I’ve always thought Abba’s story should be told. Even when he was alive I would often ask him if he was going to write an autobiography. ‘The truth can never be told,’ he liked to say mysteriously, ‘and I will not lie.’ I soon gave up trying to figure out what he meant—he liked to speak in code—I suspect in order to deter conversation as much as possible, except for the very persistent. I did not persist then but after he passed away I have learnt so much more about him—from obituaries, personal stories, letters written to my mother from friends, colleagues and admirers. I have wallowed in those words of tribute and praise and felt privileged to be loved so dearly by one loved dearly by so many.
My strongest memories of Abba are all lying down—his favourite place in the world was at home in his den in front of the picture window overlooking the trees and birds, propped up on a gau-takiya reading a book and having his feet pressed by Gyaasuddin, his loyal man Friday.
The Tiger in his den
Whilst my mother, my brother, my sister and I travelled the world making films and speeches, giving and receiving awards, caught up in hectic schedules, you could always count on him to be at home by the landline, solid and dependable as a rock. He had a love-hate relationship with the phone—insisting on sitting practically on top of it and yet frustrated by the sound of it ringing. As a sixteen-year-old teenage girl you can only imagine how mortifying it was to have your friends call home asking to speak to you and for the grouchy man on the other end to hang up on them with a curt ‘no’. His ownership over the single landline with the infinitely long extension cord continued even after he went to bed with the fastening of a lock on the dial pad. He had an incredible vocabulary but he didn’t believe in wasting words—and so it was to be for us!
A typical conversation with him went like this:
Me (calling from university in England): Aadaab, Abba. How are you?
Him: Who’s that?
Me: Umm, it’s Soha, Abba.
Him: Your mother’s not home.
Me: Oh, that’s okay, but how are you?
Him: Fine. I’ll tell her you called.
Me: Okay, Abba. Ummm . . .
Him: Are you okay for money?
Me: Yes. (As if I’d tell him if I wasn’t!)
Click.
His frugality with words was exercised in other areas too. People often ask me what it was like to grow up in a royal household and I never know what to say . . . You imagine a life abundant in riches and indulgences—someone pressing your feet first thing in the morning and last thing at night, a chauffeur at your disposal and handmaidens to comb your hair and lay out your freshly laundered clothes, and yes we did have all of this and more, but you must believe me when I say that there was never really a sense of being flush with wealth—quite the contrary. Abba was an economical man. He didn’t own imported cars, except the one distinctive white Jaguar two-seater with the licence plate PAT1, and he never bought expensive designer brands.
Abba’s most prized possession, after us of course!
When he went shopping in London to replace a pair of socks he would buy just that, turning a blind eye (pardon the pun) to all other consumerist temptations. He bought only what he needed and didn’t seem to really want anything. He was careful with money. Our doors and various tabletops at home would be covered in yellow Post-it notes, his signature scrawl barely legible but you could just about make out the four words: ‘Turn the lights off.’ He didn’t like to waste petrol. If we wanted the car to go to a friend’s house my sister and I had to think very carefully about how to approach the subject.
Wrong approach: ‘Abba, may I please use the car to go to Khan Market?’ That would lead to his favourite word: ‘No.’
Right approach: ‘Abba, have you read (insert some new article or book on history or politics—or in later years an even better distraction was a wildlife video on YouTube) . . . oh and (to be tossed in as breezily as possible) I’m going to Priyanka’s for dinner; I’ll be back in a couple of hours.’ Followed by a swift exit.
Perhaps it was a sense of financial insecurity that led him to this conservation, having lost so much becoming Mr Khan. In fact loss was no stranger to him—losing his father at the age of eleven, the sight in his right eye at twenty, his titles and privy purses at thirty. Of course all of those things happened well before I came on the scene, but I remember the move from a sprawling three-acre bungalow at 1, Dupleix Road (renamed K. Kamraj Marg around the same time Connaught Place’s inner circle was renamed Rajiv Gandhi Chowk) to the more modest home in Vasant Vihar.
Whilst the rest of us may have complained—Amman about losing her rose bushes and jamun trees, my sister about having to climb two flights of stairs to get to her room, me about not having a badminton court in our backyard—Abba was quick to adjust. He was always quick to adjust and was as comfortable in the palace in Pataudi as he was in my poky two-bedroom flat in Bandra. As long as his clothes were pressed and a good book to read produced come 10 p.m., he would look after himself, even making his own morning tea and always remembering to turn the lights off!
It could have been because he had seen so much loss in his life or perhaps it was his character-building boarding school education, but Abba knew the value of money and I would like to think that those lessons in the importance of saving have trickled down to me.
Abba didn’t like to talk about the setbacks in his life. If I asked him about his father he would say he didn’t remember him very much. If I asked about his eye, he would brush it off as ‘a bit of bad luck’. I had to discover in articles and from friends just how brilliant a batsman he was before the injury. He had already earned himself a bit of a reputation in school as a natural cricketer, graceful and lightning quick in the field. In fact Badi Amman decided to employ the English professional cricketer, Frank Woolley, who had been Sarkar Abba’s coach to train Abba when he was only twelve. She would attend each of these coaching classes and watch attentively from afar. She soon noticed that for the most part Woolley was just standing to the side watching Abba practise in the nets. After multiple sessions of much the same, she finally went up to him to gently remind him that he was being paid handsomely for his instruction. Woolley looked at her and simply said, ‘I wouldn’t change anything. I wouldn’t change anything at all.’
Swag
Cricketing enthusiasts will recall the name of Douglas Jardine, captain of the English team during the 1932–33 Ashes tour of Australia. Under him England employed the controversial bodyline tactic against Australian batsmen wherein bowlers pitched the ball short on the line of leg stump to rise towards the bodies of batsmen in a way that was aggressive and also potentially dangerous. Jardine became very unpopular with the Australians who booed him repeatedly for this tactic from the stands. Sarkar Abba had been selected to play on the English squad then and was one of the only players to indicate his disapproval by refusing to take up his leg-side fielding position. Jardine is known to have declared, ‘I see His Highness is a conscientious objector,’ and promptly dropped him from the team.
Towards the end of the tour, Sarkar Abba said of Jardine: ‘I am told he has his good points. In three months I have yet to see them.’ I bring up this story because many years later, in 1959, a young student at Winchester, aged eighteen, finally broke Douglas Jardine’s long-standing school record of 997 runs in a season. That young student was none other than my father; the son had avenged his father’s honour—it’s the stuff movies are made of! Incidentally Abba’s record of 1068 runs stood for fifty-six years until it was broken by a young English student named Dan Escott in 2015.
I used to love hearing about Abba’s favourite cricket moments, one of the earliest being the 1960 Oxford vs Cambridge Blues match, a first-class game (three or more days with two innings played by each team) held at Lord’s in London. In today’s age of Twenty20 cricket, varsity matches are a bit of an anachronism but in the 1960s there was no better place for a student cricketer than Oxford or Cambridge. If you scored runs
or took wickets at the Parks, the home ground of the Oxford University Cricket Club, you would be noticed and wooed by the counties. And to play at Lord’s has always been special—even before India defeated England in the NatWest final in July 2002 and skipper Sourav Ganguly, watching from the balcony, took his shirt off to celebrate! I myself have walked from the dressing room through the Long Room, down the stairs and on to the Ground—this was on the occasion of the Memorial Dinner that was held for Abba in the Long Room in the summer of 2012 when Charles Fry, an English former first-class cricketer friend of Abba’s, kindly agreed to take Kunal and me on a tour. I can only imagine what Abba must have felt making that same walk to the expectant gaze of the crowds.
His own father had scored a century in his first varsity match and expectations from Abba, buttressed by his school exploits, were high. It was 7 July 1960. Cambridge had been bowled out quickly for 153 and Oxford stood at a shaky 32 for 3 when he came in to bat as he often did at number 5. Abba scored 131 runs. It was always special to him, his first first-class century at Lord’s. He could finally silence those who were so eager to say of famous sons of famous fathers, ‘He’ll never be as good as his father.’
Then there was the innings against fierce Fred Trueman at the Parks in 1961 where he scored 106 against an invincible Yorkshire team. It must have done considerable repair to a collectively bruised national pride to score a century against the same man who had put the humiliating score of 0 for 4 during the 1952 Test series against India—four wickets taken and not a single run scored! In 1961 he was only 92 runs short of breaking the university record of 1307 runs in a season with three games left to play when the accident happened.
It was so avoidable. Oxford University, of which Abba had been unanimously chosen as captain post his century at Lord’s, was playing Sussex County. At the end of play on the first day, Oxford had scored only 4 runs and lost both openers. A few of the players decided to go out for dinner that night; Robin Waters drove them in his Morris 1000. After dinner some wanted to walk back and so Abba hopped in the front passenger seat to keep Robin company. They were still parked when, without any warning, they were hit hard by a passing car, sending Abba flying through the windscreen, shattering the glass. He hadn’t even had the chance to put his seat belt on.
Everyone was shaken up of course but the damage seemed to be limited to Abba’s right hand—he feared he had broken his wrist and was worried he wouldn’t be able to play the next day. It was only much later, at Brighton Hospital, that they discovered the shard of glass in his right eye.
Emergency surgery could not repair the dissolved lens and Abba was left with merely 5 per cent vision in that eye.
Can you imagine how difficult it is to play any sport with one eye? Try this at home. Cover one eye with a hand and try pouring water into a glass. It’s not so easy. You need both eyes to judge distance. And that’s a stationary object. Now imagine standing at the crease and facing bowlers the likes of West Indies’ Andy Roberts, one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, bowling at you at 200 kilometres an hour. Abba told me that once, as he was walking in to bat, he passed the wicketkeeper who was crouching closer to the boundary than to the crease.
‘What are you doing all the way back here?’ Abba asked him.
‘You’re about to find out, man,’ was the bone-chilling reply.
Charlie Griffith was bowling. Griffith, as some of you may know, was the West Indian fast bowler with an arguably lethal chucking style responsible for prematurely ending Nari Contractor’s cricket career. It was the 1962 Indian tour of the West Indies and Nari Contractor was captain; a twenty-one-year-old Tiger Pataudi, still raw from the eye accident, was vice-captain. This was a time that preceded the full battle armour of helmets, abdominal guards, thigh guards, chest guards and arm guards our cricketers wear today. When the ball hit Contractor on the side of the head the crack was so loud that Abba swore he heard it all the way in the dressing room. With blood pouring from his ears and nose, Contractor walked off the pitch, leaving the groundsmen to soak up as much of it off the crease as they could using pails of sawdust. Multiple surgeries removed the blood clots from his brain and saved his life, but Contractor would never play Test cricket again. Abba was abruptly thrust into an early captaincy many felt he was unprepared for.
Having only recently lost vision in his right eye, Abba may not have fared so well against the likes of Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith in 1962 but he would get the opportunity to strike back in 1974–75 when the West Indies team toured India under Clive Lloyd’s captaincy. The West Indies had won the first two matches and were in full attack mode as the sun rose over Eden Gardens in Calcutta on 27 December 1974. It was early in the game when a bouncer from Andy Roberts hit Abba squarely in the jaw, shattering the bone and the hopes of the 1,00,000 Indians in the stadium. Not one to be deterred so easily, Abba had his jaw wired up and was back to resume his wicket, going on to hit Vanburn Holder for four consecutive boundaries in one over! India won the match by 85 runs—a historic victory that, even today, remains one of our most iconic Test triumphs.
Down but not out; Abba leaving the ground with a broken jaw
The car accident must have crushed him at the time but he was a fighter. ‘I lost sight in one eye,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t lose sight of my ambition.’
He had already seen the life he wanted to live and he refused to let it become an impossible dream. If there is ever a story of following your dreams, against the odds, his is it. How he did it and the details of his cricketing genius are subjects for another book, but anything I write about myself is incomplete without writing about him. He was, by far, the most effortlessly cool man I have ever met—astute, judicious and quick-witted.
I remember reading out questions to him from my Australian visa application form. ‘Have you ever been convicted of a crime?’ the form asked.
‘Write “I didn’t think it was still necessary!”’ he said to me, chuckling gleefully. He was referring, of course, to Australia’s history as a penal colony used by the British government to deal with the overcrowding of their own prisons.
Abba would giggle often, going bright red in the face—usually whilst watching his favourite television shows Fawlty Towers and Allo Allo.
Life is just better when you’re laughing
By the time I was born my father had retired from professional cricket, so I never got the chance to see him play. It was only when he was in the hospital that I saw that fighting spirit people had spoken of; I saw my father the athlete. In the three weeks he spent in the hospital the steroids ate away more than half of his muscle tone but his heart was inexhaustible. The ICU doctors said they’d never seen anything like it. And we were so proud of him, so proud to be his chosen ones.
Even there, surrounded by tubes, masks, drips, pills, syringes and doctors, he didn’t want a fuss. He was always polite, ever-charming—asking every technician a question about their home village or city; making them feel comfortable even through his discomfort. Through him I have seen how a good leader commands, doesn’t demand respect; not once raising his voice—at most a plaintive ‘Rinkoo . . .’* if my mother’s tone was especially penetrating (a not uncommon occurrence).
Through Abba I have learnt tolerance and a live-and-let-live attitude.
Tradition mattered, respect for one’s elders mattered, but not for their own sake—and if there was ever a clash with what he wanted, he was not to be confined by custom. That in particular I am grateful for, for it led to my parents’ happy marriage against the wishes of many—the reputation of nawabs and actors being equally suspect in the sixties—and so to me!
On 5 January 2011 we celebrated his seventieth birthday in Pataudi. He never celebrated his birthday, having lost his father on that same day, at the age of eleven, but somehow that year my mother insisted, and somehow that year he relented. And so, surrounded by his closest friends and family, we ate, drank, told stories, recited poems, had a magic show and screened a short film
we made for him . . . He rolled his eyes at all the fuss but I know he loved it.
A rare picture of the whole family; by rare I mean the ONLY one
As a family, we’re not big on public demonstrations of affection but we wanted to show him how much we all love him, really spell it out for a change, and I am so thankful that we were given the chance to do that before he was taken from us so swiftly a mere eight months later. He was too young to go, of course, and there was nothing really wrong with him, except his lungs wouldn’t function—an incurable, irreversible disease called Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis—there was no rationalizing it, no hope of fighting it. The only real way for us to deal with his death, the ultimate setback, has been to take it on the chin as he always did—‘a bit of bad luck’.
On 22 September 2011 at 5.55 p.m., with his whole family at his side, Abba breathed his last. I was holding his hand when he went and I could see his heartbeat start to fall on the monitor, slowly at first and then more rapidly. He was tired. Every movement for him was like running a marathon; and it was time to stop. It is very hard to deal with the loss of a parent, especially when it is untimely, but if there is something that Abba’s life has taught me, it is acceptance. Life will knock you down time and time again, and you must find the strength inside you to stand up. Never give up the fight—not until your dying breath.
When we are at Pataudi I like to take a book and go sit by his grave, where he lies silently, surrounded by trees and the birds chirping.
Abba’s final resting place
My world has changed, but there it seems things are not so different. We talk to each other, he and I—I say a lot more than he does; I always have . . . and he remains in death as he always was through life, my rock.
The Perils of Being Moderately Famous Page 2