CMJ

by Christopher Martin Jenkins

  The coach suddenly stopped and we were aware of heated words being spoken between the driver of the coach and people outside. After hours of backaching travel this was all we needed. Ragu opened the side door and went out to investigate. There were more loud exchanges before he came back inside and the engine started up.

  ‘What was all that about’, one of us asked Ragu.

  ‘They were dacoits’, he said. ‘Armed bandits bent upon mischief.’

  ‘What did you say to them?’ someone asked.

  ‘I told them to bugger off’, said Ragu, revelling in the laughter and cheering that followed.

  Our hotel, when eventually we arrived, was on the rough side but we were only there for a night so the fact that there were only communal bathrooms and that ‘running water’ in the chilly, spartan rooms meant a bowl with a jug could be cheerfully borne by those of us with a public school education. Not so Mike Beale, the extremely well fed correspondent of the Daily Star. As I was settling into bed I heard his broad Brummie voice wailing down the echoing corridor outside: ‘I demand to see the manager! I refuse to be treated like an animal!’

  My most indelible memory of events off the field on my various tours to India also involved the Evening Standard’s correspondent, John Thicknesse. On one occasion in Calcutta we had played golf, on a rare day off, at the delightfully Raj-reminiscent Tollygunge Club. There was a strike of taxi drivers that day, so we had reached the club by means of the little-known underground train which runs for a few miles below the main thoroughfare of this great but chaotic city. It turned out to be both clean and cheap, and conveyed us much more pleasantly than the London Underground from our very smart hotel, the Grand Oberoi (most comfortable feather pillows in the world!) to a stop close to the Tollygunge.

  Following our usual highly competitive game and a drink, the sun had set and John refused (or probably we mutually agreed not) to walk back to the tube in the dark. The return journey was therefore a problem until one of the members at the bar, an obviously inebriated well-to-do Indian female, offered to drive us back. With some trepidation we accepted but her passage down the drive towards the teeming main road ahead was so erratic that another member tapped on the window and said: ‘Desist’ (a favourite word for Indians of a certain generation). ‘You are not fit to drive.’

  She ignored him and we decided that the die was cast. There was no other way to get back. John was in front, myself behind. She had gone a few hundred yards into the thick of Calcutta’s disordered traffic when she suddenly stopped at an angle of forty-five degrees to the oncoming cars, carts, buses, lorries, etc, felt into her handbag, pulled out a cigarette, turned to John and said, with slurred voice but in her extremely posh Indian accent: ‘Give me a light, darling.’

  ‘Thickers’ was already highly agitated as only he could be. ‘Get out of the seat and move over’ he said. ‘I’m driving. Come on, get out.’ They exchanged places – I forget which of them got out of the car amidst the chaos but probably John – and we proceeded to have the most hair-raising journey, at once hilarious and terrifying, with John gradually warming to his task although neither of us had a clear idea of the right direction and she was by now virtually comitose. John let out yelps of pleasure, like Toad of Toad Hall, as rickshaws, donkey-carts and cyclists scattered into the gutters from the path of the car. Horns blared constantly and there was the occasional emergency stop but eventually and miraculously the Grand Hotel hove into view.

  ‘Are we going to have a drink?’ asked the good lady as the door of the passenger seat was opened for her by a commissionaire in a top hat and matching uniform. ‘Certainly not’, said John firmly. ‘I’m afraid that we have work to do’, I said, ‘but thank you so much for the lift.’ Goodness knows how she got home.

  John had been at Harrow with the Maharajah of Jaipur, who had accordingly invited him to come to his palace for dinner. I was invited too, an opportunity surely too good to miss, especially as I had already met the Raj Mata, a famous socialite and patron of local causes who, even in her old age, was a woman of striking beauty and charisma. Starting life as Princess Gayatri Devi of Cooch Behar, she had been an MP in her own right before all the princely titles were officially taken away in 1971. Soon after she had spent five months in gaol for alleged tax offences but now she was in elegant retirement.

  Alas, her stepson, ‘Bubbles’, whose father, Man Singh, had been both a famous soldier and an outstanding polo player, turned out to be, at this stage of his life at least, an alcoholic. Not only was there no sign either of dinner or of the Raj Mata, but John and I were treated to a deeply embarrassing two hours or so during which we toyed with drinks whilst he repeated himself incessantly, occasionally punching his old school friend on the shoulder and over-ruling our polite attempts to leave. When he needed another drink, he yelled at terrified servants who supplied what was demanded before leaving his presence backwards, cowering close to the floor. It was an appalling insight into the worst aspects of the old India, although not, I’m sure, a typical one. Despite the rapidly emerging wealthy middle class, these contrasts of class and wealth have not fully disappeared.

  Happily, however, nor have some of the magnificent palaces. Jaipur’s City Palace is a huge creation full of beautiful features, including the pink frontage of the Palace of the Winds, the Hawa Mahal, with its mass of small windows designed so that the ladies could remain in purdah but still look out onto the bustling streets below. In 1976 there seemed to be almost as many camels in the streets as vehicles and people. Apart from the Taj Mahal itself, a genuine wonder of the world that fulfilled all expectations, the most memorable of the various forts and palaces I saw on that trip was the Amber Fort, built on the site of an old Hindu temple above the valley leading to Jaipur. Set amongst rugged hills it was memorable for the first and only elephant ride of my life, making the steep climb painless apart from some shaking up of the nether regions; for the beauty of the stone, glass and ivory carvings; for the views from ornate, unglazed windows; the monkeys clambering over the ramparts, already wise to the fact that tourists might mean food; and for two enormous silver urns, which the Maharajah’s grandfather used to have filled with water from the Ganges and transported with him on his travels.

  Another, rather less exalted, aristocrat from Rajasthan, the generous and popular Raj Singh Dungarpur, was a highly influential cricket administrator, whether or not he was in some official post. A big man with an easy charm, he had been a useful enough fast bowler to play eighty-six first-class games for Rajasthan. For years, at the Cricket Club of India in Bombay, he was the equivalent of Lord Harris or Gubby Allen at Lord’s, dominating the scene at the graceful old Brabourne Stadium through his princely bearing, private means, deep knowledge of the game and integrity. He had a flat overlooking Lord’s but I shall always think of him sitting in a cane chair on the outfield at the Brabourne, drinking something refreshing from a glass filled with ice and talking cricket. He was as comfortable there as a faithful old Labrador sitting by a stove in the kitchen.

  He had devoted his life to the game, managing Indian teams abroad, chairing the national selectors and helping young cricketers, wherever they came from. It was Raj who got the rules changed at the CCI so that Sachin Tendulkar could change in the dressing-rooms at the age of fourteen, and who promoted the youthful, shy (and Muslim) Mohammad Azharuddin into the captaincy of India.

  He and I were once staying in the same hotel during an ICC meeting in Australia when a note was passed under my door that showed that he spoke better English (albeit always with a strong Indian accent) than he wrote it. Scrawled in pencil, it read: ‘Have had to leave erly for airport but, for the whole times sake, I want to tell you excluzively that we had made brake-through in Indo/Pakistan relations. Soon we will be playing each other again. Ring me any time, Raj.’ It was typically generous of him, both to want to give a journalist friend whom he trusted a ‘scoop’ and also to be working to get cricket between the two rival nations going again after one o
f the many political aberrations. There are a few men in India who give the impression that they would crawl over anyone to gain a personal advantage but Raj was more typical, certainly of his own generation, when it came to respecting other human beings.

  On a later visit to Jaipur for the 1987 World Cup I stayed with press and broadcasting colleagues amidst the (then) fading grandeur of the Rambagh Palace. Its scale was magnificent but such important features as plumbing and food were at that time rather less impressive, to the extent that cynical journalists soon referred to it as the Ratbag. It was on this trip, on the day before a match between England and the West Indies, that I attempted to give moral support to Peter Baxter at the vast Sawai Man Singh Stadium, where an elegant pink and white pavilion, topped by twin cupolas, occupies the whole of one end of a large, open ground. Opposite we sat in a makeshift commentary position under an awning that did not prevent our being roasted for two hours while several bare-footed engineers, having successfully established that there were broadcasting lines from London to Delhi and Delhi to Jaipur, sweated in vain to solve the insurmountable problem of establishing the final communication between the Jaipur Post Office and the cricket ground.

  We had a more or less consistent link the following day, enabling my co-commentator, Jack Bannister, to inform his listeners that Gladstone Small had just completed a fiery ‘smell’ at the Pavilion End. It was quite possibly a correct statement.

  It is ironic, and rather marvellous, that India, where communications used to be so unreliable, is now the place where technology is, as Harold Wilson might have said, white hot. All of us have discovered the timings of trains in England by speaking to someone in Bangalore or sought advice on our British Telecom broadband connection from some other technical wizard in the same city. This is the same Bangalore where, two days before the Test match in 1977, I was concerned to find that my commentary box was an unfinished mish-mash of plywood and wet concrete hanging perilously in space. By the morning of the match, of course, it had been transformed by typical Indian industry into a smart new booth with a commanding view.

  On my first tour I had had a particularly bad time during a match in Jullunder, less because the Skylark hotel was memorably spartan than because the young radio technician who had been assigned to help me to get through to London on unreliable lines throughout the three-day game had failed almost every time. On the last day of the game, frustrated once more, I was on the point of telling him how useless I thought he was when he handed me a note thanking me for my ‘superb hospitality and warm and sweet friendship’.

  Hospitality to visitors is often warmer in the East. Thanks to the BBC World Service I acquired a loyal fan from the pleasant orange-growing city of Nagpur. He used to listen to commentaries in the days when World Service sport, so much more varied and popular than the unimaginative news bulletins which these days is all that our unenlightened Government will pay for, was regularly transmitted to the subcontinent. Amardhin Malik and his wife insisted on travelling all the way to Madras to meet me, shower me with gifts and entertain me to dinner, during a Test match. When, at last, I returned to Nagpur for Alastair Cook’s maiden Test match in 2006, my first visit since 1977, I was royally entertained again, this time at their family home, complete with its most prized possession, a vintage Armstrong Siddeley.

  I fear that I have never fully applied all that I should have learned from the subcontinent, amongst them two lessons from that 1977 tour, both occurring at Poona during a match between MCC and West Zone. Word had quickly gone round both the players and the media party that Poona (now Pune) was the place for tailors, the Savile Row of India. Accordingly I had a grey tropical suit made for me that was cut to measure and delivered within three days for an incredibly cheap price. The moral was the opposite of ‘all that glitters is not gold’, namely ‘not all bargains are genuine’. The suit never fitted properly and languished in my cupboard for years before going to the Oxfam shop.

  At the lunch interval on the first day of that match in Poona there was a more profound illustration of what should be the true priorities of life. John Thicknesse had boiled over when someone beat him to the only telephone in the press box. ‘I’ve only got five minutes until my deadline’, he expostulated, with a desperation in his voice that I quite understood. ‘John, John’, said the calmly unconcerned K.M. Prabhu, correspondent for The Times of India. ‘What are five minutes against eternity?’

  17

  PAKISTAN

  All Quiet on Frontier: Three Dead.

  To me that genuine headline, if memory serves correctly from Pakistan’s premier English newspaper, Dawn, encapsulates the country. Quiet, like peace, is relative and Pakistan, bloodily born, as Nehru dramatically phrased it, ‘at the midnight hour’ on 14 August 1947, has ever since been like a land that erupted from an earthquake beneath the sea. The aftershocks have never ceased. It remains politically the pivot of the world, at once an exciting and dangerous place.

  For as long as I can remember cricketers (and other sportsmen) have been reluctant to go there. That had something to do with the food, something with the feeling that, in the days before neutral umpires, no one would get a fair deal from local officials, and not a little to do with fear, both of the known and the unknown. Foreign Office advice, even at the most peaceful times, has always been to travel there with caution.

  The profoundly depressing and all too convincing allegations of spot-fixing by some of its cricketers in 2010 underlined the fact that, as Imran Khan has always publicly claimed, deep-seated corruption is at the heart of the country’s problems, insidiously creeping through cricket as it does through every other part of life in the sixth most populous country in the world. As another senior contemporary politician, Sardar Abdul Qayyum Khan Jatoi, federal minister of the People’s Party, expressed it: ‘If a thousand people are engaging in corruption, the one who does not is hurting himself.’

  The country has been out of bounds to touring cricket teams and their entourages since the grotesque attack by terrorist gunmen on the Sri Lanka team, travelling to a day’s play at the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore on the third morning of a Test match on 3 March 2009. Naïvely, as these atrocities proved, I had always argued until then that the fears of those players who refused to go there were without foundation. Cricketers, I wrongly believed, would never be a target in a land where it was the most popular sporting interest.

  I had never hurried to the front of the queue to go to Pakistan, more for family reasons, and the fact that tours there were generally deemed to be lower key than those to Australia, India, South Africa and the West Indies, than because I believed that it was a dangerous place for anyone to go merely as a cricket reporter. Now that the country is for the foreseeable future out of bounds to touring teams, however, it seems more than ever a privilege to have been there, to have watched some of the greatest cricketers ever produced by any country and to have experienced at first hand some of the paradoxes of a poor, beleaguered nation, battered frequently by natural disasters, constantly undermined by corruption and political violence, yet characterised by proud, proficient, devout and in many ways disciplined people.

  As in India there is not a little red tape in Pakistan. Even getting a visa from the Pakistan High Commission in London is a day-long experience. The last time that I did it I decided to arrive as soon as the relevant office in Kensington was open, catching an early train to be sure. I need not have bothered. The queues outside were long and, once in the crowded room where the process is started – dingily lit, musty, smelling of sweat: a microcosm of Pakistan bureaucracy in the heart of London – I got into the wrong queue. Journalists had to get a special stamp from a special executive and I was told that it might not be possible to get the visa that day. I used all my powers of persuasion and the relevant official’s love of cricket, to get him to bend the rules and was eventually told to come back at four pm, after prayers. Foolishly I had chosen a Friday.

  I first went to Pakistan in early October
1987, to cover matches there and in India in the first of the three World Cups held to date on the subcontinent. My pocket diary gives an indication of how my life then (and ever since) has been filled fairly close to the brim. The three days before my departure read: Friday: Office in morning. Leave Redhill 1pm. Filing, prepare dinner party wine, chairs etc, mow lawns. Dinner party 8pm: Bonds, Palmers, Wigans, Lloyds, Watsons. (Judy has never thought it a big deal to cook a three-course meal for twelve without any help). Saturday: prune raspberries, clear grate, collect logs, filing, finish lawns (?). Sunday: Chapel, Radley; golf; Angela party. Monday: To Lahore.

  ‘To Lahore’ was not as simple a journey as it sounds. At Kuwait, where the plane stopped either to refuel or to take on new passengers, more bags were counted onto the plane than there should have been. Even then, before 9/11, security staff were aware of the possibility of a bomb being planted in unaccompanied luggage. The holds were emptied and the 400 passengers had to be ushered onto the hot tarmac to identify their own baggage.

  The whole process took four hours and the consequence was that I and seven other journalists on our way to cover the tournament missed our onward flight from Karachi to Lahore. We felt safety in numbers but it was frustrating, the more so when we were obliged to take our place with a huge scrum of pushing locals at Karachi airport, all presumably also trying to catch the 8.45 flight. The airport hall was hot, crowded and dimly lit and in all respects that was typical of travel on the subcontinent. Flights from one city to another were often late and always uncomfortable.

  By comparison, life was relatively straightforward once I got to Pakistan. Everything there revolved around travel, cricket and serving my two masters at that time, the BBC and The Cricketer. The country was going through one of its quieter periods and I remember writing home that Pakistan seemed more efficient than India, not least because all the BBC lines booked actually came up on time.