The Great Tamasha

by James Astill

  One or two murmured inarticulately, but none spoke up.

  Ravendra spoke for them. ‘These things will never change,’ he said. And none of his schoolmates contradicted him.

  I had returned to Shahabpur that day because of a bigger game of cricket. India were playing Australia in Ahmedabad, in the World Cup quarter-final, and I wanted to see what interest the game held in the village.

  It was not obvious it would hold any. Indian cricket started in the cities and it has more or less remained there. Between 1932 and 1979 there were ten village-born players among Indian Test cricketers, according to Richard Cashman’s researches – but all learned their cricket after migrating to the city. Unlike England, India had developed no rich tradition of village cricket. Yet this was changing, like so much else in India, mainly due to the spread of television.

  The first black-and-white TV sets started appearing in Shahabpur in the late 1980s, driven by a craze for a serialised version of the Ramayana broadcast on Doordarshan. Around the same time, local men began migrating to work in India’s thriving western cities, which brought a modest infusion of wealth to the village. This had since become the backbone of the village economy. By the time I visited Shahabpur, roughly a third of the workforce was absent at any given time, working on building sites and in slum factories in Mumbai, Pune and elsewhere. They returned periodically, to their wives and children, with a few thousand rupees, new clothes and city ways. Both changes, television and migration, had helped bring cricket to the village.

  This history was described to me by a member of Shahabpur’s former ruling family, Amresh Singh Pratap. In British times, his grandfather had ruled a vast local estate, consisting of 70 villages. The family now owned only 100 acres of orchards in Shahabpur and an elegant fortified bungalow, which had been built by its 19th-century British owner. ‘Cricket started here sometime in the early 1990s,’ he told me, sitting in the garden of this splendid property. ‘You’d see village lads playing in tattered clothes, on a field or a dried-up pond, with a country-made bat and ball. You saw this in the 1990s, very rarely in the 1980s, never in the 1970s. Back then they were playing only kabaddi, in the lanes and in the fields, like they do cricket today. Kabaddi, rugby without a ball, that was the evening game for boys back then.’

  When home from his boarding-school, in the 1980s, Amresh often played cricket with the village boys. This was his main point of contact with them. Yet he preferred the chase to cricket. His greatest sporting regret, Amresh told me, was having failed to ‘bag a stripes’ – tiger-shooting now being banned in India.

  On the morning of the India–Australia game, I had arrived at Allahabad railway station aboard the night-train from Delhi. Armod Pandey, one of the many journalists who have helped me on my travels across India, was waiting on the platform. He had a motorbike helmet on his head, and another in his hand.

  Sharing Armod’s motorbike, we rode through the streets of Allahabad, once one of the most elegant cities in India. An important headquarters of the Raj, it has many fine colonial buildings – All Saints’ Cathedral, the high court, the university buildings. They looked magnificent and woebegone in the grey light, as we whizzed past, enjoying the cold morning air. In the empty streets, cows were picking through the piles of rubbish that were everywhere. After Delhi, Allahabad looked dirty and poor.

  There was also, unlike in Delhi, very little to show that the World Cup was on. There were not many billboards of any kind in Allahabad and I spotted only one, put up by a telecoms company, that referred to cricket. ‘Keep cricket clean’ it read, above a picture of some aging cricket stars. Allahabad was not all that into cricket. Mohammad Kaif, that unlikely celebrity, is probably its most famous cricketing son.

  Leaving the city, we crossed a road-bridge over the Ganges, flowing milk chocolate brown far below. Shortly after, we left the tarmac road and turned onto a hard mud trail, which led through fields of ripening wheat to Shahabpur.

  Arriving in the village, we went directly to the house of Anwar Ali. One of the richer villagers, Anwar worked as a clerk in Allahabad and he had helped me a great deal during my previous stay in the village. He was waiting for us outside his small brick house, and greeted me with a diffident hug. A delicious breakfast of fried eggs and oily parathas was also waiting. After eating together in silence, we went outside to sit beside Anwar’s small wheatfield, to drink tea in the warming sun and catch up.

  Anwar wasn’t interested in cricket. ‘Cricket? Ah, nahin, boss,’ he said, amused at the mere idea that he might be. He was 50, had never played the game and rarely watched it. He had electricity at his house, unlike Sarju. Yet Anwar had no television set because his wife considered the medium unIslamic.

  Anwar preferred the sports of his youth, especially wrestling, which had been the main tamasha in Shahabpur before cricket arrived. Until the late 1990s, the village had held an annual fair, with a livestock sale, travelling circus and a grand wrestling tournament. It was held on the wasteland where Sarju’s mud hut now sat. Beside this shack was a small shrine dedicated to a local wrestling champion, one Pahalwan Baba. The man himself had been long-forgotten. Yet every day his shrine was draped with a clean red loincloth, signifying his purity and devotion to the god of wrestlers, the Hindu monkey-deity Hanuman.

  That ancient sporting culture was rapidly fading. Yet it was still evident in parts of north India, as Anwar had previously shown me. He had taken me to a wrestling tournament in the nearby village of Nawab Ganj, held to commemorate Gandhi’s birthday.

  The wrestling took place on a small sandy mound, the akhara, in a field filled with thousands of men and boys, squatting, standing or perched in the branches of the surrounding trees. As soon as we arrived, I was grabbed by the crowd, and pushed by hundreds of eager hands towards the akhara. Almost before I realised what was happening, I had been hoisted up its sandy slope, and displayed to the crowd.

  ‘Come and see the journalist who has come from England to see our wrestling!’ the master of ceremonies shouted through the dozens of tinny speakers that festooned the village trees. ‘He has come to see our wrestling!’ he shouted, as I was garlanded with marigolds and raucously cheered. ‘What an honour! What an auspicious day!’ It was nice to be appreciated.

  Yet such gatherings were becoming rarer every year around Shahabpur, as Kabaddi and wrestling became scarce. The village youths preferred cricket – including the small crowd of teenage boys who had gathered outside Anwar’s house, to watch me digesting my breakfast. Unlike Anwar, all said they were mad about cricket and played the game whenever possible. All had a favourite player – either Tendulkar or Virender Sehwag. Most watched cricket at home on TV. Though, as there was no cable television connection to the village, none of the boys had seen the IPL. One or two had scarcely heard of the new Twenty20 tournament.

  Nor had any heard of their most famous cricketing neighbour, Kamran Khan. An 18-year-old fast bowler, who came from the nearby village of Nadwa Sarai, Kamran had briefly made a name for himself in the IPL. The son of a poor woodcutter, he had been taken to Mumbai by a freelance cricket scout, where he was spotted by the Rajasthan Royals. He had then played for the Royals during the second IPL season, in 2009. He was small, slight and inexperienced with a leather ball. But he could bowl fast, with a slingy action, and he was successful at first. His captain at the Royals, Shane Warne, nicknamed him The Tornado.

  Here was a wonderful rags-to-riches advertisement for India’s wildly popular new cricket tournament. Under the headline ‘A ticket to stardom for Indian youngsters’, the Times of India reported: ‘Kamran had played just tennis-ball cricket earlier and was so poor that he had slept on railway platforms on occasions. Besides, his parents had to die as the family couldn’t afford proper medical treatment. All that changed once he had the ball in his hands, and Kamran, inspired by skipper Shane Warne, produced some magical spells.’

  But his luck didn’t last. Kamran’s form dipped and he was not retained by the Royals. He was hired i
n 2011 by the new Pune Warriors side, but his uncoached bowling action was ruled illegal soon afterwards. He was subsequently banned from bowling and paid off by the Warriors. The Tornado was last spotted back in Nadwa Sarai, working in his brother’s field, wearing a Pune Warriors shirt.

  As the sun climbed high, Armod, Anwar and I set off on a stroll through Shahabpur. All but the poorest hamlets, I noticed for the first time, had a few television sets. Only the lowliest Dalit mud huts, which had no access to electricity, had none.

  In the Chamar hamlet of Godown – named after the still-visible ruins of a British indigo warehouse – Ram Kishore, a retired government worker, said he had bought a black-and-white set to watch the Ramayana in the late 1980s. He estimated that five of the hamlet’s 45 households now possessed one. Like many of the villagers, he also said he was looking forward to the World Cup game later that day.

  At the approach of two o’clock, when the quarter-final was due to begin, we were still ambling around Shahabpur, through its wheat fields and hamlets. I was hugely excited about the game: the quarter-finals were when the World Cup got serious. And the Australians, led by their aging captain Ricky Ponting, promised to give India a tough match. But when the clock struck two and the Australians went in to bat in Ahmedabad, there was no rising buzz of television sets over Shahabpur. There was a power cut. In fact, Anwar admitted sheepishly, the village never had electricity in the afternoons. So there never had been any prospect of watching the game there after all.

  We walked back through Godown, where Kishore was listening to the game on a radio. Actually this, he said, was how he had to follow cricket these days, even when there was electricity. His old black-and-white television had recently been burnt out in a power surge.

  That was almost the only radio commentary I heard in Shahabpur. Almost none of the villagers were following the game. The only public place to watch it was a mobile phone shop in the bazaar. Its owner had set a Chinese mobile handset with a tiny television screen on the counter. A small crowd of boys were crushed around it, watching tiny flickering images of the Australian innings. Ravendra was among them.

  We repaired to drink tea in the bazaar, while I followed the cricket score on my Blackberry. In their innings, the Australians managed 260 for six – a good but, as it would turn out, beatable score. Dusk was falling fast now, turning the wheatfields grey.

  We said our farewells, climbed onto Armod’s motorbike, and bumped through dark fields back towards the Ganges. Hitting the tarmac road, the scene abruptly changed. Here, there was electricity. So, in every roadside village, shops and chai-stalls flickered with silver television light and a rasping cacophony of cricket commentary, audible above the engine’s roar.

  Throngs of men and boys were gathered outside the shops, spilling onto the road, craning their heads towards the flickering cricket images inside. In that remote slice of north India, we must have passed a cricket crowd of thousands. Everyone, all the way to Allahabad, seemed to be watching the game.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Cricket à la Modi

  ‘What about Monsieur?’ said the waiter, in the direction of my lunch guest. But there was no response. Lalit Modi was bent over his BlackBerry. The waiter paused, then lifted his head from his notepad. A look of surprise crossed his face, then one of mild disdain. This could be an interesting contest, the high-handedness of a super-rich Indian versus French hauteur.

  The waiter gave a cough, which was almost a groan. ‘Is Monsieur ready to order?’

  ‘Eh?’ said Modi, without looking up. ‘Ah, get me a fondue.’

  ‘A ... what?’ said the waiter, appearing baffled. This was a fine Mayfair restaurant, the most expensive I could afford. It was not a ski-chalet.

  ‘Fondue. You don’t have a fondue? OK, what have you got that’s vegetarian?’ said Modi, momentarily looking up from his phone.

  ‘Monsieur is ... a vegetarian?’ asked the waiter, as if the word was unfamiliar. ‘Then how about a tomato confit with some goat’s cheese?’ he said briskly, wishing to end a disagreeable encounter.

  ‘Fine,’ Modi snapped. ‘And get me some potatoes with that.’

  ‘Potatoes for Monsieur?’

  ‘Yeah, I like potatoes. I’ll have some potatoes on the side,’ said Modi, dismissing the waiter with a small wave. The Frenchman paused, looking shocked, then bowed briskly and stepped away.

  Even by rich Indian standards, Modi could be very rude. In fact this was one of the reasons he was here in chilly London, wearing a blue fleece jacket indoors and looking tired, anxious and far older than when I had seen him last on Indian television a few months before. He was 47, slightly built. The stark autumn light, flooding through a nearby window, showed up grey streaks in his hair. Around Modi’s mouth I could see the lines caused by his relentless smoking.

  Modi finally put down his BlackBerry and looked up. ‘So then ...?’ he said.

  He was not speaking to journalists at this time. He had agreed to meet me because we had a slight personal connection and our conversations would be, selectively, off-the-record. Yet he looked nervous, and it was no wonder.

  ‘Is it true they’ve taken your passport?’ I asked.

  Modi shrugged. ‘I’m waiting to hear.’

  ‘People are saying you’re going to seek asylum in Iceland ...’

  ‘No,’ he said glumly, ‘though we have good friends there ...’

  ‘So you expect to be here for a while?’

  He shrugged again. ‘I hope not.’

  Modi hated the cold. And he hated his anonymity in grand, hard-to-impress London even more. He wanted to be home in Mumbai, in the heat and the action, doing deals and wielding influence. He wanted to be running the world’s flashest, richest, most insanely popular new sports tournament, the Indian Premier League. For Modi was the IPL’s creator and, until recently, its impresario – its ‘chairman and commissioner’, according to the job title he had awarded himself.

  For the first three years of the tournament, Modi had been ubiquitous in it. Strolling across the pitch before the games, barking out orders with a look of manic command, BlackBerry in hand, Modi was ever-present and watched by a television audience of millions. Then the cricket started, and still Modi flickered on to Indian television screens, enthroned in a VVIP box or seated on the boundary alongside the league’s celebrity team-owners, laughing, cheering and singing team songs. He had a television crew follow him around to ensure this coverage of himself. ‘Modicam’ his retinue called it.

  Six months before we met in London, ahead of the third IPL season, Modi had appeared on the cover of India’s best-selling weekly magazine, India Today, in what was by then a familiar image. Dressed in his customary Armani suit, he was grinning and leaning dandily on a cricket bat, with a cheerleader hoisting her pompoms either side of him and a screaming crowd behind. ‘Billion dollar baby’ read the headline.

  Four billion, more like – for that was what the IPL, after just three six-week seasons, was estimated to be generating in annual revenues. It was the apogee of India’s cricket boom. It was a powerful symbol, too, of India’s wider take-off. The IPL was a ‘global representation of India and what the modern-day India stands for,’ Modi had said. But that had turned out to be truer than he would have wished.

  The IPL was rich, glamorous and inventive, a tearaway T20 craze among India’s exuberant and swelling middle class. But strip away the glitter and the noise, and its first renditions had been a poor sporting contest. And the trauma the IPL had caused to cricket was immense. With the force of India’s turbo-charged cricket economy behind it, the IPL could pay the world’s best cricketers enormous wages. International cricket, a uniquely collaborative sporting culture, worked out over decades, had been instantly devalued as a result. Many wondered what this might mean for Test cricket, the game’s most distinctive, sophisticated and least profitable format. Would it even survive the competition? India’s cricket bosses hardly seemed to care: they were too busy counting their money
. The IPL had become an emblem of India’s cricketing hegemony at its most destructive. It also appeared, like India, to be rotten with corruption.

  Hence Modi’s flight to London, in exile and disgrace. He stood accused by the cricket board of gross financial misdeeds. The government of India was also out to get him. So were the Mumbai mafia. How could such a powerful man fall so suddenly, many asked? And then they looked at his life story and wondered how he could have been given such enormous power over cricket in the first place.

  Modi was born rich, the son of one of north India’s great Marwari business families. His grandfather, Gujarmal Modi, was a sugar baron and confidant of Jawaharlal Nehru; the company mill-town he founded in 1933, Modinagar, a short drive east of Delhi, still bears the family name. His father, Krishnan Kumar Modi, helped oversee a vast expansion in the family business. Thereby he had formed one of India’s biggest conglomerates, with interests in tobacco, chemicals, fashion, food, education and retail.

  Lalit inherited his forefathers’ commercial instincts. He had a great flair for business. In conversation, he was never happier than racing through the structures of some complicated deal, spitting out revenue, profit and cost projections, challenging his listener to follow his arithmetical gymnastics. I rarely could. But Modi’s formal education was less to boast of. After attending some of India’s most expensive schools, he went to Duke University in North Carolina, where he got into his first major scrape. It was over a drug deal that went wrong. Modi and three other students were allegedly mugged while trying to buy cocaine. Seeking vengeance, they turned on another student whom they blamed for the robbery. Modi was subsequently arrested and pleaded guilty to charges of possessing cocaine, false imprisonment and assault. He was put on probation for five years but, after pleading ill health, permitted to return to India.

  Everyone commits youthful follies. But Modi’s seemed indicative of some deeper character traits. He was reckless, self-destructive even. And when challenged he could be aggressive. ‘So long as people agree with Lalit, he’s fine,’ one of his oldest friends told me. ‘But if you tell Lalit he can’t do something, he’ll just go for you, and he won’t stop.’