You Must Like Cricket?

by Soumya Bhattacharya

  When I first proposed this to book to its publisher, I was convinced (deeply, sincerely and irrationally convinced) that if India won the 2003 World Cup, I would land myself a commission. India did not win. The commission did not come. I went ahead and finished the book. It got taken on by the same publisher. And I heard the news right after India beat Pakistan in a Test series in Pakistan for the first time ever. A coincidence? Or evidence of cricketing karma – the mystical correspondence between cricket and life?

  I know, I know. But a small part of me still wants it to be true. If India win, that is.

  As I get older it becomes ever more apparent that cricket is a window on to a parallel – perhaps a better – universe. Its disappointments do not have a bearing on my job or my family; its thrills are other-worldly. I need only press a button on my remote, and I will be transported. I will have escaped.

  On bad days, I have a fantasy in which I’m much older. I often find myself imagining the worst. (It’s not quite a daydream, it’s not quite a nightmare – the fear is real but it’s also indulgent, even comforting.) My career’s over (as the years go by that’s something that becomes less and less difficult to envisage); I have arthritis or some other debilitating but not life-threatening illness which leaves me just about housebound; my daughter has left home, my parents are dead, my wife no longer finds me an amusing or interesting companion; and my friends have all died or gone to live in other cities. What will I be left with then? What will prevent me from going over the edge, becoming a slobbering old man drooling into his bowl of soup or plate of boiled vegetables? Should such an eventuality come to pass (and with life, you just never can tell – life does have a habit of coshing you over the head), I know I will always have cricket. At the flick of a switch and the turning of a knob, with the riffle of a newspaper or the click of a mouse, I will be able to summon those familiar images, those thrills, that other world. Even when all else is gone.

  So I can’t afford not to treat the game with reverence; to admit, just occasionally, that it may have powers that I cannot comprehend; to place offerings in front of its altar. I wouldn’t want to offend its gods. That would be stupid, wouldn’t it?

  When I was young, I never thought of these things – one doesn’t think of growing old when one is a child. Now I fear the loneliness that age might bring. And I hug cricket to myself because one day it may be all that’s left me.

  10

  ‘Today’s the day for all this madness’

  Thirty years of following a team. Three decades of high and lows. Three decades of lows, mostly. Let’s face it: if your home ground is the Eden Gardens, if your team is India, it was never going to be easy.

  The highs are to be cherished. They are remembered, relived, moment for moment, especially in the bad times. Remember what it was like then? When we won that game? It’ll be like that again. We can live with these shocking results. And even if we never win a match again, we have our memories. They are ours. They happened.

  Nothing comes close to watching India win a big Test match. Nothing. Partly because it doesn’t happen very often.

  * * *

  On 13 December 2003, I found myself in Catherine Hill Bay, a beautiful little village by the sea some hundred-odd miles from Sydney up the New South Wales coast. We had travelled up by train, my wife, our daughter and I, to attend that most Australian of institutions – a barbecue party – at the beach house of a colleague of mine from the Sydney Morning Herald, a paper on which I was spending three months as a visiting journalist thanks to a fellowship from the Australia-India Council.

  As the lobsters cooked in the garden and the champagne corks popped, I stepped on to the porch for a cigarette. These days one is made to feel such a prick as a smoker that I was delighted to find I had company. Another guest, Gary, was leaning against his car, a cigarette in his hand, listening to the cricket on the radio. The glare hit me as I walked out, bareheaded, without sunglasses, a little unsteady after too many beers. It was one of those really hot days of Australian summer: the light seemed to have bleached the nearby buildings of colour; everything was so uniformly white (not so much a colour as an absence of tone, shade or texture) that it was hard to tell where the sand ended and the sea began. Feeling a little stunned (the heat, the light, the still air and very definitely the beer) I nodded at Gary and, without a word, leaned against the car as he bent to give me a light.

  India were playing Australia in the second Test of the series at Adelaide. The first, a thrilling game at Brisbane in which India had had the upper hand more often than the hosts, had been drawn.

  This was the second day of the Adelaide match and Australia, in true Australian fashion, had racked up 556. India, when I took the first pull of my cigarette, were 83 for 3 in reply: Akash Chopra, Virender Sehwag and Sachin Tendulkar were gone. Before I’d flicked the ash for the first time, Ganguly – heroic Ganguly of the century in Brisbane – was run out for two. 85 for 4.

  ‘Your luck’s run out, mate. It only lasted till the end of the first Test. Looks like you’ve dug yourselves a pretty deep hole.’

  I agreed. I didn’t have a choice.

  ‘But you’re used to it, aren’t you? It’s like this every time you come to Australia. Every time, mate. Must be such a pain.’

  Indisputably, I was used to this. We had been here before. As a matter of fact, ‘here’ was just about the only place we had been for as long as I could remember.

  We went back inside to attend to the champagne and the seafood.

  By the time play ended that day (by which time, blissfully drunk and spared another encounter with a car radio broadcasting cricket, we had returned to our apartment in Sydney), India had got to 180 for 4 with Rahul Dravid on forty-three not out and V. V. S. Laxman on fifty-five not out.

  The following day was a Sunday. In the living room of our Sydney flat, hunkered down on the sofa and repeatedly murmuring, ‘Oh fuck, this is fucking unbelievable’ (a refrain soon taken up – faithfully if not in its entirety or entirely accurately – by my two-year-old daughter), I watched as Laxman and Dravid, in a reprisal of their famous partnership in Kolkata two years before, put together a stand of 303. At stumps that evening, India were 477 for 7. Laxman had made 148; Dravid was unbeaten on 199. India had run the Aussies ragged, scoring nearly 300 runs in a day’s play for the loss of three wickets. When India were finally all out on Day Four, they were only thirty-three runs behind.

  Perhaps because they were unused to this sort of thing, Australia seemed a little unnerved in the second innings and were dismissed for 196. India needed 229 to win, to become the first team to take the lead in a Test series against Australia in Australia for ten years.

  On the fifth afternoon, as Dravid cut Stuart MacGill to the cover boundary (taking his second-innings score to seventy-two; his average for the match stood at 305), I was standing in front of a television set in the Sport department of the Herald. Watching Dravid punch the air, uproot one of the stumps and start running towards the pavilion, I couldn’t take the grin off my face. I’d been grinning for half an hour now, and I didn’t think I could ever stop.

  How long had it been? You had to go back decades to find the last time India had beaten Australia in Australia. Margaret Thatcher was in her first term; the Soviet Union was still a country; Diego Maradona was yet to play a World Cup game; Sachin Tendulkar was seven years old; a couple of the current Indian side had not even been born. That was how long ago it was.

  On my way home from work that day, with the curved sweep of the harbour to my left and the shopfronts spattered with the gold dust of early evening sunshine, I thought about Melbourne in 1981. My parents had allowed me to bunk off school to listen to the radio. It seemed odd to recall the different person I was then, to realise that, in the years that had elapsed between the two occasions, I had had a child of my own who would be running into my arms in fifteen minutes. Nearly half a life gone between those two wins, half a life swallowed in that interminable wait. Long en
ough for the world to have changed beyond recognition.

  * * *

  This Indian team, however, made a habit of triumphant occasions.

  India drew the 2003 Australia series 1–1. In the final Test in Sydney, they ground Australia into the dust with their batting. Only Simon Katich and Steve Waugh, in his farewell Test, denied the tourists victory. Soon after, India did what they had never done before: defeat Pakistan in Pakistan in a Test series. Talk about India being the second-best team in the world – this was before England’s 2004 renaissance – was swirling in the clear air of the Australian summer and the smoggy Indian winter.

  The victories in Australia and Pakistan weren’t India’s only convincing performances. Since 2001, India had beaten England and the West Indies away (they don’t often win away games, no matter how weak the opposition) and if they didn’t quite manage to win either of the two series, they came close. In 2004 India beat South Africa at home; and though they lost to the Australians, they were the only team to take a Test off the Aussies that year.

  We were watching the best Indian side of all time. Not that we acknowledged that fact very often. One reason for that is that although cricket fans like making comparisons between teams from different eras and arguing about which was the best, they don’t really want to come up with an answer. (Because that would put a stop to the discussion.) But there were other reasons too. Our reluctance to admit that we had a terrific cricket side on our hands was partly superstitious. We feared that if we flaunted our beliefs – allowed that yes, we were that good – the spell would be broken. Better to be underwhelmed – and underwhelming – than sorry.

  Most importantly, we didn’t praise this side enough because we always thought it could do better: because the players had raised our expectations to the point where they were so consistently high, so outrageous, that it was impossible for the team to match them, no matter how well they played. (When Pakistan fought back to draw the first Test of the 2005 series against India, most of us behaved as though we had lost. It never occurred to us that not too many years ago, had we managed to avoid losing to Pakistan, we would have behaved as though we had won.)

  Even if the current side shows signs that it is slipping a little, this has been a great century in which to be an Indian cricket fan. From that Test series against Australia in 2003, through one-day tournaments, home Tests, away Tests, we’ve been given more moments of joy than ever before.

  Away wins in Test matches are a fair indicator of how accomplished a team is. In my first twenty-six years as a cricket fan, between the tour of England in 1974 and the Bangladesh series in 2000, India won eight Tests away from home. (During the 1990s, for instance, they won just once: against Sri Lanka in Colombo in 1993.) Between November 2000 and April 2004, they managed ten Test victories on foreign soil.

  Now that scares the hell out of me.

  Following Indian cricket, for the thirty-odd years that I have been doing it, has largely been a matter of betrayed hopes. I have endured years of miserable days and nights, when one good bowling performance, one gallant innings in a lost cause – always in a lost cause – was all we had to be proud of. Wretchedness was the cornerstone of my life as a cricket fan. And now I have this.

  This continuing success is so odd that it is hard to come to terms with. It seems unnatural. (I find it easier to deal with the failures – I’ve had more practice at that.) For someone like me, even four years of victories can be only a temporary distraction from the real business of Indian cricket: failure. Sometimes I find myself hoping for the bad times to begin again – at least then the worst will have happened, I’ll know where I stand. (It’s like going to the dentist: the anticipation of the pain is worse than actually being in the chair.) And I can sense their approach: a Test series drawn at home against an indifferent Pakistan; then a series loss to Pakistan in Pakistan; a lost Test to an injury-hit England side; the departures of coach John Wright and captain Sourav Ganguly. In the spring of 2006, despite the team’s astonishing one-day record, it is beginning to seem as though the familiar is not very far away.

  But I worry far more for the younger generation, kids who are twelve or ten or eight years old, or perhaps not even that. We are all part of the same club, the same family of Indian cricket fans, but the rules are a little different for them. These kids have grown up with success. What must following India seem like to them?

  They must believe that if you support a team properly, if you will it to do well with all your heart, you will be rewarded. Happiness will be yours. They think it is bloody cause and effect, see? They do not know; they have yet to find out.

  When they do – and they are bound to sooner or later – they will realise that there is nothing so logical about this exercise; they will have to learn to live with random failure and unrequited love. They have been witness only to the vertiginous ascent. And, unlike me, they do not suffer from vertigo.

  * * *

  On the first four days of the Eden Gardens India-Pakistan Test in March 2005, I go to my club for my daily swim, not in the morning as I usually do, but late in the evening. At this time of day, the place is filled with elderly men who aren’t here for the swimming. They treat the pool as a huge, communal bathtub: they wallow in the water, discuss the business of the day, then head upstairs to the bar for a few whiskies.

  These men have never had much to do with me. They think I’m too young – and therefore too callow and ignorant – to belong to their club, where you don’t count for anything unless you have been a member for at least a couple of decades. Given that you have to be thirty to join, that means you shouldn’t really open your mouth until you’re well over fifty.

  It is instructive to see how a person gets into cold water in winter or early spring; it tells you what sort of a man he is: some dive in, fearless; some walk down the steps gingerly, curling up their toes, letting the water inch up their bodies, and then stand, shivering, their bodies only half submerged; some run down the steps, eager to get the uncomfortable part out of the way, and head off towards the deep end with hurried strokes. Whatever method the old men choose, it’s over soon enough. They take their rightful place at the shallow end. On this particular evening, the second of the Test, Pakistan are 273 for 2 at close of play in reply to India’s 407. Today’s topic of conversation is why we have a really crap cricket side.

  ‘Hopeless lot. In our time, you know . . .’

  ‘They’ll lose this Test and then the series.’

  ‘Ganguly should be sacked.’

  I am leaning against the wall at the shallow end, panting, my lungs shot after all the cigarettes I’ve smoked today (well, every day for the last twenty years). I am quiet, listening. I know my place.

  ‘What do you think?’ one of them suddenly asks, turning towards me. ‘What do you young people think? Should Ganguly be captain or what?’

  ‘Well, yes, I think so. I mean . . .’ I start.

  But a flurry of voices – ‘Rubbish’; ‘You have no idea you’re talking about’; ‘This is the kind of stupidity that lets him off the hook’; ‘Drop him now, I say’ – stops me finishing my sentence and we are off. I have hardly ever exchanged a word with these guys, there exists a sense of mutual suspicion and distrust between us, but now we are talking, arguing, shouting each other down to make ourselves heard, as though this is what we do every evening after work, as though this is what we come to the pool for. I never get my lengths done that day. And I head upstairs with them to the bar soon afterwards.

  Three days later, on a warm, spring-almost-summer Sunday afternoon, India complete a memorable victory. I’m watching the game on television; I still can’t face India-Pakistan at the Eden. Just after three o’clock, as Harbhajan Singh takes the wicket of Danish Kaneria to put India one up in the series, my phones begin to go crazy – as they always do on such occasions. I know how to handle this: cradle one phone between my left shoulder and my cheek, use the right hand for text messages and the left to take the other
phone off the hook and tell the caller that I shall be with him in a moment. This is the first time that India have beaten Pakistan in Kolkata. I know this, but my friends are telling me anyway. I’m not complaining. (How can I? I call several people who don’t need telling either and go ahead and tell them too. None of us can get enough of this.)

  I feel wound up, restless. I can’t sit still even to watch the awards ceremony and the interviews and the post-match analysis. I go out into the still, moist afternoon. The heat hangs like a low cloud over the city.

  It is the day after Holi, the Indian festival of colours, and the streets and buildings are still awash with the previous day’s revelry. There are victory processions on the streets, garlanded posters of the players held high like standards at the front of a triumphal march. Young men have brought out yesterday’s colours, they’re dancing, chanting, dipping their hands into paper bags full of pink and red and green and orange and throwing the soft powder heavenwards. The colours dissolve in the afternoon glare like the wispy, blue-grey smoke from the countless cigarettes and crackers all around us.

  Every house in the street has its TV set turned up as loud as it will go. It’s as though we can’t quite take it in, we won’t be able to believe it’s really happening until the cheering from the stadium is loud enough to drown out the rest of the world. With every roar that goes up, there’s a corresponding roar from the people out on the street, until it becomes hard to say where the Eden ends and everywhere else begins.

  I park my car on Harish Mukherjee Road – the ‘No Parking’ sign is so smeared with colours that’s its nearly illegible – opposite a hospital that advertises its prosthetics clinic with the sign, ‘Legs for the legless’. It is a silence zone, but the ‘No Horn’ sign has been obliterated too. Everywhere you turn there are cars draped in India flags honking their horns. The passengers are opening the doors, jumping out to join a procession led by residents of the adjoining slum.