking about the way we were to talking about the way we are. Soon enough, the conversation is about children: why we choose to have them, how they grow up, how expensive they are, how they become the centre of your life, only to leave you with a gaping hole as they begin to make their own.

  One of my friends turns to me and asks, ‘Which year was your daughter born in?’

  Now I am not one of those fathers who neglects his children, who scratches his chin when asked what grade his daughter is in and mumbles something incoherent. On the contrary, I pride myself on being a New Man, graceful with the nappies, efficient with the feeds and as important an influence on my daughter as her mother is. (It’s my way of making up for having done nothing to bring my daughter into the world. Nothing, that is, apart from the impregnation. And that is the nice part.)

  But somehow, the question throws me. Perhaps it is because at the time, I am accustomed to thinking of her age in terms of months rather than years. (She hadn’t had her first birthday yet.) Perhaps it is just one of those temporary blank periods that hit me once in a while. But the fact is that I can’t think of the answer. I scratch my chin, and gaze from the depths of my vodka to the arched eyebrow of my friend. What a prick, the eyebrow seems to suggest, as does the hand that has frozen, its fingers curled around the glass, halfway to his lips. Can’t even remember the year his daughter was born in.

  ‘Urn, well, she was . . .’ And then it strikes me. ‘She was born the year India beat Australia after following on. Laxman’s epic double, you know. His and Dravid’s match. Well, Harbhajan’s also.’

  My friend looks at me incredulously. ‘Are you fucking crazy or what?’

  I don’t think so. It is just that I tend to think of every major event in my life in terms of something that happened on a cricket pitch. It helps me keep things straight, I find. I think it is a perfectly serviceable way to keep my memory sharp and fresh. (A lot of people use mnemonics, don’t they? Are they fucking crazy or what?) But the truth is, it is the only way in which I can remember anything at all.

  * * *

  The 2001 Eden Gardens Test was remarkable, as far as I was concerned, for another reason. I wasn’t there. Having watched every international game at the Eden Gardens for the last quarter of a century, having flown all the way from London to catch a final there, I had decided to call it quits. I’d turned my back on the Eden for various reasons. Having made up my mind, I didn’t find I regretted my decision. At least, not as Day One ended. (I did feel a twinge of bitterness that they had found someone to take my place in the stands. The ground was packed. Clearly, no one in Block L was missing me.)

  Australia arrived in India having won fifteen Tests on the trot. They made it sixteen when they breezed through the game in Mumbai in a little over three days. Beating India in India, their captain Steve Waugh was on record as saying, was the final frontier; as the second Test began in Kolkata, there seemed
to be little standing in Australia’s way.

  On 10 March, the evening before the game started, I was discussing India’s prospects with a few of my colleagues. (Essentially it was a discussion about whether India could avoid humiliation.) Having had more beers than was strictly necessary for an after-work, camaraderie-fostering trip to the bar, I had a flash of perspicacity.

  ‘It’s a game of moments,’ I said. ‘Remember Tendulkar? Remember him walking back after Ponting took that catch? Remember his face? That could be the image of this series.’

  In Mumbai, Ponting had leapt out of nowhere to take what had seemed like an impossible catch. I’ve seen Tendulkar look disappointed many times after being dismissed but I shall never forget the look of despair on his face as he walked back. Once Tendulkar had gone that day, nothing could prevent Australia’s victory. Or India’s defeat. Depending on how you chose to look at it. And he knew it better than any of us.

  ‘Yeah, remember how he took them apart in 1997–8? That was the key then. That will be the key now. Unless Sachin does something . . .’ a fellow editor trailed off.

  That’s when I got my feeling. ‘No, it won’t be Sachin. It has to be somebody else. It has to be someone they’re not expecting.’

  It wasn’t just the drink talking. History supported my hunch. In 1959–60 against Australia in Kanpur, India’s hero had been Jasu Patel. Coming from nowhere, he’d ripped through the Aussies, taking fourteen wickets for 124. Complete unknowns had won us matches against the West Indies on a couple of occasions. Now India had a young spinner called Harbhajan Singh. We didn’t know anything about him – except that the captain wanted him and the selectors didn’t. That was just the right pedigree for a miracle-worker.

  ‘We need someone to run through the Aussies.’ (Former India batsman Sanjay Manjrekar on the eve of the match.) ‘We need runs on the board.’ (India’s coach John Wright.) Simple formula: score enough runs, bowl out the opposition twice, you win the match. You hardly needed an expert to tell you that, do you?