Playing It My Way: My Autobiography

by Sachin Tendulkar

  In the World Cup, India failed to make the semi-finals, despite being competitive in most of the matches. We lost to England and Australia by the narrow margin of nine runs and one run respectively and our second match against Sri Lanka at Mackay on 28 February was washed out because of rain.

  The high point of the tournament for us was the match against eventual winners Pakistan on 4 March 1992 at Sydney. After two consecutive defeats, we were determined to turn things round against Pakistan. Batting first, we had to negotiate a hostile spell of fast bowling from Wasim Akram. At one stage he was bowling magnificently to Vinod Kambli and, batting at the other end, I just kept telling Vinod to nudge the ball and run. We put together an important partnership and I followed it up with another with Kapil Dev, who scored a valuable 35 off just twenty-six balls. I was unbeaten on 54 at the end of the innings.

  Our total of 216 wasn’t a big score to defend, but we started well and Kapil Dev and Prabakhar picked up two early wickets for very little on the board. Our bowlers and fielders were charged up and there was a lot of chat out in the middle. We were cheering each other on and giving the Pakistan batsmen a hard time.

  This match is often remembered for the tussle between our wicketkeeper Kiran More and Javed Miandad. Javed, if I remember right, was having back spasms and could not play his strokes freely. He was finding it difficult to bat but was performing an uncharacteristic job for his team, trying to anchor the innings and hold up one end. Behind the stumps, Kiran was constantly up and down, shouting out instructions to our bowlers, saying Javed was in no position to play his shots. Infuriated at the continuous chatter, Javed imitated Kiran’s actions by doing a frog jump. We were all stunned and amused at the same time and this tiff between Kiran and Javed made the eventual victory even sweeter.

  I bowled my full quota of ten overs, conceding just 37 runs and picking up the vital wicket of opener Aamer Sohail. It was a satisfying win and by the end of the match I had completely lost my voice because of all the shouting. It was the first time India had played Pakistan in the World Cup since the inception of the tournament in 1975 and it was the start of a string of victories against them in World Cups. The 1992 victory was particularly pleasing because I was also Player of the Match.

  When we returned to India at the end of March after four and a half months in Australia I was a transformed cricketer. The 1991–92 Australia tour undoubtedly had a fundamental impact on my career.

  A brave man

  The story of the Australia tour is incomplete without a story that has stayed with me over the years. It involves Venkatapathy Raju, our left-arm spinner, and Merv Hughes. They were great pals and on a flight to Perth, which is a little under four hours from Sydney, we dared Raju, one of the skinniest cricketers in the team, to go and grab Hughes’s famous thick moustache. Merv, a huge man, was known for his volatile temper and most of us were convinced that Raju would chicken out in the end. To our surprise, he boldly went up to Merv and pulled his moustache, a feat of incredible bravery – or foolishness. Merv took it all very sportingly and the act was applauded by everyone on the flight, making Raju an instant hero.

  * * *

  India in New Zealand 1990

  1st Test. Christchurch. 2–5 February 1990

  New Zealand 459 (JG Wright 185, KR Rutherford 69, AH Jones 52) and 2–0

  India 164 (NS Sidhu 51, M Azharuddin 48, SR Tendulkar 0; DK Morrison 5–75) and 296 (f/o) (WV Raman 96, SR Tendulkar 24; RJ Hadlee 4–69)

  New Zealand won by 10 wickets

  2nd Test. Napier. 9–13 February 1990

  India 358–9 dec (M Prabhakar 95, SR Tendulkar 88, KS More 73; DK Morrison 5–98)

  New Zealand 178–1 (JG Wright 113*, TJ Franklin 50)

  Match drawn

  3rd Test. Auckland. 22–26 February 1990

  New Zealand 391 (IDS Smith 173, RJ Hadlee 87; AS Wassan 4–108) and 483–5 dec (AH Jones 170*, MD Crowe 113, JG Wright 74)

  India 482 (M Azharuddin 192, AS Wassan 53, KS More 50, SR Tendulkar 5; DK Morrison 5–145) and 149–0 (M Prabhakar 63*, WV Raman 72*)

  Match drawn

  New Zealand won the series 1–0

  India in England 1990

  1st Test. Lord’s. 26–31 July 1990

  England 653–4 dec (GA Gooch 333, AJ Lamb 139, RA Smith 100*) and 272–4 dec (GA Gooch 123, MA Atherton 72)

  India 454 (M Azharuddin 121, RJ Shastri 100, Kapil Dev 77, SR Tendulkar 10; ARC Fraser 5–104) and 224 (SK Sharma 38, SR Tendulkar 27)

  England won by 247 runs

  2nd Test. Old Trafford, Manchester. 9–14 August 1990

  England 519 (MA Atherton 131, RA Smith 121*, GA Gooch 116; ND Hirwani 4–174) and 320–4 dec (AJ Lamb 109, MA Atherton 74, RA Smith 61*)

  India 432 (M Azharuddin 179, SV Manjrekar 93, SR Tendulkar 68; ARC Fraser 5–124) and 343–6 (SR Tendulkar 119*, M Prabhakar 67*, SV Manjrekar 50)

  Match drawn

  3rd Test. The Oval. 23–28 August 1990

  India 606–9 dec (RJ Shastri 187, Kapil Dev 110, M Azharuddin 78, KS More 61*, SR Tendulkar 21)

  England 340 (GA Gooch 85, RA Smith 57, EE Hemmings 51; M Prabhakar 4–74) and 477–4 dec (f/o) (DI Gower 157*, GA Gooch 88, MA Atherton 86, AJ Lamb 52)

  Match drawn

  England won the series 1–0

  India in Australia 1991–92

  1st Test. Brisbane. 29 November–2 December 1991

  India 239 (M Prabhakar 54*, SR Tendulkar 16; CJ McDermott 5–54) and 156 (RJ Shastri 41, SR Tendulkar 7; CJ McDermott 4–47, MG Hughes 4–50)

  Australia 340 (MA Taylor 94, DC Boon 66; Kapil Dev 4–80) and 58–0

  Australia won by 10 wickets

  2nd Test. Melbourne. 26–29 December 1991

  India 263 (KS More 67*, SR Tendulkar 15; BA Reid 6–66) and 213 (DB Vengsarkar 54, SR Tendulkar 40; BA Reid 6–66)

  Australia 349 (GR Marsh 86, IA Healy 60, DM Jones 59; Kapil Dev 5–97, M Prabhakar 4–84) and 128–2 (MA Taylor 60, DC Boon 44*)

  Australia won by 8 wickets

  3rd Test. Sydney. 2–6 January 1992

  Australia 313 (DC Boon 129*, MA Taylor 56) and 173–8 (AR Border 53*; RJ Shastri 4–45, SR Tendulkar 1–2)

  India 483 (RJ Shastri 206, SR Tendulkar 148*, DB Vengsarkar 54; CJ McDermott 4–147)

  Match drawn

  4th Test. Adelaide. 25–29 January 1992

  Australia 145 (DM Jones 41; SLV Raju 3–11, Kapil Dev 3–33, SR Tendulkar 2–10) and 451 (DC Boon 135*, MA Taylor 100, AR Border 91*; Kapil Dev 5–130)

  India 225 (Kapil Dev 56, SR Tendulkar 6; CJ McDermott 5–76) and 333 (M Azharuddin 106, M Prabhakar 64, SR Tendulkar 17; CJ McDermott 5–92)

  Australia won by 38 runs

  5th Test. Perth. 1–5 February 1992

  Australia 346 (DC Boon 107, AR Border 59, TM Moody 50; M Prabhakar 5–101) and 367–6 dec (DM Jones 150*, TM Moody 101)

  India 272 (SR Tendulkar 114, KS More 43; MR Whitney 4–68, MG Hughes 4–82) and 141 (K Srikkanth 38, SR Tendulkar 5; MR Whitney 7–27)

  Australia won by 300 runs

  Australia won the series 4–0

  India in the 1992 World Cup

  2nd match. England v India at Perth. 22 February 1992

  England 236–9 (50/50 ov); India 227 (49.2/50 ov)

  England won by 9 runs

  9th match. India v Sri Lanka at Mackay. 28 February 1992

  India 1–0 (0.2/20 ov)

  No result

  12th match. Australia v India at Brisbane. 1 March 1992

  Australia 237–9 (50/50 ov); India 234 (47/47 ov, target: 236)

  Australia won by 1 run (revised target)

  16th match. India v Pakistan at Sydney. 4 March 1992

  India 216–7 (49/49 ov); Pakistan 173 (48.1/49 ov)

  India won by 43 runs

  19th match. India v Zimbabwe a
t Hamilton. 7 March 1992

  India 203–7 (32/32 ov); Zimbabwe 104–1 (19.1/19 ov, target: 159)

  India won by 55 runs (revised target)

  24th match. India v West Indies at Wellington. 10 March 1992

  India 197 (49.4/50 ov); West Indies 195–5 (40.2/46 ov, target: 195)

  West Indies won by 5 wickets (with 34 balls remaining) (revised target)

  27th match. New Zealand v India at Dunedin. 12 March 1992

  India 230–6 (50/50 ov); New Zealand 231–6 (47.1/50 ov)

  New Zealand won by 4 wickets (with 17 balls remaining)

  32nd match. India v South Africa at Adelaide. 15 March 1992

  India 180–6 (30/30 ov); South Africa 181–4 (29.1/30 ov)

  South Africa won by 6 wickets (with 5 balls remaining)

  Final. England v Pakistan at Melbourne. 25 March 1992

  Pakistan 249–6 (50/50 ov); England 227 (49.2/50 ov)

  Pakistan won by 22 runs

  5

  ANJALI

  As I was trying to establish myself as an international cricketer, my personal life changed dramatically in August 1990 when I met Anjali, my future wife. It was the beginning of by far the best partnership of my life.

  I had just landed in Mumbai on our return from the 1990 tour of England and was waiting to pick up my bags when I first saw an extremely attractive woman looking down from the viewing gallery in the airport. Little did I know then that I had just seen my life partner. She was standing with a friend of hers, Dr Aparna Santhanam, now a well-known dermatologist in Mumbai. We had fleeting eye contact and then she disappeared.

  The next I saw of the two of them was when I was making my way out of the airport. I spotted Anjali, dressed in an orange T-shirt and blue jeans, running out of the gate, apparently chasing after me. That was not all, because she soon started yelling, ‘He is sooooo cute!’ I felt awkward and started to blush, as I knew both Ajit and Nitin were waiting outside to take me home. My childhood friend Sunil Harshe was with me and he murmured in my ear that a very good-looking girl was calling my name and seemed keen to meet up with me. I had of course seen her and found her particularly attractive, but I told him there was no way I could speak to her at the time, not with Ajit and Nitin around.

  The years of courtship

  Anjali and I courted each other for five years between 1990 and 1995, a commitment that led to engagement and finally marriage. It has to be said that the two of us come from very different backgrounds. Anjali is half Gujarati, half English and is a South Mumbai girl from a very well-to-do family. She went to St Xavier’s College and then studied medicine at JJ Hospital. She was well-spoken and had an upbringing fundamentally different from my own. In her family, wearing Western outfits was the norm. My situation was completely different. I had hardly ever been out of my colony and had always mingled with cricket friends. I had never gone out with a girl, let alone brought one home. Unlike most men of my age, who were able to meet girls at college, I had been playing for India from the age of sixteen and simply hadn’t had the opportunity.

  While I first saw Anjali at Mumbai airport, it turns out that she had actually seen me a few weeks earlier on 14 August, when I got my first Test hundred at Old Trafford. At the time she was in England with her parents, and her father, Anand Mehta, a former national bridge champion and a serious cricket fan, had called her to catch a glimpse of the innings on television. However, she had no interest in cricket and didn’t watch at all. Soon afterwards she came back to India and it was when she went to the airport to receive her mother, Annabel, who is English but has worked in India tirelessly as a social worker for more than three decades, that we ran into each other for the first time.

  The day after she saw me at the airport – and this is her version, by the way – she asked a friend of hers, Mufi Muffazal Lakdawala (who played club cricket and is now a very well-known surgeon), if he could get her my phone number. After coming home from the airport, she apparently jokingly declared to her parents that she had seen the man she wanted to marry.

  Mufi did get her my number but it was pure chance that I happened to pick up her call. There were no mobile phones then and I was hardly ever at home to pick up the land line. The stars, I can say in hindsight, were aligned. She said she was the girl from the airport and asked if we could meet. While not trying to sound too eager, I told her that I remembered her and could meet with her at the Cricket Club of India, where I was playing. At first she did not believe me and asked if I could remember what she was wearing on the day I had first seen her. When I mentioned the orange T-shirt and blue jeans, she was impressed.

  She came along to the CCI, as we’d arranged, but we couldn’t really meet up and talk properly with so many people around. Being discreet was the best thing under the circumstances. All we did was exchange numbers and after that we started talking on the phone fairly regularly. It wasn’t long before my sister-in-law Meena began to suspect that something was cooking between the two of us. She often asked me about this girl who kept on calling me but I tried to avoid answering. I wasn’t used to discussing private things with my family and felt distinctly uncomfortable.

  Our first proper meeting finally happened at my house when we came up with the idea that Anjali should come over posing as a reporter wanting an interview. That was her first and last foray into journalism. A female reporter had never come to my home for an interview before and, in light of all the phone calls, my sister-in-law was particularly suspicious about who this special reporter was.

  For that first visit, I was keen to offer Anjali something to eat and was disappointed to see that hardly any of the chocolates I had brought back from England remained. In fact, there were only two left and in my keenness to salvage the situation I carefully cut them up and set a plate of chocolate pieces in front of her. She couldn’t stay for long, however, and our first meeting was much too brief for my liking.

  Despite being brief, it left a lasting impression. I simply felt happy in her presence. I can’t really pinpoint what I liked about her but what I can say is that I was able to relax and be myself with her from the very first day. I had intentionally spoken very little because I was worried about embarrassing myself by saying something stupid. She did most of the talking and that was fine with me. In any case, at the time I wasn’t as fluent with my English, which was the language of conversation. It was perhaps a defensive act, but Anjali never made me feel self-conscious. She was just the most ideal soulmate I could have asked for.

  While we continued to speak for long periods on the phone after our first meeting, we hardly ever got a chance to meet. On some occasions we did plan to meet at around 8.30 p.m. and go for a drive. However, it turned out that Anjali’s parents, who were unaware of the relationship then, were watching television and so, despite wanting to meet, Anjali was unable to leave the house without arousing suspicion. For my part, I drove all the way from Bandra to Warden Road, a journey of about forty minutes, and waited in the car until I was finally forced to turn back. Because of the risk of people recognizing me, I couldn’t even call her from the public phone close to her house (there were no mobiles then) and had to go all the way back to Bandra to find out what had gone wrong, then I’d ask her to try again and drive all the way back. Needless to say, I am now an ardent advocate of mobile technology!

  The second time we met was when Anjali suggested I pick her up from her house and we go for a drive in her Maruti 800, India’s most affordable small car in the early 1990s. She wanted to have coconut water along Marine Drive and it was the only time in our lives that we have sat on the bench opposite the Air India building in Mumbai drinking coconut water. In my eagerness to please her, I had agreed, despite knowing that there was a possibility of people spotting me and coming up to speak to me. The century in England had made me a household name and people had started to ask for autographs. I did not mention this to her in case she thought I wa
s pompous. Because Anjali knew nothing about cricket, it had never occurred to her that people might recognize me. She simply wasn’t aware of how public a cricketer’s life in India can be. It is true that there is hardly any privacy, which means that we’ve never been able to do the things couples normally do – watch a film, stop at roadside eateries in the evening, take a walk along the beach and the like. It was an adjustment Anjali and I had to make very early on in our lives together. The one time we tried to defy the odds was when a few of us – Anjali, her father Anand and some of our friends – went to see the film Roja in Worli in South Mumbai in 1993. We planned the outing meticulously and I put on a wig, a false moustache and glasses in an attempt to hide my identity. Things went smoothly till the interval, when I dropped my glasses and broke one of the lenses. My friends asked me not to put the broken spectacles back on just in case something went into my eye, but in my panic the moustache came off too and soon people recognized me, causing us all a lot of embarrassment. There was such pandemonium that we had to flee from the cinema halfway through the film.

  We had a similar experience in Switzerland just a few years ago, when we were holidaying as a family. I had suggested we stay in a chalet rather than in a hotel and do our own cooking. Things were going to plan till the day we decided to visit Interlaken, now famous for Indian tourists as the location of the hit Bollywood musical Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. We had planned to leave early in the morning and walk to the site. A few of our friends had advised us not to do so in case people recognized me on the way, so instead we hired a horse and carriage. Just as we were setting out, a few of the other Indian tourists spotted me. Within minutes they started following us and even when I told the carriage driver to go faster, they kept running behind us, trying to catch up. It was only when they realized that they couldn’t keep pace that they finally gave up.