You Must Like Cricket?

by Soumya Bhattacharya

  Since the Eden Test of 1999 things have changed for the better – at least on the face of it. In January 2004, India and Pakistan met at the negotiating table in an attempt to sort out their complex, acrimonious relationship. One of the cornerstones of the peace process was what diplomats and politicians like to call ‘people to people exchanges’. That March, the Indian cricket team embarked on its first fully fledged tour of Pakistan for fifteen years. It caused a frenzy of excitement. Thousands of Indians followed their team to Pakistan. Perhaps to their surprise, they received a warm welcome. They returned home full of glowing stories about the kindness they’d been shown, the hospitality they’d been offered. For me the most enduring image of that series was not to be found on the pitch, despite Sehwag’s triple hundred at Multan. It was of an Indian and a Pakistani flag stitched together and inscribed with a line borrowed from Bollywood: Pyar to hona hi tha (Love had to happen between us).

  Pakistan returned the compliment at the beginning of 2005. If the atmosphere was not quite as intense this time around, it was filled with a spirit of goodwill that not been seen before. When India disgraced themselves by losing by 168 runs in the final Test at Bangalore, shopkeepers did not need to barricade their stores against the inevitable rioters. There were no reports of players’ houses being attacked or their families abused. The hysterical jingoism of previous India-Pakistan games was largely absent. As indeed it was when India toured Pakistan again in 2006. It may seem trivial in the scheme of things, but for many of us it was a benediction. Cricket seemed a little like cricket again.

  Even so, I was edgy throughout these tours. The calm seemed fragile; I feared it could not last. Somewhere beneath that deceptive restraint, I thought, the old ugly emotions still stirred. It would not take much to provoke an eruption – perhaps just an ill-timed run-out, a bowler getting in a batsman’s way.

  * * *

  I love to watch Pakistan on a cricket field. I love the way they bring on young talent. I love their audaciousness, their unpredictability, their guts, their tendency to scale heights or plumb depths that few other teams are capable of. Cricket is a game of glorious uncertainties, and Pakistan exemplifies the cliché better than any other side in the world.

  My first memories of watching Pakistan are of the 1978 India-Pakistan Test series. (India and Pakistan did not play each other between 1961 and 1978.) I fell in love with Majid Khan’s strokeplay; with the murderous elegance of Zaheer Abbas (another nearly man, like Viswanath, always in the shadow of Javed Miandad); with the gentlemanly Asif Iqbal (I almost cried when his rubber soles slipped and he was run out in his final Test at the Eden Gardens in 1980). And of course there was Imran. The feline grace, the flashing eyes, perpetually narrowed to slits so you wondered how he ever saw through them, the long hair flying behind him in the slipstream as he tore in, the shirt with its three buttons undone, the pre-delivery leap, and the women. Always the women. (A psychiatrist friend once told me that that was why I found Imran so fascinating. I hope it wasn’t just that.)

  I have often dreamt of the side we would have were Pakistan and India still one country: Sehwag and Afridi to open in the one-days; Sachin and Inzamam in a Test middle order; Wasim Akram and Anil Kumble bowling from either end; Imran the inspirational captain. Occasionally, I have to pinch myself.

  For much of my lifetime, I have had to keep this to myself. Voicing my admiration for Pakistan would have been a treasonable offence, especially over recent years. It has not always been this way (and who knows, perhaps things really will be different from now on). It has not been the fault of the players. Flashpoints on the pitch arise not because of any personal antagonism but because of the pressure both sets of fans put their sides under to win. It is the fans’ fault, our fault.

  I have never burnt an effigy, never threatened a player, never demonstrated outside his home. I was not present at the 1999 World Cup game. But it makes little difference. In a sense one is always there – you don’t have to be at the game, or even in the same country, to be implicated, however indirectly. It is our common shame. The fact that I was not one of the rioters at the Eden Gardens in February 1999 does not make things any better. As a matter of fact, it makes it worse. I did not do anything, but my failure to act implicates me equally.

  When India play Pakistan I encounter a doppelgänger I would rather not acknowledge. It is like meeting an identical twin who has disgraced himself. I see men like me – men who on other days and in other circumstances could be my colleagues, my friends, even my family – behaving despicably. And I cannot escape the taint of this brotherhood. We, all of us, have allowed cricket to become more than a game. As a result, it has also become less.

  I hate India-Pakistan matches not just because of the chauvinism, the religious bigotry. I hate them because they are an attack on something deeper, something we may not care to admit to: our idea of sport itself. In allowing politics, religion, even war, to hijack our game, we have given cricket a symbolic value it does not possess. We have convinced ourselves that the game is important because it stands for something else. But cricket isn’t like anything else; it is only like cricket.

  In their introduction to the Picador Book of Sports Writing, editors Nick Coleman and Nick Hornby make this point eloquently: ‘A common misapprehension about sport is that, in itself, it stands as a metaphor for real life; that we play, watch and read about sport because we want the rest of our lives to be illuminated by sport’s special allegorical language, as if sport has something to tell us in the way that art does. The editors beg to suggest that this is tosh. Sport is not a metaphor for the rest of life, it is indivisible from the rest of life. That’s its magic. It is not a description of something, it is, simply, what it is.’

  And I resent any attempt to take my game away from me.

  8

  ‘B for L, J for D’

  You can tell from their faces. Shining with anticipation, a restlessness revealed by the darting eyes. Above all else, triumphant. On the buses heading towards the Eden Gardens on match day you can tell from the faces who is going to be inside the ground when play begins. And who is not. They’re the ones who look vaguely resentful, who stare out of the window because they can’t bear to look at their fellow passengers, who are eager to get off and get on with whatever else that they are supposed to be doing (because anything else is better than being on a bus crammed with fans going to the Eden). They don’t fit in; they want out of this celebration.

  The conductor, perhaps because he knows that proximity to the people going to the Eden Gardens is the closest that he will get to real action, is indulgent. He’s happy to talk about the match. (A rare gesture. Conductors on Kolkata buses don’t talk; unless it’s to ask you for your fare. And sometimes not even that – they’ll shuffle up and merely riffle their sheaf of tickets under your nose. A sharp, grating sound. Pay for the privilege of riding on one of the worst transport systems in the world.)

  This is Kolkata’s biggest annual picnic. For many, this is the most sought-after prize of the whole year: a plain rectangular stub of glazed paper that tells you your gate and seat numbers. It is a chance to be there. It really is. (At the time I first started going to the Eden Gardens in the late 1970s, even on the fourth day of a Test that is dead or dying, 100,000 people would fill the stadium.)

  One after another, the buses crawl to a halt at Chowringhee, the busiest intersection in the heart of Kolkata’s central business district. I have always wanted to catch the first Chowringhee-bound bus on a match day. (When do the first spectators start coming in? Just when? I’ve rolled up two hours before start of play, three hours, and still seen thousands walking up to the stadium.)

  Half a step at a time. That’s as much of a stride as you can take. The crowd presses in on you from all sides. No traffic is allowed on the roads leading to the ground; the police reroute all the vehicles. They cordon off the pavements; spectators are penned inside rough bamboo partitions. No one is allowed to spill over on to the road. />
  The first time I walked through this crowd – along with this crowd – I was scared. I was nine years old and I had never seen so many people. The tight columns made me feel claustrophobic; I feared a stampede. Over the years, though, I have realised that this is not the danger period. It’s too early in the morning for the crowd to be drunk. (Often, it’s only seven o’clock.) And since there has been no play we’ve not yet been disappointed. Tempers have not yet been frayed; no one is actually spoiling for a fight.

  These days I get off the bus and plunge right in, taking my place behind the last man in the long queue. It is a good couple of kilometres to the ground. Hard work, when there’s no place to put your feet, when all you see in front of you is a sweat-stained shirt and all you can feel is the guy behind you steadying himself in the crush. Just occasionally, to your right you can see the vacant road. There are so many police – on foot, on motorbikes, in jeeps, chattering agitatedly into their walkie-talkies. The emptiness of the road only draws attention to how crushed we are.

  Groups – friends, colleagues, family, lovers – try to stick together in the swarm. Some of them carry today’s newspapers. They’re not for reading. They’ll be spread out on the ground’s dusty concrete benches. Seats are luxuries.

  As I approach the Eden I examine my fellow spectators. The crowd seems so much more, well, internationalised, than it used to be. The last time I was here, a year ago, among the shuffling feet, I saw hundreds and hundreds of trainers: Nike, Adidas, Reebok. Shorts, fashionably long for men, and T-shirts, fashionably short for women, covered in swooshes or leaping pumas; jeans (Levi’s, Pepe, Wrangler, you name it, you got it); baseball caps turned backwards; shades (Ray-Bans, Gucci); satchels, knapsacks. If you want a snapshot of global sartorial kitsch, here’s the place to come.

  Unless you look at the faces – these days often emblazoned with the Indian tricolour (a decade-and-a-half-old habit, picked up from watching international football on satellite TV) – you could be in any city in the world. It is a far cry from the days when my mother insisted I wear my darkest pair of shorts and a terry cotton shirt stitched at the local tailors. (‘These are best for the Eden Gardens, the grime won’t show.’)

  Like tributaries into a river, the roads finally open out into the green of the maidan at the stadium’s edge. Most fans keep on walking when they reach the grass, happy to let their strides lengthen, relieved to find the extra space. Some, though, huddle together in knots. For we’ve reached the monstrous statue of Goshto Pal (one of Bengal’s legendary footballers; his arms are flung out at a painful, almost absurd angle), the most popular prematch meeting ground.

  As the crowd pauses for breath and looks up at the upper tiers of the stands, the street vendors approach: chewing gum, chocolates and, in the last few years, Coke, Pepsi, bottled mineral water.

  The street vendors are only the first wave. Next come the walking billboards. Big corporations have hired them for the day. They’re distributing cardboard sunshades, tacky, pathetic things, with the name of the company in bold letters across the visor. Not many fans have any use for them. It’s ironic: the crowd won’t take them, even though they’re free; but they’re happy to shell out for branded baseball caps. They’ve been educated by the TV spots, the glossy magazines. They know what is appropriate to the occasion. Would you rather be seen with a sunshade that says ‘ACC Cement’ or a cap which says ‘Adidas’?

  ‘Extra ticket? Extra? Any price, brother, any price. Which block?’ The next tribe has arrived. These are the guys who have not planned in advance, who have left it too late and are prepared to risk the disappointment of standing by the gates all morning only to leave empty-handed – back to the sofa at home with a beer because they have taken the day off work anyway and wouldn’t, for any price, go to the office and admit to not having had a ticket in the first place. Or else they’re really desperate, crazy enough to have stood in line all night for the day seats. They’re back again this morning: fate is bound to reward fans as persistent as themselves, they hope. How could it not?

  We’re on to the last bunch. Those who want to exchange tickets. They walk up to you, brandishing their stubs.

  ‘B for L.’

  ‘J for D.’

  ‘C for K’.

  Like all codes, it’s simple enough to crack if you know the key.

  ‘What on earth are they talking about?’ an ex-girlfriend (the only girlfriend I have ever taken to a cricket match) once asked me.

  The way it works is this: say you have a ticket in Block B, to the right of the pavilion, and your friend has one in Block L, to the left. You wave your (or your friend’s) ticket above your head and scream, as hard as you can, in the hope of finding someone who wants to swap; someone sitting on the left of the pavilion with a friend on the right.

  No money changes hands during these encounters. But sometimes one of the parties will emerge distinctly better off.

  ‘B for J? Come on, that is no deal.’

  Block J is square of the wicket, nowhere near as good a place to watch the cricket as Block B, which is behind third man or long on, depending on which end the bowler is bowling from.

  ‘Well, take it or leave it. I’ll find someone else. Thirty minutes for the toss, brother. Remember.’

  The hustling won’t make any difference. What matters is how badly you want to sit with your friend. On occasion, I have made a bad swap myself. It just depends.

  Inside the stadium things look very different these days. I’ve been coming here for twenty-seven years now. Everything changed in 1987, with the World Cup. They rebuilt the stadium for the final: they added more tiers to the stands; a fibreglass roof, essential now that they were playing cricket in what used to be the off-season; a giant scoreboard square of the wicket. The new scoreboard was a bit like the Indian batting: it had enormous potential (more details than anyone could ever want); it was also scandalously fickle. It still is, after fifteen years. It’s infuriating when it goes on the blink at the death in a one-day game.

  Opposite the pavilion, above the sightscreen, they built a new stand. It’s the only stand in the ground with individual seats, white plastic bucket chairs that shimmer in the sun; the rest of us, squeezed on the concrete benches, look on in envy. The new stand was built for foreign fans travelling to the World Cup – their pounds and dollars went further than the humble rupee, justifying the high ticket prices. These days, the stand’s occupants can spend more on watching a day’s cricket than the average income in Bengal.

  There are corporate boxes too, again spin-offs from the World Cup. For once the Cricket Association of Bengal were a little ahead of the curve. (They must have taken their cue from Sharjah.) In 1987, air-conditioned, glass-fronted boxes were unheard of in India. Their inhabitants, with their televisions and minibars, are insulated from the rest of the ground, deliberately so. (Ironically none of the minibars stock any alcohol. You used to be able to drink at the Eden, but it was a purely nudge-nudge-wink-wink thing. Some spectators spiked their giant bottles of cola with rum, or their soda water with whisky. Real men in Kolkata drink only rum or whisky. It stinks. But that’s all gone now – you’re not allowed to bring bottles of any description into the ground. Water is sold in small, plastic pouches which you tear open with your teeth, water dribbling down your front. The hawkers selling bottles of mineral water outside the stadium have less business these days, although many still buy and down the water in a single gulp before entering the stadium.) The spectators in the insulated boxes sit there in their splendid isolation. The rest of the ground treats them with the kind of scorn that one reserves for rich but stingy relatives who neither bring us nice gifts when they arrive nor leave us generous pocket money when they go.

  The stadium has its own class system, which may or may not correspond to the real world. Visitors to the Eden fall into one of three camps: the aristocracy, the bourgeois and the workers. You’ll find the aristocracy in the life-members’ stands on either side of the pavilion and in th
e annual and associate-members’ stands adjacent to them. For these are reserved for the members, those who are here by right (God-given, they assume). Once you are a member there’s no more queuing for tickets, no doubt as to whether you’ll get in. Just pick up your ticket and go to your seat.

  The bucket seats and air-conditioned boxes are the preserve of the bourgeois (nouveau riche usurpers, the members call them): company men enjoying a day at the cricket as compensation for their eighty-hour weeks, businessmen who don’t care how much money they spend because the annual turnover will take care of it.

  The rest of the ground belongs to the working class: the stands at widish mid-off and mid-on of the pavilion end, and the Ranji stand – perhaps the most raucous and vibrant in the whole ground.

  Each of these groups is convinced that it is the only authentic presence in the stadium; the others are mere impostors.

  Those in the cheap seats claim that they’re the true fans – after all, they’ve queued for hours to buy tickets, they’ve had to show resolve, determination, indomitable will just to be here, and now they’re fighting for space on the bum-numbing concrete benches.

  The members know that they are the Eden’s real, rightful owners. Those who have bought day tickets (cheap or expensive) are interlopers, here today, gone when the next match is played. They will be here for ever. They and the Eden share a history. They are the Eden’s history – many of them have been coming here for generations. It’s a family thing, and Eden is part of the family.

  The monied elite who pack the expensive seats and corporate boxes think that everybody else is shit. Because they have more money than everybody else. They are perhaps the least self-conscious and most confident people in the place. They couldn’t care less about being members; they wouldn’t dream of queuing all night. Money buys privileges and after a while (so long as your wallet remains comfortably full) those privileges become rights. Who cares about history, who cares about what other people think of them? Their wealth inures them to others’ scorn.