The Dhoni Touch

by Bharat Sundaresan

  ‘Tabhi bhi nahi samjhe, aur abhi bhi nahi samajh rahe hai ki Mahi hai kya. (Even in those days they, the powers that be at MECON, did not understand what Mahi was, and even now they don’t.),’ the veteran curator puts things in perspective. By now, Chittu has ‘silenced’ at least half a dozen phone calls and when his phone rings yet another time, he turns around and points at one corner of the stadium to the left of the pavilion, and once again simply shakes his head. This time, though, he manages a few words.

  ‘They had promised to turn one section of the MECON ground into a Mahi museum. You have no idea how excited he was,’ says Chittu, his finger still pointing towards what looks like a mix of rubble and debris. ‘He had even kept his stuff ready to give away, but they never came for it.’ Chittu grits his teeth like there’s an invective on its way. But nothing. He goes back to shaking his head, now more vigorously than before.

  The repeated rebuffs that those close to him lament about have hardly deterred Dhoni from showing up at his literal ‘home ground’. He still shows up here whenever he’s in town and indulges in some nostalgia, something that he enjoys doing, says Chittu—which, in its own way, is surprising for someone who’s celebrated for living in the moment. Jena-da, now smiling, is quick to talk about the last time Dhoni came to the MECON stadium. It was when he was visiting a friend in the colony and heard that there was a junior soccer tournament underway at the venue. Unannounced, he just landed up at the stadium and rather than sit in the office room, plonked himself in the one concrete stand that provides a rather nice viewing experience of the action at the MECON stadium. What followed was an inevitable melee. Like it happens in India so often, thousands appeared literally out of nowhere and the stadium turned into an uncontrollable cauldron. The game, which had continued for a few minutes post Dhoni’s arrival, had to be halted, as security guards were called in to clear the crowd. Dhoni had no way out and there were even suggestions made that he jump down from the stands into the parking area—a good 12-feet drop—and make a quick getaway. Sanity prevailed though, and Jena-da insists that Dhoni stayed back and watched the match till it was over and even gave away a few prizes before leaving, in one piece.

  Jena-da too has his own recollections of Mahi before he became MSD. He and Dhoni’s father, Paan Singh, who moved to Ranchi from his village of Almora in Uttarakhand back in 1964, would play cards together on Sundays and public holidays. Jena-da now stays in the same quarters that Chittu and his mother used to, back in the day. He remembers how Paan Singh was never too appreciative of his son’s passion for sports—well documented now in the movie. But while he tried to stay clear of his son’s sporting exploits within the colony, Jena-da would catch Paan Singh slyly watching Mahi in action through the grooves on the stadium’s boundary wall facing their residence.

  ‘Though his office was behind the school, he would often go to the pump room for some routine work. On his way back, he would quietly go to that corner and watch Mahi bat, and even smile once in a while if he saw his son hit a boundary. He thought nobody knew. But we have known each other for thirty years and I can pick him out from afar. I never bothered him though, I didn’t want to ruin his special moment,’ says Jena-da.

  But Paan Singh, says the curator, didn’t appreciate his son compromising on his studies; he disliked Dhoni accepting the never-ending invites to play in tennis-ball cricket tournaments. ‘He would get angry, scold him, and come and complain to me. Our card games would be interspersed with his rants about how his (Dhoni’s) friends keep coming and taking him away to play in those “canvas-ball tournaments” as he would call them. “That tournament there, this tournament here, the boy shouldn’t lose focus on his studies, Jena-da,” he would tell me.’” Jena-da would generally just put an arm around the concerned father and tell him that his son was already creating a buzz with his batting feats and that he was made for bigger things.

  ‘That mahol (atmosphere) started with just the kids he used to play with. Nobody expected him to go too far. But soon the whole colony was talking about it (his cricketing feats). Before you knew it, everyone wanted a piece of Mahi, and everyone wanted to be part of what they assumed, and correctly so, would be a journey to superstardom, but still not quite like this. The boy would simply not leave the ground, and if it was raining heavily, he would be the first one out with his football,’ he says.

  Even though this is peak summer, the light fades fast in the east of India. Chittu wants us to get going so that we can take a few pictures of the colony before it’s too late. As he’s about to leave, Jena-da taps him on the shoulder and whispers something into his ear. It’s something to do with him not receiving payment for a job he’d done at another ground. Chittu pacifies the old man and tells him that it’ll be done. It’s a role that Chittu ends up playing wherever he goes—that of the proxy agent, caretaker and problem-solver for pretty much everyone close to Dhoni. And he does it well.

  We are now right outside N171 where Dhoni grew up. There are a few kids playing cricket in the gully parallel to the building. Chittu politely asks them to continue with the game as it would enhance my photograph of the place. Understandably, the batsman, who’d till then been trying to pierce the tiny gap between the two fielders on the off-side, now wants to only attempt the helicopter shot. He has, of course, been informed about the purpose of my visit and the boy knows exactly whose former house he’s batting next to.

  ‘Some trivia for you,’ says Chittu, pointing at the building, ‘you know he used to stay on the first floor, but when they were shooting for the movie they couldn’t get a good shot of that house from here. So, we convinced the residents on the second floor, above what was Mahi’s home, to allow us a few days to shoot at their house.’ Chittu should know. He was the unofficial consultant for the movie and spent hours and days with the scriptwriters and director, taking them around the many points of interest in Ranchi, including the MECON Colony.

  N171 was a two-room house with one wall covered with Sachin Tendulkar posters, thanks to the young boy who grew up dreaming of one day playing cricket for his country. This love and immense respect for Tendulkar never faded away even after Dhoni took over as Indian captain and, technically, had his idol play under him. ‘On the field, Dhoni was always the captain. Tendulkar might suggest a bowling change to him, ask him to bring on a spinner, but Mahi would tell him politely that it wasn’t a great idea, and would stick to his plan of keeping the fast bowler going. He always remained the General. But if Mahi ever saw Sachin walking towards him in a hotel lobby, he would always instinctively give way. That was out of genuine respect and he never ever was faking it,’ says one close confidant of Dhoni.

  And how can we forget the mobile guard of honour that Dhoni instigated at the Wankhede stadium in November 2013 on Tendulkar’s final moments as an international cricketer. There’s a fascinating episode narrated to me by someone quite close to both wherein Sakshi wanted Tendulkar’s autograph before his final Test in Mumbai. And despite being captain, Dhoni kept dilly-dallying, but Sakshi had had enough. It was the night before the match—Tendulkar’s 200th and final Test, against the West Indies at the Wankhede—and the Dhonis ended up outside Sachin’s room after much deliberation, with Dhoni insisting it wasn’t a great idea to disturb him. He waited for a couple of minutes before knocking, and once Sachin opened the door and asked them to come in, Dhoni is believed to have rather sheepishly said, ‘Sorry, Sachin, she wants your autograph on this shirt. Aap jaldi de do (You please give it to us quickly), and we’ll be off.’ Despite Tendulkar’s insistence that the two should come in, Dhoni had his way and Sakshi the autograph.

  The Dhoni family moved out of N171 in 2005—the year he scored those two breathtaking ODI centuries, including the highest score for a wicketkeeper in 50-over cricket, 183 not out against Sri Lanka at Jaipur—and into a bigger house within the colony. It was an individual house with a garden at the back. And this is our last stop as the light has all but faded. Meanwhile, Chittu has already set up my n
ext meeting. It’s with Keshav Lal Banerjee, the man who turned Dhoni into the cricketer we all know, or, as Chittu puts it, ‘The only cricket coach Mahi has ever had.’

  3

  The Portrait of a Cricketer as a Young Boy

  It’s been around ten minutes since Chittu and I walked into the vast premises of the DAV school. Like the rest of the city, DAV is an interesting blend of now and then. The main school building itself is two-storey high. It’s a modular concrete building with perforated screens and tiled roofs. What catches my eye though are the many open spaces around, not a sight that metro cities offer. The bracket-shaped building allows for plenty of space in the middle for the kids to indulge in a variety of activities. It also turns into a mini-auditorium whenever their most famous alumnus shows up as chief guest for a function. The premises are big enough to have a number of gated entrances at various vantage points around the school. Our entry is through Gate No. 3. It’s the month of May and it’s the holiday season. But there is still some activity as kids walk in and out carrying their badminton racquets. The air is pleasanter here than outside, thanks to the handsome smattering of green on all sides.

  Around the back is where the cricket nets are. The sun has more or less set completely over the MECON Colony but I still find a young man—a potential batting star in the making, according to my guide, Chittu—in full gear facing throwdowns from another boy who looks younger than him. The setting is quiet enough for the thud of willow on leather to echo around the area. It’s in the midst of this impressive display that I first come across Banerjee sir.

  I hear Banerjee sir before I see him. He’s much older than his pictures suggest but has retained a stable gait and a strong posture. There’s every bit of the sports master about the man. I’m soon escorted to the school premises and a security guard is asked to unlock the door to the principal’s office. ‘He (the principal), like most of the kids, is away on vacation. So we can use his room,’ says Banerjee. I’m welcomed into a room—with wooden showcases, chairs and a wide desk—which is just so prototypically a principal’s office that it gives me a few nostalgic shudders about the many visits that I have made to this esteemed section at my own school. Before we begin, he apologizes again for having kept me waiting.

  It is difficult to imagine Keshav Ranjan Banerjee having ever been a hard man when you look at him now. So when he talks about the tough time he gave M.S. Dhoni and his school team after they lost a must-win game, I simply can’t believe him, or maybe I don’t want to. The story goes that DAV school were up against what their long-standing coach describes as a ‘faaltu’ (useless) team in a league match. Dhoni was among the senior boys in the team, and they ended up losing the match. It wasn’t so much the loss that irked Banerjee. He recalls the boys having taken it a tad easy against the underdogs and being lacklustre in their approach.

  ‘I was irate. I was very upset too. As they walked off the field, I shouted at them, insisting that only the younger members of the team would be allowed to get on to the bus, and the senior boys, including Mahi, would have to walk back to the school or wherever they wanted to go. The bus would leave without them,’ Banerjee recalls. True to his word, the coach and the kids left with the bus, leaving Mahi and company stranded. The ground was in Harmu—where Dhoni now lives—which was a good 6 km away from the school. It was a warm summer’s day and the boys had already felt the brunt of the unforgiving sun on the field.

  Still seething, but now slightly concerned about the boys, Banerjee waited at the school gate for the boys to return. Around half hour later, he spotted them trundling up the road with Mahi in the lead. He still remembers Mahi’s face all too vividly. It was placid as ever and there was even a hint of a smile as he spotted his coach from a distance.

  ‘I’m sure they took a lift. The ground was quite far. It was a punishment, but more importantly, I wanted them to realize what they had done. I wanted to see how they would react to this. Mahi didn’t flinch or even have a frown on his face. Most kids will react. But he was the main player. And clearly, he’d asked the rest to simply follow his lead. Nothing has changed about him even now,’ recalls Banerjee. Thinking back, the coach admits to having been a tad worried about the repercussions of his radical lesson on discipline.

  ‘You never know. I was half expecting some pitaji (a dad) to come and complain to me the next day, saying, “So what if they lost a game. How could you leave my son stranded, and make him walk so far in the sun?” But nobody came.’ It was only much later that Banerjee found out through one of the boys that Mahi had told his teammates to keep the issue under wraps and not inform the parents.

  ‘Of all the boys he was the only one to realize exactly why I had not allowed them on the bus,’ Banerjee says with a smile. The way he would do over and over again as an international cricketer, here too, Dhoni had analysed the situation in front of him with a calm mind. Instead of panicking, he had found a solution to it—hitching a ride and also ensuring that the purpose behind his coach’s exercise wasn’t wasted, which it would have been if even one of his teammates had informed the parents. Dhoni had learnt his lesson, and along the way, also revealed something vital about himself to Banerjee.

  Some two decades later, the coach recalls this incident as one of the prime reasons he’s always felt with great conviction that ‘Mahi hamesha sabse hatke tha, aur hamesha hatke rahega. (Mahi was always different from every one, and will always remain so.)’

  He doesn’t stop there. ‘I come across nearly 4000 to 5000 kids a day at school. In my career, I’ve seen some 60,000 to 70,000 walk in through those gates, grow up in front of my eyes and then walk out. But none have walked in like Mahi did, and none have walked out like he did,’ Banerjee asserts.

  Banerjee sir isn’t an elusive man like Chittu. He was originally a sports teacher in Kolkata before shifting to Ranchi a year after Dhoni joined DAV in kindergarten. He does interviews, quite often too. But he doesn’t generally delve too deeply into a summation of his favourite student’s personality. This is different though, he tells me. Mahi himself has given the go-ahead. Seated to my right, Chittu nods in agreement, followed by a reiteration.

  ‘There are a lot of people who claim to have been responsible for the Mahi phenomenon. Some claim to be mentors, others claim to be coaches. But, according to me and Mahi himself, he’s had only one coach, and that’s sir,’ Chittu says, pointing at the elderly gentleman seated on the other side of the wooden desk. Banerjee flashes a shy smile in response and reveals with pride how his former pupil had told those making the Dhoni movie that there was only man responsible for playing cupid between him and cricket.

  The start of Dhoni’s affair with cricket has been well documented over the years. Long before Sushant Singh Rajput and Rajesh Sharma added a dollop of Bollywood flavour to how Banerjee transformed a football-crazy goalkeeper into the most successful wicketkeeper batsman in Indian cricket history, it had already become one of the most popular tales of sporting discoveries of our times. But the coach doesn’t mind repeating it one more time for my benefit.

  Perhaps the most fascinating part of how Banerjee and Dhoni came across each other for the first time is how clichéd it is. It’s a scene played out almost every year in every school around the country. A desperate coach suddenly in need of some players as his main ones approach the dreaded black hole of their school sports careers—the tenth to twelfth standard phase. Banerjee’s need was dire. He needed to fill a vacancy that required a long-term candidate. DAV’s wicketkeeper at that point happened to be in Class XI and with less than a year of school cricket left in him.

  Wicketkeepers are like good bassists for a metal band. They’re difficult to find, and when you do find a good one, you never want to let him go. Banerjee didn’t have much time left. ‘Academics always got precedence over sport here, and once a kid was in twelfth, khel-kood bandh (no more sports). That’s it. No questions asked. I couldn’t just go and say, “Chod ke aao. (Leave that and come.)” I was sick and tire
d of finding wicketkeepers in the eighth or ninth standards and then having to let them go after a couple of years. Mahi was in sixth then. And I just dragged him in. He was the perfect fit in so many ways,’ Banerjee says.

  There’s an unbridled joy you see in Dhoni whenever he’s involved in a game of football. It’s different from what we get to see on the cricket field. He even reacts a lot more. He might finish off ODIs and T20s with a last-over six and nonchalantly walk off like it’s just business as usual; but he celebrates almost every goal he scores in the mandatory football matches that the Indian team indulges in at the start of every practice session. And you’ll never see him miss out on any opportunity to show off his striking skills in the celebrity football matches that are usually played in Mumbai.

  Even back when Banerjee had turned him from goalkeeper to wicketkeeper, Dhoni’s love for football didn’t suffer. The coach recalls him playing football for the school regularly till around the tenth standard. And Banerjee never stopped him either.

  ‘He used to have football shoes in his bag always, and when cricket practice would be called off due to heavy rains, he would go and play football. I never stopped him like some coaches would say, “No, no, you’re a cricketer.”’

  Banerjee is an old-school coach in all other respects though. He abhors the practice of parents carrying kitbags and accompanying their kids to practice. He doesn’t appreciate them interfering in their children’s sport. Before becoming a coach, he was a teacher. He always believed that kids needed to learn how to fend for themselves.