You Must Like Cricket?

by Soumya Bhattacharya

  When Pakistan come out to bat trailing by thirty-eight, the match has been thrown wide open.

  Eager to redeem his first-innings duck, Anwar plays, as he so often has against India, an innings on which the match may turn. His 188 not out is a classic, but it is a lone hand: Youhana gets fifty-six; the other nine batsmen manage eighty-two runs between them. (In an inversion that is so typical of Pakistan cricket, the last four wickets – the saviours in the first innings – fall for merely thirty-two runs.) Srinath takes eight for eighty-five (making it thirteen in the match) but the spectre of Shoaib is looming over the Indian batsmen. No one is quite sure if Srinath’s effort has been enough.

  India come out needing 279 to win the match.

  Ramesh scores well again, though his leaden-footed swishes outside off stump make you wonder how he manages not to get an edge. Laxman plays in his usual limp-wristed manner – if he did not have a bat in his hand, he’d look dreadfully camp. The two put on a century opening stand. Then with the score on 108, Ramesh is out.

  ‘Aren’t they going to leave some runs for Tendulkar?’ asks a man in the row in front of me. ‘Another 171 to get,’ he says with a quick glance at the scoreboard. ‘And another wicket to go before he comes in.’

  ‘They should have sent in Tendulkar instead of Dravid,’ says my neighbour. ‘I want to see him murder Shoaib.’

  ‘Yeah, a duck at the Eden. Can you imagine? No one does that to Sachin in Kolkata. Bloody Pakis.’

  As India stride on (125 for 1, 130 for 1) people are beginning to get edgy. No Test between India and Pakistan has ever been decided at the Eden Gardens. The prospect of seeing a winner in a game with so much needle is winding the crowd up. Disconcertingly, it seems to me that a lot of people are spoiling for a fight – whichever way things go.

  ‘Mian doesn’t want Tendulkar to get all the glory.’ ‘Mian’ is skipper Mohammad Azharuddin.

  Someone else pipes up: ‘Mian loves Pakis, na!’

  Azharuddin is a Muslim and his religion sometimes makes him vulnerable. The present conversation really doesn’t make any sense of course – the new man in, Dravid, is a Hindu just like Sachin. But then, if the sort of people who say these things were rational, they wouldn’t be saying them in the first place.

  With the score on 134, Laxman falls to Saqlain. There’s wild cheering as Laxman trudges back to the pavilion, but it’s more to welcome the next man in than to acknowledge the Hyderabad batsman’s elegantly crafted innings. With 145 to win and Rahul Dravid at the other end, Sachin Tendulkar emerges from the pavilion, the afternoon sun sliding off his twirling bat.

  When Tendulkar walks out to the middle in a home Test, you can almost smell the unnaturally heavy burden of hope that he carries. The clapping and the cheering start from the stands on either side of the pavilion. Then the roar radiates outwards and all around, the ripple of applause swelling to a wave that washes over the ground and then drowns it. Everyone is on their feet; by the time the young man has reached the pitch, looked around, touched his helmet, whirled his bat a couple of times and performed what the Indian writer Mukul Kesavan once referred to as his ‘crotch jerk’, every pair of hands in the stadium is sore. And he has not yet faced a ball.

  As he takes guard, everything goes quiet. You could be inside a cathedral. You can sense the veneration. You can almost hear the prayers. You know that lurking somewhere in the minds of all these people is a sense of fear: that their boundless expectations, just this time, might not be met. When Tendulkar walks in to bat, every spectator feels that anything – and everything – is possible. The silence as he readies to face his first ball is an acknowledgement of that fact.

  On the afternoon of 19 February 1999, 100,000 people are waiting for Tendulkar to explode. They’re thinking of the golden duck in the first innings. They want vengeance; it is only fair – and only natural.

  The first boundary is greeted with the sort of applause you get when a player has reached a hundred. And then, with Sachin not yet in double figures, it happens.

  Tendulkar turns away a ball from Shoaib and sets off for a run. From where I am sitting (in the members’ stand to the left of the pavilion, beyond the fine-leg fence if the batsman is at the pavilion end), I see the following things in quick succession: Tendulkar approaches the bowler’s end; Shoaib is standing in front of the wicket, and they collide; the throw from the substitute fielder hits the stumps; Tendulkar is scrambling. The Pakistanis are celebrating. They think he hasn’t made his ground. The umpire gives Tendulkar out. He starts walking back. The scoreboard says 145 for 3. (What has actually happened I cannot say. The Eden Gardens still does not have a giant screen so there are no replays. Even when I see it later on TV, in slow motion and freeze-frames, I am none the wiser.)

  By the time Tendulkar has reached the shade of the members’ stand, the stirrings have begun to gather momentum. Spectators around me are screaming, an angry, uncontrollable torrent of filth directed at Shoaib and the rest of the Pakistan team.

  ‘Butchers, cheats, Pakistan murdabad!’

  ‘Fucking Muslims, go back to your own country.’

  ‘Cheats! Bastards! Hai Hai! Go back!’

  The first hail of bottles comes from Block J, to my left. They vault over the high fence, over the heads of the policemen ringing the boundary, to land on the edge of the field. Before long, the grass is littered with sharp, squat, pointed, blunt or heavy objects. The players are in a huddle at the centre. The umpires look embarrassed, they’re consulting each other and the Pakistan captain.

  I’m sitting in the middle tiers of the stand and things are getting dangerous. However hard they fling their ammunition, those in the upper reaches of the stands will never find their target. Bottles – some still full of water – are falling all around me, like grenades. I cover my head with my hands, sink to my knees on the gritty concrete and wait for the worst. The guy next to me (the meek man with the huge voice) is attacking his concrete seat. A group of young men have come to lend him a hand. The seat splinters bits of stone and sand. Carried away on waves of hatred, they hurl the debris on to the field.

  Whenever I look up, I can see faces contorted with rage. It seems like a riot. It is a riot. It is mindless, senseless, and after a while it turns in on itself. Small groups of spectators are beginning to fight among themselves. The riot police move in, shoving and pushing their way into the narrow space between the rows of seats, their batons flailing. Dull thwacks catch anyone who happens to be in the arcs of their vicious swats.

  It takes a while to bring things under control. Even then, play cannot restart immediately. The Pakistan players fear, with some justification, for their safety. They’re reluctant to stand close to the boundary. An early tea is taken. Tendulkar emerges from the pavilion to make a plea for peace and sanity. He walks the circumference of the field.

  When play finally resumes India have lost their rhythm. In the evening session they lose the three key wickets of Dravid, Azharuddin and Mongia. As Sourav and night-watchman Kumble walk in at stumps, India are on 214. They need another sixty-five to win. There are four wickets in hand.

  The crowd jeered every time Akram and Shoaib touched the ball. And they are not done yet. Walking out of the Eden Gardens, among the thousands trooping across the maidan outside the stadium and towards the buses and taxis on Chowringhee, I catch snatches of conversation which suggest that the worst is still to come.

  ‘Akram should have called Sachin back.’

  ‘Yes, don’t you remember what Viswanath did against England at Mumbai? He called the batsman back.’

  ‘I mean, it was a clear case of cheating. I saw it. Shoaib slammed into Sachin. I saw it.’ The man is shaking his head. Each time he repeats himself he grows more convinced that he is right.

  ‘What do the rules of the game say about it?’

  ‘Aw, forget the rules. It was cheating.’

  ‘Banchod. Sisterfuckers. We won’t let them off if they look like winning tomorrow.’

 
They don’t. And the papers do nothing to help matters.

  Supporters are waving copies of the Kolkata-based English daily the Telegraph as they settle into their seats on the final morning. It reminds me of the Indian parliament, MPs brandishing copies of dailies in the House as sticks to flog the opposition with. ‘akram loses india, may win test,’ says the headline. The Telegraph has made no pretence at objective journalism – it has sided with the crowd. So things got out of hand? Come come, the poor guys were given a raw deal. The fault was Akram’s. ‘He could have called back Sachin Tendulkar and become a hero. But he chose to sour the goodwill generated by him and his team with one gesture he chose not to make.’

  Everyone in the ground knows what would have happened to Akram back in Pakistan had he called Sachin back and then lost the Test. They know the Pakistani captain had the rules of the game on his side, that he’s a professional cricket player, that he wants to win a tough match by any legal means. Claiming that he should have called Sachin back is like suggesting that a tennis player ask for a key point to be replayed because he has won it on a net call. But that’s not what the spectators at the Eden Gardens want to read.

  I leave the ground as soon as the first bottle lands on the field. India are nine wickets down, and Akram has bowled beautifully. I am scared; I don’t want to repeat the previous afternoon’s crouching vigil.

  In hindsight, it is a pretty smart decision.

  By the time I get back home and switch on the TV (there, that’s the masochism at work again), the commentators are talking about the Eden Gardens’s hour of shame. Play has been suspended: the barrage of bottles, fruits, stones and slabs of concrete has sent the players off.

  It continues for two more hours. Then the crowd seems to calm down. The players are coaxed to return. No sooner have they trooped back than the trouble starts again.

  I remember the guy I had met outside the stadium the evening before. ‘Sisterfuckers. We won’t let them off if they look like winning.’ Clearly, he is not alone.

  The match referee considers awarding the match to Pakistan, but ICC boss Jagmohan Dalmiya – the man who dreamed up this tournament – is insistent that this charade of a Test match be played out to its grim, sordid end.

  Probably bored with the vandalism, thousands of spectators have left the ground. The riot police have moved in again. The truncheons come down, connecting with bone and flesh. The dull thuds are muted on TV. But I was there yesterday, I can imagine what it is like. There are people cowering on the concrete; there are people trying to run; there are children and women. But the police catch them all, flicking out a boot here, bringing down a fist there. The Eden Gardens does not look like a cricket stadium.

  In the end, after the stands have been cleared, the players reappear. There’s a smattering of spectators in the upper tiers. They make the ground look even more cavernous and desolate. Pakistan take the last wicket before a single run is added. They have won by forty-six runs. The players seem embarrassed, eager to get the game over and done with as soon as they can.

  After the match, Akram blames the media more than the crowd. He calls the incident ‘the saddest thing ever to have happened in Test cricket’. But he says ‘it is all because of you people and your reports. You have held them [the crowd] responsible for the wrongdoings but I will never blame them.’

  The Pakistan captain is both right and wrong. The media must bear some responsibility but they didn’t start this; they merely fed the frenzy. In the best tradition of tabloid journalism, they gave people what they wanted to read.

  The rioters didn’t need the press to give them an excuse. They rioted because they wanted to. They revealed the side of them that is best kept hidden. They always do when India play Pakistan.

  I was there. And being there is the worst thing.

  * * *

  I’m playing a little game with myself now. Join me.

  I’m trying to imagine what an India versus Pakistan cricket match would look like to an outsider, to someone who, unlike me, is not steeped in the backstory. Were you living on Mars (or in the United States – as close to Mars as you can get when it comes to talking cricket), what would it look like, this meeting of two Asian neighbours on a cricket field? It should look like a game. It does not.

  Here is a selection of extracts I’ve gathered from around the world. (Okay, that’s the cricket-playing world, which, as my football-fan friends never tire of telling me, is not quite a representative sample of the globe.) Go on. Find out what you think. Watch out for the warlike language, the riffs about cross-border tension and terrorism, the chauvinism, the hard-edged nationalistic fervour.

  Whenever the two foes play, it is a case of politics, history, rivalry and honour coming together on the cricket field. For Indians and Pakistanis across the rest of the world, today’s match is the final and what happens in the rest of the tournament is not important . . . Many temples and mosques have been busy, while some fans have been giving money to charities and homeless people in the hope that their good deeds will secure favour from higher forces for their team.

  (Vivek Chaudhary in the Guardian, 1 March 2003, on the eve of the India-Pakistan World Cup game in South Africa)

  It was Imran Khan who in his own flamboyant but politically naïve style once declared that if Kashmir were the only issue between India and Pakistan, why not settle it on the cricket field with a match for territory? . . . Such posturing only goes to show why there can never be a lasting peace between the two nations, only tensions made worse by their nuclear capabilities.

  There will be words exchanged. There will be skirmishes in the crowd as that great British institution – the brewery – sends its products down the throats of the cricket spectator. There will be flags waved and drums beaten and unique subcontinental bad words will be flying around . . .

  This is sport’s ultimate derby, greater than the Celtic versus Rangers football match in Scotland where too religious sectarian feelings can run high between Protestants and Catholics.

  ‘This is an encounter that brings into play politics, religion and the foundations of a national identity across a huge swathe of humanity . . .’ says the Nation newspaper in Pakistan.

  India and Pakistan are nations divided by a common culture, much as it is said, humorously of course, that England and the US are divided by a common language. But then, what makes this particular match so significant is it comes in terms of time too close for comfort after the air sorties and the shelling in Kargil and the downing of IAF planes.

  (R. Mohan in the Indian Express, 6 June 1999, before the India-Pakistan World Cup game in England)

  We know this is just a game . . . But for Pakistani people, we feel this [game] is like a war and our players are our soldiers and they should not let us down,’ said Pakistan cricket board secretary Mohammad Rafiq . . . ‘Not disappointing but a crime,’ said Mansoor Ahmed, a supporter in Lahore.

  (The Telegraph, Kolkata, 10 June 1999, the day after Pakistan lost to India in the World Cup)

  Watching the immense build-up of public excitement, the [Indian] ministry of external affairs was obliged to comment . . . that the game would not affect India-Pakistan relations.

  (The Deccan Herald, 28 February 2003, on the eve of the India-Pakistan World Cup game in South Africa)

  There is an unsaid sub-text here: we can afford to lose to them at football and table tennis but not at cricket.

  (From A Corner of a Foreign Field, Ramachandra Guha)

  When the Pakistan team returned home from the 1999 World Cup, Inzamam ul Haq found his home ransacked by angry fans. Captain Wasim Akram’s mother made an appeal, with folded hands, to the fans for tolerance. Most newspapers concluded that the intense anger was not because Pakistan had lost the final (being the second best one-day side in the world can’t be that bad, and losing to Australia was no disgrace) but because earlier in the tournament they had been beaten by India.

  Now. Go on. What would you think if you knew nothing abou
t India and Pakistan?

  * * *

  The story goes back to 1947. When India gained its independence it was not as one country but as two. It had seen off the British, but it could not overcome its internal divisions. The result was an imposed Partition and – to oversimplify – one Hindu-majority nation, India, and one Muslim-majority nation, Pakistan. Pakistan’s founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, hoped that the creation of an independent Muslim homeland would bring lasting peace to the region. Things did not quite turn out that way.

  Nearly one million people were killed in the Hindu–Muslim riots that followed Partition; millions more lost their homes; and the trauma of displacement and exile became encoded in the DNA of both nations. Within months of their births, India and Pakistan were at war. Before Partition, Kashmir’s Hindu Maharajah had decided that his state should become part of India. But Kashmir was – and is still – predominantly Muslim. Pakistan believed it was rightfully hers. Kashmir has been a running sore ever since. It was the cause of renewed hostilities in 1965, and low-level border skirmishes have gone on for years. Heavy fighting in Kargil during the 1999 World Cup – just as India and Pakistan took to the field at Old Trafford – almost led to war again. Now that both India and Pakistan possess nuclear weapons, the results would be unthinkable.

  The two countries may be at loggerheads politically, but culturally they have much so much in common: heritage, language, food, clothes. And of all that they share, cricket is the most pervasive, the most fervently supported and perhaps the most enduring. Which is why a win – or loss – at cricket is so important. Whenever India and Pakistan meet on a cricket field, it is not simply to play a game. As the social historian Ramachandra Guha says, ‘Within India, a loss to Pakistan at cricket is harder to bear than a loss on the battlefield.’