My daughter rather enjoys watching it these days. ‘There’s Oishi,’ she says, her crooked index finger pointing at the television screen. She seems to enjoy her performance. I don’t enjoy mine. I worry that when she grows up, she will sense that the whole video was actually just me showing off. I worry more that she will be right.
It contains, however, one moment that is not disingenuous in any way. It is an instant which sums up life in our family. At the point that this section was shot, Oishi had just begun to learn to walk. She would take a few steps then collapse from the effort. It was as if she was struggling to grasp the significance of this momentous achievement – all she knew was that life would never be the same again. When my wife and I used to watch her in those days, it seemed to us that having walked a few steps, our daughter was pausing to take stock.
The video catches Oishi as she gets up from the floor and begins to do a slow pirouette. Her arms are extended on either side for balance. A smile, half self-congratulatory, half tense (as though she’s worried whether she can sustain this effort but is evidently pleased that she is managing well so far) is trembling on her lips. Then she takes a step, treading firmly, carefully, with great resolve and concentration, as though she were walking on slushy ground. The camera pulls away from her and we get a long shot, the entire family sitting in a ring around her, applauding, the brass plant holder in the corner of the room, the lamp, the legs of the sofa and the television propped up on a wooden cabinet. If you watch carefully here, you will be able to catch a glimpse of the TV screen; you will even be able to make out the powder blue shirts of the Indian cricket team. There is a match on.
The camera zooms in again on Oishi, lingers on her bare little feet, then pans up from floor level, pausing to catch her expression. (Presumably I was shooting this scene lying on my stomach, guerrilla-style.) Oishi takes one more step.
At this point, the camera begins to wobble. Horribly. My daughter goes out of focus and we see, in quick and rather jagged succession, glimpses of tiled floor (startling swirls of white mosaic on black), blank expanses of wall, a snatch of a David Hockney print in a gilt-edged frame, a fragment of a lampshade, table legs. Someone’s turned up the volume on the television and we can hear the cricket commentary. Tony Greig is talking about Sachin Tendulkar.
Then the recording stops.
I must have been too ashamed to go on, I think now. But I have not doctored the tape in any way. It’s there, just as I shot it, to remind me of who I am and what my wife and daughter have had to endure.
It is not a pleasant memento.
It can’t be quite right, can it? You are filming your daughter’s first attempts at walking and you go and fuck it up (completely fuck it up) because of a minor landmark in one of Tendulkar’s innumerable innings. And that is not the worst of it: I wasn’t missing anything; the match wasn’t live, it wasn’t even a rerun, it wasn’t even a rererun. It was a re-re-rerun. I had seen it, live. I had watched the repeat telecast. I already had off by heart (I still have off by heart) most of the action that was worth remembering. And I still went and messed up a moment that happens only once in a lifetime.
* * *
Okay. I am in my mid-thirties. I have a job which I enjoy and which pays me handsomely. I’ve traded my small car for a larger, more expensive one. I have a wife who happens to be my best friend. We have a daughter who we both love madly, deeply, unconditionally.
I have never been arrested for shoplifting or busted for drugs or questioned for culpable homicide not amounting to murder. I am intelligent enough to make pasta or a curry or do the washing up without any obvious disasters. I enjoy music. I read a fair amount. I take at least one holiday a year. I have sufficient social skills to conduct a reasonable conversation, or so my friends say. I have friends.
In short, I have the CV of a middle-class, about-to-be-middle-aged, average heterosexual male.
In all – well, nearly all – respects.
So what goes wrong when it comes to cricket? What is it?
Over the years, I have discovered something: age does make a difference. It does not make me any less stupid or selfish or blinkered. It does not make me any less of a fan. The game is no less central to my life than it was fifteen years ago, when I was an average heterosexual male with no job and no wife and no kid and plenty of time.
What growing older has afforded me is a sense of perspective. Some days I can even step back and try to see myself as others see me. Some days I am even aware that my behaviour may seem strange or embarrassing.
I have realised several other things. I have realised that I do cricket the way some do drugs. Or drink. Or S & M. Twenty years ago, even ten, cricket was there to fill my time, to fill it in the most interesting and exciting way I knew. Now, I need to make time for cricket. There is just too much going on in the average, soon-to-be-middle-aged, middle-class, well paid, socially active parent’s life. Too much clutter. I need to strip away some of that clutter to give cricket its proper place.
No, that is all wrong.
Cricket’s proper place is right at the centre of my life. That’s where I have to start. Then I can arrange the clutter around it. Luckily this comes naturally to me. But there are occasions – rare occasions, yes, but I can recognise them now and again – when I regret where my choices lead me.
When I make my wife cancel a doctor’s appointment, when I refuse to look after my daughter or call off drinks with an old friend I haven’t seen for years, afterwards I am miserable, filled with self-loathing. I know that if only I could have torn myself away from the cricket, I might even have enjoyed myself. It is unfair on my friends, my family. It is unfair on me.
But I quickly forget, and when the occasion comes around again, I let the cricket take precedence. If I have a choice between cricket and something else (and everything else in life is just ‘something else’), cricket will win. The difference is that these days I am aware that there is a choice – and that some choices may be the wrong ones.
It is the nature of addiction. All addicts realise afterwards that there is a line they should not have crossed: a last puff, a last drink, a last fix they ought to have resisted. But when the craving returns (it always does, it always does), all the promises go out the window. They forget themselves. They reach for the bottle or the powder or the pipe.
I reach for the remote.
Addicts suffer if they give in to their addiction. They suffer if they don’t.
I do cricket, didn’t I tell you?
* * *
My aunt comes calling one evening during the 2003 World Cup. This aunt is married to my youngest uncle (not the same uncle who took me to the Eden Gardens, and who pretended he was fanatical about cricket just to humour me. He used to spin me tales about how he was friends with Viv Richards and Ian Chappell; I believed every word) and when I was little we all lived in the same house. My aunt watched me grow up; she watched me fall in love with cricket. The two were pretty much the same thing. These days we don’t see each other too often and, when we do, I’m accompanied by my wife and my daughter and it’s my day off but I’m still fielding phone calls from work (the run-of-the-mill adult encumbrances), and I can see that though I’m familiar, I am also strange, no longer quite the person she once knew. Not surprisingly, my aunt assumes I don’t have time for cricket now. She has never said as much – we haven’t talked about it – but I know she refuses to believe that a thirtysomething man with a wife and a child can still be crazy about a silly game.
So she comes visiting us one evening during the 2003 World Cup and finds me lying on the living-room floor surrounded by stacks of newspapers, dozens of pens and sheaves of A4. I have a calculator in my hand, and I’m consulting the colour-coded spreadsheets lined up in front of me. My daughter is toddling around the room but I’m ignoring her. The TV is blaring away; occasionally I look up from my work to see how the game’s going.
It’s probably Namibia versus Holland. (I don’t exactly remember, but
had it been anyone else, I would have been watching the game properly.)
‘Um, hi, tea?’ I stand up to greet my aunt, quickly pulling a sheet of paper out of the way of my advancing daughter.
‘Well, no, isn’t your mother in?’
‘Yes, yes, of course. So is Chandrani. Ma has gone for a shower.’
‘All right, I’ll wait for them. I’m sure they’ll want a cup too.’
‘Aami kolom nebo,’ says my daughter. She wants the pens, especially the felt-tips.
‘Oishi, come here. Baba is working,’ says my aunt. ‘What’s up? Why are you bringing work home? You should finish all that stuff in the office. I have been telling your uncle for years, he never listens. Do you want to take your work into another room? I shall play with Oishi till Chandrani arrives.’
‘No, it’s okay. The thing is I am not working and, er, I need the TV too.’
‘What? Not work? What are you doing then?’
So I tell her.
And as I explain, it begins to sound sillier and more inconsequential than it is (or than I think it is). It comes out all wrong. The bemused expression on my aunt’s face does not help.
I tell her that I am filling in my hand-compiled score-sheets for every World Cup game; that I’ve given each team its own colour; that there are separate sheets for run rates; that the pages over there are my Super Six predictions (‘Look, here’s the analysis, it’s pretty simple really – if their run rate falls below the figure in the top-left box, there’s no way they can qualify’); that I do this every day, that it’s important to keep it all absolutely up to date.
‘?!?’
I spread out my palms and try a shrug.
‘But isn’t it all in the papers anyway?’
‘Yes, but, you know, not all of it. And once you start doing it, if you stick with it you get a more, holistic picture?’ (In my confusion, I turn the statement into a mild question, using an upward inflection at the end of the sentence as though I were a teenager.) ‘And it is really thorough. The papers can get things wrong sometimes. It’s fun too, great fun.’
‘Fun?’
There’s nothing to say in reply.
When my mother emerges from her room, my aunt tells her that she thought I had ‘got over the cricket thing’. Got over it. As though it was a relationship in which I had been dumped.
She is amazed, she says, and a little amused, and it’s important that she explains to me that this is not entirely sensible behaviour. Lying on the floor, I get the gist: she cannot believe that at my age I still do things like this, isn’t it time I paid more attention to what’s important? She is kindly, my aunt, and her face is indulgent, but I know the look. It is a look that a lot of people give me.
* * *
During my final year at university (when most people worry about money, jobs, what they’re going to do with the rest of their lives), I wasn’t worrying about a career. My big concern was whether I ought to get a job at all. It was not that I had an ambition to be a professional layabout (though, to be fair, studying English Literature was good practice); it was just that any job was bound to be time-consuming. And that would have an effect on the cricket.
Cricket is that sort of game. You can be a football man in England or Europe and manage. Yes, there’s travelling to away games, yes there are midweek fixtures, but it’s mainly a weekend thing. Besides, a football match lasts less than two hours (and that’s if you’re including half-time). Look at what the cricket fan has to contend with. Five full days for a Test, one full day (or afternoon and evening) for a limited-overs international. Between two and five Tests and lots of one-days in a series. Four, five, six, seven series in a year. Keeping up with that is a full-time job. Where in my life was there space for another?
Any job I took would have to be flexible, I thought. It should allow me to determine the hours I worked; it should offer me the freedom to follow all the cricket I wanted to (which was all the cricket there was). So I decided to become a writer. I had no idea of what I would write about, of course.
My father found it scandalous that his newly graduated son should be frittering away his time on watching cricket and writing a literary masterpiece he didn’t know how to start. So in the end, I found a job. As a reporter on a Kolkata paper. I began to enjoy myself. And I began to see the point of working – not so much for the money, but for the social respectability that comes with having a job in middle-class Bengali society.
The cricket suffered.
I kept track when I could. But when you are out in rural Bengal covering a drought, when the ground is cracking up and the villagers look like they’d kill for a drop of filthy water, you don’t ask the nearest guy for the score, do you?
In the years since, I have done my best to achieve a work-cricket balance (or rather a cricket-work balance): I have offered to write about it so that I can watch it (this does not work so well if you’re working on the crime beat at the time); I have got myself promoted (so that I can tinker with my work schedule – I’ve gone to work before the cleaners arrived and left by late afternoon or early evening so that I could catch a match in a different time zone); I have even, to my shame, claimed that my mother was in hospital in order to take the day off.
But the cricket has suffered.
These days, I’m less bothered about the social respectability. I need the money.
* * *
One of the problems of being a cricket fan in his mid thirties is that no one takes you seriously. Most people think it’s about as mature as wetting the bed. As I get older and more impatient and less inclined to laugh at the world, it grows boring explaining to people that loving a game (okay, loving a game a lot) does not necessarily make me maladjusted.
There’s a general assumption that sport is a childish, frivolous pursuit. That it is not worthy of the degree of emotional and intellectual engagement that politics, classical music or Estonian films merit. I’m often told that cricket is basically twenty-two grown men meeting in a park to throw things at each other. (Imagine being interested in that.) But in these terms Mozart was messing around with doh ray me; Shakespeare was juggling twenty-six letters. Most seven-year-olds manage eight notes and the alphabet. If you can hum piano concertos over your coffee, you are an object of respectful fascination. If you can trot out the Indian batsmen’s averages during their 1971 tour of the West Indies, you are a crank. Benign, perhaps, but a crank.
Which is why these days, sometimes, I have to resort to subterfuge.
A couple of years ago I had to go to a funeral which clashed with a Test match India were playing against Australia. So I made a plan. For the period when I would be away from a television set, I asked a friend of mine to text me the score at the end of each over. When I say ‘the score’ I understate things somewhat; it was more in the nature of a running commentary, like the live reports you get on the internet. My friend must have typed his fingers to the bone. (The logistics of it all still cause me some puzzlement. Amid all this furious texting, when did he actually get a chance to watch the cricket? Anyway, I am grateful to him – I ought to take this chance to let him know.)
At the funeral, I looked suitably sombre, if a little distracted. As I explained to one curious relative, as I picked up yet another message, things were difficult at work. My bosses were unsympathetic, my colleagues recalcitrant. They wouldn’t leave me alone, even today of all days.
Ten, even five years ago, I would not have bothered with this elaborate charade: I simply would not have attended the funeral. Now I go – I can’t be bothered with making my excuses. It seems like a waste of time. I find the explanations I am obliged to put forth irksome. I don’t find the jokes amusing.
Of course, I don’t do much to help myself. No fan does.
Not so long ago I went to a dinner party in London where I didn’t know a soul. (The friend I was staying with brought me along – he felt he shouldn’t leave me sitting in front of the TV with my lager and cigarettes; he really should have
known better.) I was a little nervous, and as a result, I drank rather more than I should have. While I did not have a glass in each hand all the time, I ended up rather substantially drunk.
The drink did not help with my nerves. In fact, it made me edgy, and it gave me the courage to let my edginess be evident. At one point in the evening, I found myself in front of a po-faced young woman who, her fingers wrapped around the stem of a glass of wine she had barely touched, asked me about right wing Hindu fundamentalists in India and the riots in Gujarat. ‘Yeah, well, oh Gujarat. Very embarrassing. I mean, they are, they just burn buses and kill people. Mmm, complex issue, you see. I don’t have much time for that sort of thing really,’ I said. (This was, I could see, unforgivable.) ‘But I do have time for cricket. India is away in South Africa and . . . um . . . with the time difference, you know, you wouldn’t happen to know the score, would you?’
Po-Face stared at me. I could just as well have made a clumsy grab at her. We did not speak again. I left shortly afterwards, without my friend.
* * *
The night India beat the West Indies at Port of Spain in 2002, a close friend of mine lost his mother (a sudden heart attack – she didn’t last till the hospital). I remember the phone call; it came in the middle of a whoop-and-whirl I was doing on my own in the living room. I couldn’t take the smile off my face even as I drove to the hospital to comfort my friend. There were hundreds of young men out on the streets, celebrating. They thought that I was on a celebratory drive of my own.
I can no longer pretend that how my team performs on a cricket field will determine what happens in the rest of my life. I’ve left exams behind me; these days there is just too much at stake. As we get older and marry, have children, we become more vulnerable. There is so much more to worry about, so many more people who by being hurt could hurt us too. I don’t want to tempt fate.
And yet, sometimes I find myself returning to the old notions, hoping that if things go right on the cricket field, good fortune will be matched elsewhere. It’s a comforting illusion – it makes the complexities of adulthood more manageable.
You Must Like Cricket? Page 14