by James Astill
We sat on, drinking tea together and enjoying the sunshine and the sound of bat on ball. A grey pi-dog ambled across the outfield, ignored by the fielders.
It became obvious why Haresh, who described himself as a specialist in ‘politics, crime, obituaries and cricket’, was so stricken by the corruption in cricket. He was a serious fan, who had devoted much of his life to reading, thinking and talking about the game. No sort of a cricketer himself, Haresh had spent much of his youth writing fan mail to famous players all around the world. He had received over 100 replies, he said – including ten letters from the great Donald Bradman. ‘I will never part with them,’ he said. ‘Nor will I ever reveal what Sir Don wrote to me ...’ I wondered, briefly, what he meant by that.
Haresh’s favourite player was Gundappa Viswanath, a wristy Bangalorean batsman of the 1970s. Vishy, as he was known, is the Indian aficionado’s favourite. He scored fewer runs than his brother-in-law Sunil Gavaskar, yet was especially revered by many who watched them playing together in the 1970s. Gavaskar was a genius, yet restrained himself, husbanding his talent, in ruthless pursuit of runs. Vishy was an artist, who played in a style that was beautiful and carefree. He was also, unlike Gavaskar, loved by opponents for his graciousness in victory or defeat.
I told Haresh that my own hero was David Gower, an English batsman not dissimilar to Vishy. Haresh sighed. ‘Gower, yes, he was a beautiful player. But he was also lucky to be English and written about by English writers. Vishy’s misfortune was to be born Indian, which meant he never got the recognition he deserved. You know, sometimes I think you need a great writer to make a great cricketer.’
‘You don’t sound like a man out of love with cricket ...’
‘I didn’t say I was!’ said Haresh, looking shocked. ‘I said I had lost my passion for the game. But it is still cricket, so of course I still love it.’
The last Baroda wicket fell and the players began trooping in. The groundstaff, women wearing salwar kameez and long dupatta scarves, walked out to sweep the pitch with bundles of twigs. Haresh and I then drained our tea and set off for Rajkot, and the office of the cricket association.
Shah was there, chatting with some of his officers. He was wearing an India team tracksuit and was nowhere near as friendly as he had been in Mumbai.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘what is it?’
I congratulated him on the Project. But Shah frowned. ‘Hmm. It is quite good. But what we need there is an integrated hotel. That is very essential now. Because we spend lots of money on hotels so we need our own.’
There was not much else the Project would lack. It would soon have an indoor cricket school, a swimming pool, several restaurants and a health club. It would be one of the smartest stadiums in India. This was in sharp contrast to the rest of Shah’s domain. Rajkot, a city of 1.5 million people, in one of India’s historic cricket regions, had only five other turf pitches. They included those at the Rajkumar College and at the city’s Madhavrao Scindia stadium, which had hosted 12 one-day internationals. Outside Rajkot, in the seven districts of Gujarat that comprise Saurashtra, the situation was much worse. By Shah’s reckoning, only three or four had a cricket pitch worthy of the description.
‘We are running cricket in Rajkot, basically,’ he conceded. ‘Next I will start spending in the districts. I will see if I can find six or seven acres of ground, then we can have a pitch.’
I asked why he had not done this already. It seemed odd that he had chosen instead to build a wonderful modern stadium, at a cost of around £15 million, in a city that already had a perfectly serviceable one. The Project looked to me like a temple of concrete to Shah’s enormous personal ambition.
The badshah glowered across his desk. But Haresh, as a local cricket reporter, could not afford a row with him. ‘Niranjan-ji, who is your favourite cricketer?’ he asked soothingly.
Shah grinned. ‘Well everyone has to say Sachin, don’t they?’ he replied, then chuckled in self-delight, as if he was about to say something daring. ‘But I have to say it – Sehwag!’
Now it was Haresh’s turn to fall silent. He wore a look of mild disdain, and I felt sure I could imagine his thoughts. ‘Sehwag indeed! What of Vinoo Mankad? What of our Vishy?’
We left Shah soon after. But I called him again a couple of days later, with a question I had forgotten to ask. ‘Mr Shah, who is Karen Stevens?’
The big man of Saurashtra cricket wasn’t sure. ‘She’s from quote book,’ he said. ‘Maybe poet.’
At 7am the next day, I left my hotel to find Haresh waiting for me. Rajkot was already bustling with the morning rituals of provincial India. Barrow boys in grubby slacks and shirts were rearranging piles of bananas, potatoes and papaya on the narrow pavements. Cows moved slowly among them, flicking their tails at the clouds of flies that were rising with the warming sun. A clanging of temple bells could be heard above the buzzing of scooters and auto-rickshaws that were already choking the city’s streets.
We made our way to another of Rajkot’s cricket grounds, this one owned by Indian Railways. It was a more modest ground, flat at least, but with no facilities to speak of, and surrounded by scruffy concrete apartment blocks for railway workers. In a corner of the ground, a pair of tattered nets had been erected around two practice pitches, one of dirt, the other made of concrete.
A broad-shouldered man, dressed in an old tracksuit, was standing halfway down the concrete strip, lobbing cricket balls at an adolescent boy. Behind him, half a dozen teenagers were standing in a silent huddle, waiting to be invited to bowl.
The man, whose name was Arvind Pujara, was delivering the balls in a ten-pin bowling style, with a fast underarm action. Striding forward confidently, the young batsman drove them off the middle of his bat into the tattered netting. He looked a good young player. But Arvind was unhappy. ‘He has talent, that is not the problem,’ he said as I approached, barely looking up. ‘But he’s so late. At the age of 13 my son had already scored a triple-century. He needs a lot of practice but because he lives far away he cannot come here often. Look at that! He’s standing right but he’s not watching the ball on to the bat. He’s a good boy but it will be very difficult for him to succeed.’
Arvind, now a grey-haired 50-year-old, had been a cricketer himself. He was a good enough wicketkeeper-batsman to play half a dozen games for Saurashtra and Indian Railways. But, unlike the badshah, who made frequent reference to his own inglorious career, Arvind hardly referred to it. He wasn’t a bad player, he had told me, when we met the evening before. But he was poor, so had been unable to practise much, and had left the game early. Arvind’s contribution to cricket came later.
For nearly two decades he had provided daily coaching on the railways ground, free of charge, to the sons of poor railway workers. That described most of the teenage bowlers lining up behind us, most of whom lived in the adjoining flats. The batsman, Kalpesh, was the son of a woman who cleaned Arvind’s house.
Arvind had spent most of the little money he had ever saved on this hobby. Having worked as a clerk on the railways, he was not charged for using the ground. But he had to buy the cricket balls – ‘season balls’ as Indians call them – and as they were quickly shredded on the rough concrete surface this was a considerable expense. The balls cost 80 rupees each, which had been about half Arvind’s daily wage as a clerk. Even before his recent retirement, he had therefore been dipping into his pension fund to pay for them.
But now consider the return on this investment. Arvind had coached around 20 seriously committed boys at the railways ground. He was not especially selective, he said. ‘Sometimes, when a boy has no talent, I tell him to go away and concentrate on his schoolwork instead. But this has not happened very often. Most boys can learn. Hard work, that is what is required.’ Of Arvind’s 20 pupils, four had played for Saurashtra. Another four were currently playing for Saurashtra’s junior teams. And one, his own son Cheteshwar, a tall 23-year-old batsman with a fine, classical technique, had done rather better.
A few months earlier ‘Chintu’, as he was called, had played his first Test for India.
Haresh had taken me to meet Arvind at the small concrete house he shared with his son. I was immediately struck by the force of his manner, which was not usual in a poor man. Arvind seemed not remotely fazed to see a foreigner on his doorstep late in the evening. Courteously, he had ushered us inside.
‘When did you realise that your son was talented?’ I asked.
Without answering, Arvind got up off the floor where he was sitting and left the room. He returned with a small, faded photograph, which he handed to me. It showed a small boy swiping at a bouncing rubber ball with a toy bat.
‘Do you see it?’ Arvind said eagerly. I looked hard, wanting to see what he had seen. The ball was in reach of Chintu’s flailing bat, about two feet off the ground. I looked harder.
‘He’s really watching the ball. Is that right?’
Arvind nodded approvingly. ‘When this photograph came back from the shop, I showed it to his mother, who was very intelligent,’ he said. And he gestured to a black-and-white picture of a woman’s face, garlanded with marigolds, on the wall behind him. It was a portrait of Chintu’s mother, Reena.
‘I said to her, “I think this boy may learn cricket easily,”’ Arvind continued. ‘She said to me, “Then you must teach him.”’
The family was living in a flat in the Railways colony at the time. So every morning before work Arvind started taking his four-year-old son to the ground. There he set him in front of a tree and lobbed a rubber ball at him, underarm, 50 or 100 throws at a time.
‘Let me show you my method,’ he said, leaping up. He grabbed a newspaper and, in the urgent, muscular way that he had, rolled it up and began brandishing it like a cricket bat.
‘A boy must learn to play straight,’ he said, assuming a batting stance. ‘Like this and like this,’ said Arvind, moving his front leg forward into a drive, then back to his stance, then forward again. ‘And, see, this is my method,’ he said, now miming bowling a ball with his ten-pin bowler’s stride.
‘A boy cannot play straight, as he must, if the ball bounces up – here – above his knees. That is why it must be pitched underarm ... like this ... and he must come forwards ... like this ... to hit the ball on this side and – see – on that side. This is my method.’
After only a few months, Arvind introduced a ‘season ball’ to Chintu’s practice sessions.
‘But he was tiny!’ I said. ‘Surely he was too young?’
‘No,’ said Arvind firmly. ‘I wanted him to get used to it. I didn’t want to put fear in his heart by avoiding it.’
Facing a hard leather ball, Chintu needed batting pads but there were none small enough. So his father cut an old foam mattress into strips and tied them around the boy’s legs. And the practice sessions continued, every morning and every evening, 50 or 100 balls at a time.
The sons of other railway workers gathered to watch. Arvind started coaching them too. He didn’t look for help from the Saurashtra Cricket Association. As a student he had played cricket with Shah, supported his putsch against Shatrusalyasinhji, and he had later worked as a proofreader on his newspaper. But the two men had since fallen out badly.
Arvind accused Shah of mishandling the affairs of the cricket association and launched a one-man campaign against him. He did not get far. No one wanted to hear a penniless Railways clerk criticise such a powerful local figure; it was partly in an effort to make him drop this campaign that Reena encouraged him to devote his restless energies to coaching their son.
I asked him if he had considered this as an investment for the family’s future prosperity.
‘Not at all!’ cried Arvind. ‘There was no money in cricket back then. We were just doing our work, trying to do something good. That was enough.’
Arvind’s mobile phone rang. It was Chintu calling from Baroda, where he was playing for another Saurashtra side. Switching to Gujarati, Arvind shot urgent questions down the phone. Then he listened gravely to his son’s answers, nodding his head in silence.
He put down the phone and apologised for the interruption. ‘We have got into this habit since Cheteshwar was a boy,’ he said. ‘Whenever he is away from home he always calls about 9pm, before he goes to sleep.’
I asked what they talked about. ‘Generally we talk about cricket,’ said Arvind. ‘Nearly always we talk about cricket. We talk about how he has played that day, what happened in the game, how many runs he scored, what mistakes he made. This is our routine.
‘As a father, I have no complaints. My son’s character was built by my wife. He is a good boy, a very religious boy who has a good relationship with God. If he scores runs, he thanks God. If he fails to score runs, he says it is God’s will.’
When Chintu was 12 he started playing for Saurashtra’s junior sides. His results were dramatic. Arvind handed me a piece of paper on which he had recorded his son’s first run of scores: 79 not out, 77, 77, 72, 52, 138, 302 not out. These were some of the first innings Chintu had ever played, Arvind having discouraged him from playing even games of street cricket previously. ‘We had worked so hard,’ he said. ‘I did not want his technique to be messed up.’ In his first two seasons of cricket, Cheteshwar scored a century on average every four innings, and it was often a double or even a triple.
It was everything Arvind had dreamt of. But then, when Chintu was 16, the family suffered a catastrophe. Reena was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Arvind and Chintu were devastated. Like so many strong men, Arvind had relied on his calm, understated wife far more than almost anyone knew. As she lay dying, she tried to console him. ‘She told me, “I assure you our son will play for India and nobody can stop him,”’ Arvind said, and abruptly flicked a tear from his eye as if it was a fly. ‘Her guru had told her that this was so and she knew that he was right.’
C.A. Pujara made his first-class debut for Saurashtra against Vidarbha in December 2005, two months after his mother’s death. He scored 145 in his second match, and was picked for India Under-19s the following year. In 2007–08, his second full season of first-class cricket, he scored more runs in the Ranji Trophy than any other player: 807 at an average of 73.36. He was easily Saurashtra’s best batsman. By the end of 2009–10, his first-class average was above 60 – more than twice that of Saurashtra’s captain, Jaydev Shah.
His India debut came the following year. In October 2010, in the middle of a two-match series against Australia, India’s selectors announced that Yuvraj Singh had been dropped for the forthcoming game in Bangalore. Chintu would take his place, thereby fulfilling his mother’s prediction. But Arvind, asked for his delighted response by many journalists, refused to celebrate. ‘This is a very good chance given to Chintu,’ he said grimly. ‘Now he has to prove himself.’
The first Test of the series, held in Mohali, had been won by India by a single wicket. India’s hero, as often against Australia, was V.V.S. Laxman. Half-crippled by back pain, he had scored 73 not out off 79 balls to deliver India’s closest ever Test victory.
It was a wonder the game was played at all. The BCCI had planned the series as four lucrative one-day internationals. But because India was then on top of the ICC’s Test rankings, the board had been persuaded to revert to cricket’s traditional format. The match was a reminder of how wonderful it can be. And the second Test, Chintu’s debut, was almost as gripping.
It started on 9 October 2010 – the fifth anniversary of his mother’s death. Arvind, unusually for a proud Indian cricket parent, did not attend the game, instead preferring to watch it on television in Rajkot. ‘I had done my best for Cheteshwar,’ he told me. ‘Now it was time for him to do what he could. He did not need me to be around him.’
The Australians, a great team on the way down, scored 474 in the first innings. India replied with 495, of which Tendulkar scored 214. Pujara, batting at No. 5, came in when the Indian score was 346 for three. He had spent six hours watching his team-mates bat. But his long-awaited inning
s only lasted three balls. He blocked the first, drove the second for four and the third was a shooter from the fast bowler Mitchell Johnson that barely bounced above ankle height. He was out lbw for 4. It was desperately unlucky.
In the fourth innings of the game, India needed 207 to win, almost the same as in the previous Test. Chintu, promoted to No. 3 in the order, walked in to bat in the third over of the innings, after Sehwag got out. It was a daunting position for a 21-year-old debutant. He was effectively playing his first Test innings all over again, against the fastest bowling he had ever faced, and charged with winning the game for India. Yet he set about the Australian bowling, calmly and viciously. He reached his fifty off only 64 balls, with a pull for four. Not many Indian debutants have scored fifty in the fourth innings of a Test match: Gavaskar had been the last. Tendulkar, batting sedately at the other end, watched approvingly.
Chintu was out for 72, bowled by a straight ball from the off-spinner Nathan Hauritz. But India, at 146 for three, were now comfortably on their way to victory. Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid knocked off the remaining runs, but Chintu was the hero of the day. When the match was over, he shrewdly praised Tendulkar for his support, reporting that Sachin had told him, ‘God has given you this chance to play, he will help you score runs. Don’t worry.’ Then he flew home to Rajkot.
Several thousand people were waiting outside the city’s small airport. As Chintu emerged, they surged forwards to place garlands around his neck and shower him with rose petals. He then drove, at the head of a long convoy of well-wishers, directly to seek the blessings of his mother’s guru. Yet at 7 o’clock the next morning Chintu and Arvind went to the Railways pitch, to resume their practice, just as they always did.
It was almost midnight by the time Arvind finished the story. He had told it thoroughly, as if every detail was an important part of the record. But he did not seem remotely boastful: for himself, he made no claims whatsoever. He was imposingly self-assured, yet modest. He had often broken off, more in frustration than embarrassment, to apologise for his self-taught English – though it was in fact very fluent.
