The Great Tamasha

by James Astill

  Other IPL franchises had lesser troubles. The Rajasthan, Punjab and Delhi teams were all rumoured to be wholly or partly for sale. The IPL, it appeared, was in meltdown. Yet, in the midst of this tumult, the BCCI coolly resold the rights to the Hyderabad franchise to a Chennai-based television company, Sun TV, for $79.5 million. Worked out over five years, that was double what Deccan Chronicle had paid in 2008. Soon after, Pepsi bought the IPL’s title sponsorship rights for over $70 million – twice what their previous owner, DLF, had paid. There will be more upheavals in the IPL. But the tournament, it seems, is not going away.

  This would mean more bad news for international cricket, especially the Test match, cricket’s greatest format. So long as the IPL continues, its investors are likely to demand, sotto voce, an expansion of the tournament. The current eight-week duration of the IPL is too short for most of the franchises to make a profit, even with the share of television and other revenues they get from the BCCI. Building a team brand, to attract lucrative sponsorship deals, is hard enough in a country with little tradition of club sport. It probably cannot be done satisfactorily in so short a season. To save costs, most IPL franchises are in fact hardly trying. For nine months of the year, they operate from tiny offices with skeleton staffs. But as their handouts from the BCCI are gradually reduced, this will have to change. To make money, the franchises will have to become serious, year-round businesses.

  That would logically require either a longer IPL season or a second annual tournament. Either would create an even worse clash between club and country, which the moneybags IPL would probably win. Yet it is hard to imagine that the Indian board would not, in the end, facilitate such an expansion of the tournament. Indians want more tamasha. And if the board will not provide it, perhaps others will. The IPL franchise owners might even consider going it alone: they are already claiming a bigger role in running the tournament. Rather than risk that happening, the Indian board would probably bend to their demands, to the great detriment of international cricket.

  For cricket tragics, it is a depressing outlook. India, a country that has so enriched cricket, is now the gravest threat to its most precious traditions. But then again, look closer at what cricket means to Indians, and it is hard to remain altogether disapproving. Cricket is, for millions of poor and recently poor Indians, a remarkable consolation, a rare moment of escape and excitement, sometimes a dream of advancement and leisure. It always has been, for 150 years now. And they, too, deserve the cricket they most want.

  Asghar Husain sat at his aged mother’s feet, looking up at a large flat-screen television still half-wrapped in shop plastic. It was showing the pre-match scenes at Eden Gardens, ablaze with light and colour. Mumbai Indians were about to play Kolkata Knight Riders in one of the last games of the third IPL season. Victory for the Knight Riders would put them through to the tournament’s final qualifying round as one of the top two sides. Victory for Mumbai could put them through too.

  Asghar nodded approvingly. ‘Big game,’ he said. Yet he was unhappy with his new television set. It was the third he had bought for his small flat on Ninety Foot Road, a busy thoroughfare on the edge of Dharavi slum in Mumbai, but he still wanted something better. ‘Twenty-eight inches only,’ he said, fiddling with the remote control. ‘Now we’re planning to go for 40 inches.’

  Asghar was a small man, aged 30, wearing black jeans with a lot of zips and a white linen shirt piped with gold embroidery. He considered himself a Mumbai Indians diehard. ‘First because of cricket, which is my passion. I watch all games whenever I have time,’ he said. ‘Also because it is Twenty20 – new generation cricket.’

  T20 was the only kind of cricket for Asghar, a first-generation fan. He was uninterested in Test matches. He also found the 50-over game dull by comparison, though he liked it when India won. But there was another reason why Asghar, a son of poor north Indian migrants, liked the Mumbai Indians: ‘Mumbai is my city.’

  As he fiddled with the remote, Asghar’s other arm was draped lightly across the knees of his septuagenarian mother, Khairunnisa. She was a tiny figure in an embroidered salwar kameez, perched like a small white bird on her chair. She did not understand English, so listened to us in uncomprehending silence.

  Khairunnisa hailed from a village on the Ganges, close to Allahabad. She and Asghar’s father, Husain, had migrated to Mumbai sometime in the 1970s. She didn’t know exactly what year, any more than she knew her age. Khairunnisa was illiterate, as Husain had been, and she found ages and dates hard to get straight. The couple had landed up in Dharavi along with thousands of other poor migrants from all across India, driven by ambition, hunger and the innumerable other small tragedies that afflict the poor.

  Husain found work in the slum’s shack factories, block-printing patterns on to silk saris. The couple and their ten children – Asghar was the second youngest – lived in a tiny two-room hut. Yet a decade after coming to the city, Husain made a brilliant investment. He borrowed 7,000 rupees and sent his eldest son to Dubai to work as a silk embroiderer. ‘That was the turning-point for our family,’ Asghar said. His father died a month later. But Asghar’s migrant brother worked hard and did well, and almost every dirham he earned he sent back to the slum.

  Supported by his brother, Asghar graduated from Mumbai University with a degree in electrical engineering, and got a job in the oil industry. He had since worked on oil rigs all over the world, on contracts worth half a million rupees a month. He also owned five mobile phone shops in and around Dharavi, each with an Arabic name. Al-something, this is my trademark,’ Asghar said proudly. ‘Like Al-Barakat, which is prosperity, or Al-Kair, which is goodness.’

  Asghar was now richer, better educated and more independent than anyone in his family could have imagined possible. A year earlier, he had bought this flat and left the family slum-hut, taking his mother and new bride with him. He was now awaiting delivery of a 4x4 Skoda, a power car in India. ‘Big family, so we need a big car,’ he said, grinning.

  The door was flung open and Asghar’s young wife and one of his sisters stepped inside, wearing billowing black burkhas over their faces and bodies. As they entered, they were chattering gaily; seeing me, their heads dropped and they swished silently through to the kitchen.

  ‘Money is one thing,’ Asghar said. ‘But we have continued our culture, just like before. Respect for our elders, respect for our parents, respect for our elder brothers, just like in the village. This is our culture. We are the same.’

  At Eden Gardens the Knight Riders’ innings was reaching a dramatic conclusion. Jacques Kallis, the great South African, heaved consecutive sixes off the New Zealander James Franklin. Kolkata were on 149 for four with three more overs to bat. The stadium was alive with a churning crowd and the Knight Riders cheerleaders jumping up and down like anything. As the cameras closed in, they pumped their hips and busts, brandishing their pompoms.

  ‘How do you like that?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re nice,’ Asghar said, smirking, as his mother maintained her inscrutable silence.

  I had first visited Dharavi four years before, for a week-long stay. I had wanted to understand how the slum ticked. In particular, I wanted to know how so many poor people could live so crowded together, apparently harmoniously. Dharavi has had bursts of Hindu–Muslim rioting, including a bad one in 1992 in the wake of the destruction of the Babri mosque. But there had been no repeat of this and everyday crime in the slum was rare.

  I stayed as the guest of two slum-dwellers, Raju Korde and Shashikant Kwale, whom I had met more or less by chance. Raju was a portly Maharashtrian, taciturn and watchful. He had a small printing business and a couple of slum shops. ‘I am a communist and an entrepreneur. There is no contradiction,’ he used to say, a bit defensively. He lived with his wife, two children and widowed mother in a three-room slum house, where I stayed. Shashikant, known as Shashi, was also Maharashtrian and one of Raju’s sidekicks in the local communist party. He was a tall, slightly stooped Dalit and,
when I first met him, on hard times.

  He was unemployed, single and badly shaken by a motorbike accident. He lived with his drunken parents in a tiny two-room hut, where I also spent a night. The rest of the time, I wandered the slum with Raju or Shashi as my guides, exploring its workhouses and mazy ghettoes, its Bengali, Dalit and Muslim quarters. I learned more about India in those days, about the dynamism and grit of its hardworking poor, than in weeks in my office in Delhi. In the shanties of Mumbai – a city where half the population lives in a slum – modern Indian society is being forged.

  Whenever I was back in Mumbai, I tried to revisit Dharavi to catch up with Raju and Shashi and hear their news. In these boom times, it was almost always uplifting. A year after my first visit I returned to find Raju running a small cooperative bank. Shashi had opened a small recruitment agency from a cubbyhole office. A year after that, Raju had opened more shops and Shashi’s business was growing. This is how economic growth looks among the weeds of a poor country: as a glorious burgeoning of opportunity.

  Shortly before I was due to leave India, I returned to Dharavi one last time. I wanted to say goodbye to Raju, Shashi and the slum. I also wanted to fill a serious gap in my knowledge of it, by finding out what cricket there was in Dharavi.

  As usual, I went first to Raju, who was now operating from a room in a half-finished office block on the edge of the slum. It was a big step up from the dingy communist party office, where I had first met him, with portraits of Marx, Lenin and Engels on the walls.

  ‘Welcome to my law office,’ Raju said, half-smiling, as I entered.

  ‘But you’re not a lawyer!’

  ‘I am now. I’m a slum lawyer and also a slum developer,’ he said, and paused to see my reaction. ‘There is no conflict. I’m doing business like anyone else, only with honesty.’

  For his first redevelopment project, Raju said he had raised $100,000 and he expected to make a big profit.

  Shashi soon turned up, wearing beige shorts and a matching T-shirt printed with the legend ‘Golden Age Flying 2’. His news was also cheering. Shashi’s employment agency now specialised in providing hospital orderlies and had over 400 on its books.

  I was very pleased for him. Good-humoured and sometimes alarmingly candid, Shashi was one of the nicest people I knew in India. He could also be very funny. He was prone to sudden bursts of enthusiasm, gushingly expressed in Hindi with just enough English words thrown in for him to swear he was speaking English.

  ‘Aray, I have more ...’ he continued.

  Shashi had got married, though he had always said that this would be impossible. He had been unable to say why, but he had hinted at some humiliating damage resulting from his motorbike accident. Yet a few months before, a young midwife had walked into Shashi’s office and, though she was north Indian and of high Hindu caste, he had married her two days later.

  ‘Love-marriage!’ he said triumphantly.

  ‘Everything is good,’ said Raju. ‘Everyone is moving up.’

  I asked Raju if I could stay at his place. ‘You are always welcome,’ he said and informed me that it had undergone a significant improvement: it now had a toilet. I also told Raju I wanted a cricket tour of Dharavi, and he rolled his eyes and smiled. He was used to my requests: to see where the potters lived, to visit Dharavi’s tanneries and recyclers, or a slum dance-bar. But I don’t think he ever minded them. Raju, born and raised in Dharavi, was as fascinated by the slum as I was.

  ‘Asghar will guide you,’ he said, nodding at a young man sitting quietly in the corner.

  We went first to the Dharavi-Sion Sports Club, a half-hour walk away, and one of only three spaces easily available to Dharavi’s cricketers.

  On a Sunday afternoon, ahead of the evening’s IPL game at Eden Gardens, it was packed, with at least 20 games in progress. The cricketers were tailors, embroiderers and cobblers, slum-workers, all enjoying a precious day off.

  Asghar led me to a muscular middle-aged man, wearing a tracksuit, who was keeping a magisterial eye on the play. This was Babaji Ghule, who was regarded as an authority on Dharavi cricket. A keen player himself, he organised an annual knockout tournament, contested by 16 slum sides. It comprised six-over games of tennis-ball cricket, played over two days in January or February.

  The teams were mostly defined by the caste or religion of their members. Around half were Muslim, including Princes XI, a side that Asghar played for as an off-spinning all-rounder.

  ‘So it’s a communal cricket tournament?’ I asked.

  Asghar translated the question. ‘Nahi, baas!’ Babaji replied. ‘Hum sab ekhai!’ – ‘We are all together!’

  Babaji said he had started the tournament in response to the 1993 riots, to rebuild trust between Dharavi’s bereaved and resentful communities. ‘We do not see caste or religion in cricket,’ Asghar said firmly.

  Babaji was another first-generation cricket fan. His father, a poor migrant from a parched Maharashtrian village, had only known wrestling and kabbadi. ‘But now I want my son to play real cricket, with a season ball, that is the next thing,’ he said. But it was not easy. Babji reckoned it could easily cost 15,000 rupees a year, in cricket kit and subscriptions, to send his boy to a gymkhana. ‘Pukka cricket is an expensive game for us.’

  Soon the cricket ground was cleared for the afternoon’s main event. This was a six-over contest between one of Dharavi’s Muslim sides, Khwaja Geri Nawaz, named after a revered Sufishrine, and a team from a neighbouring slum. The game was played with great intensity in front of a laughing, catcalling crowd, and the local side won easily. This was chiefly due to the brilliance of their fastest bowler, a short and skinny slum-dweller, who bowled almost unplayable tennis-ball yorkers.

  I went up to congratulate him after the game. He was an illiterate silk embroiderer called Wahid Khan and, though very shy, he seemed thrilled to be praised. ‘I love cricket too much,’ he said, beaming.

  Wahid had recently been offered a few hundred rupees a week by a local club to play for it on the maidans. Yet he was unsure whether he should do so. He said he was scared the hard leather ball might injure his hands, which he used to make tiny stitches on silk saris, for which he was paid 7,000 rupees a month. Most of that went to his elderly parents.

  I asked Wahid if I could have a bat against him and he nodded happily. But, to the delight of the crowd, he was too good for me. I blamed my embarrassment on the light, which was fading rapidly now.

  ‘Everyone is coming up,’ echoed Asghar, as we left the ground to find his shiny new motorbike. ‘But, you know, slowly.’

  Halfway through the evening IPL game, it was shaping up for an exciting finish. Kolkata Knight Riders scored 175 for five in their 20 overs. It was a stiff target, but gettable for the Mumbai Indians’ superb batsmen. Yet Asghar and I had had enough of the game. Instead, joined by Shashi, we left the flat on Ninety Foot Road and headed out into the slum. I wanted to see who was watching the cricket in Dharavi.

  The slum’s alleys, so narrow and overbuilt they were almost tunnels, flickered with fluorescent television light and resounded with television noise. Without a breath of breeze, it was very hot. Many of the slum-dwellers had therefore left open the doors of their windowless huts, in which most had a TV set switched on at high volume.

  We moved carefully through the alleys, listening to the general television din. At every step, there were snatches of Bollywood songs and the melodramatic chords of a Hindi soap. But most of the sets blared out the equally portentous sound of Ravi Shastri, overlaid with bursts of dance music and a white noise of cheering. Perhaps one in three huts, I estimated, was watching the IPL.

  A small multi-coloured Hindu temple, writhing with gods, signalled that we had entered a Tamil area. We stopped to talk with one of its dark-skinned inhabitants, Anthony Kamraj. He was lounging outside the single-room hut he shared with his new wife and his brother and sister-in-law, wearing nothing but a tartan sarong. Two sets of plastic rosaries hung around his neck. He was chew
ing paan and watching the game.

  Anthony said he was a fan of the IPL though he much preferred to watch India play. ‘That is not just for relaxing, it is something I feel in my heart,’ he said. I asked him if he ever watched Test cricket and he smiled and shook his head. A small boy’s shrill voice piped up from the dark of the alley. ‘Boring!’ it said in English. An explosion of noise signalled that a wicket had fallen. But at 123 for four, Mumbai Indians were cruising now.

  We moved on, criss-crossing trickling drains, to arrive outside a tiny two-storey hut in a gloomy corner of the slum. This was where Asghar had lived until recently with Khairunnisa and his many siblings. Now it was occupied by two of his brothers, their wives and some children, about ten people in all.

  Next door was a taller, three-storey shack, with a mess of ropes and ladders providing access to its upper levels. From the third storey came a flicker of TV light and the sounds of Ravi Shastri. So Asghar and I clambered up to look inside.

  It was a rectangular room, about 15 feet by ten, weakly lit by a single bulb. The floor was filled by three wooden frames, around which a group of skinny boys were crouched, making desultory stitches in bright silk saris. They stared up at us blankly, surprised more than afraid, but too streetwise to show it.

  There were 14 of them living here, they said. By day they worked on the frames, embroidering saris and shawls; during the night they slept under them. They were skinny and gaunt and the youngest looked no more than 12 or 14.

  Watching television was their Sunday treat, the boys said. At other times their boss, a local Bihari businessman, forbade them to turn the TV on lest it distract them from their work. The boys earned 2,500 rupees a month, a bit more than $40, which they mostly sent home to their impoverished parents in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. Hanging beneath the television, on a row of wooden pegs, were a few grimy-grey shirts. These were their possessions.

  I asked how they had spent their day off and every one of them said he had been playing cricket. An effeminate-looking Bengali called Shahrukh said he been playing at the Dharavi Sports Club. He wore a smudge of pink lipstick, a silver hoop in his right ear and said he was a fast bowler.