A couple of times during Tests in Nagpur, Rahul dropped in at our house for dinner: very normal evenings; people were not invited in to show him off to. What I noticed then was how curious he was about other people and their lives. Very little of the conversation was about him. We would talk more about my internship in surgery and my work as a rural medical officer than about his cricket. At the time I appreciated it, but I didn’t quite realise what an unusual quality that really is. Now that I have witnessed the crazy world of Indian cricket, I think he must have enjoyed those dinners. Just a normal evening in a normal house, without fuss, where he was treated like a normal person, which he has always been.
After we got married, I stepped into a completely alien environment. All he had said to me was that once we were married, we would travel a lot, I would meet a lot of different people and I would learn along the way. As part of my post-graduate training I had spent a year in a Maharashtra village as a medical officer, working with basic facilities, helping women deliver babies, doing surgeries and post-mortems. I was very involved with my work, had seen a lot of life by then; my post-graduation studies had made me a little more mature than I would have been if I had got married at 21. In cricket, I found people talking about difficulties and pressures, how to handle being dropped and so on. I didn’t get it at all. To me the real anxieties of life were under the knife, the real pressures were in hospital wards.
Very early in our marriage, I remember Rahul saying to me that he was hoping to play for the next three or four years and that he would need me to be with him to support him in that time. When he retired in March 2012, I thought: not bad, we’ve done better than the three or four years he thought about in 2003. We have shared a very good half of his cricket career together, and knowing how much he loves the game, that has mattered to me.
It was six months before I travelled with him for the first time, when the Indian team toured Australia in 2003. It had been six months without international cricket – we had spent three months in Scotland, and only when we came back to India did I hear people talk about Australia. I had no clue as to how he had fared in 1999, why the tour was so important to everyone. Rahul never spoke about it himself either. It was as if he was conscious that while his career was the only thing that was talked about, his wife was an individual herself and her world was as important as his was.
I watched his Adelaide innings back home on television with his parents, everyone getting up at five in the morning. I didn’t realise the magnitude of that innings in cricketing terms. We saw him go from 199 overnight on the third day to 200 very early on a Monday morning. When I went in to work that day, to St John’s Medical College, I was told there were some reporters who had come to talk to me. I didn’t speak to them, of course, but I could tell people were happy. I fully understood the significance of Rahul’s double-century and that victory much, much later.
When I went to Melbourne and Sydney, I was happy that I was back with him and he was doing well. I was still trying to get to know him, know his game. It was only then that I began to notice how he would prepare: his routines, his obsession with shadow practice at all hours of the day, which I first found very weird. (At one point I thought he was sleepwalking.)
I’ve learnt what I have about Test cricket by talking to him, and a few of his close friends, who have helped me understand the tempo of Test cricket, bowling changes, field placements and the importance of sessions – all the things that can make Test cricket an adventure. As I began to understand the game, I got hooked on to it, so much so that when there was a match I wanted to follow but there was no live TV, I followed the game on the internet and enjoyed the text commentary as much as I did the immediacy of being able to follow scores. These days, of course, I have my own theories about cricket, which he has to listen to.
Early in our marriage I saw that there was nothing about his cricket that was casual, unconscious or accidental. Before he went on tour, I would pack all his other bags, but his cricket kit was sacred. Only Rahul handled it. I did not even touch it. I packed his things knowing full well that if I packed two sets of informal clothes, he would wear them in turn all through a tour for weeks if he had to and not think about it. He has used one type of moisturising cream for his dry skin for 20 years. He is not enamoured of gadgets and barely registers brands, of watches, cologne or cars. If the weight of his bat is off by a gram, though, Rahul will notice it in an instant and get the problem fixed.
Everyone around him knew that cricket was and had to be his utmost priority. On match days Rahul wanted his space and his silence. He didn’t like being rushed, not for the bus, not to the crease. All he said he needed was ten minutes to himself, to get what I thought of as his “internal milieu” settled, before he could get into a match day.
When we began to travel with the kids – and he loved having the boys around during a series, even when they were babies – we made sure we got two rooms, next to each other. The day before every match, the boys were told that their father had to be left alone for a while, and he was. He would go into his room to meditate or maybe to do a few visualisation exercises. On the morning of the game, he would get up and do another session of meditation before leaving for the ground. I have tried meditation myself and I know that the zone Rahul is able to get into as quickly as he does takes a lot of years of training to reach. It is all part of the complete equilibrium he tries to achieve before getting into a series.
Like all players, Rahul too has his superstitions; sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. He doesn’t try a new bat out in a series, and he puts his right thigh guard on first. On the 2011 tour to England, he made sure he sat in the same space in the Lord’s dressing room that Tillakaratne Dilshan had occupied when he scored 193 earlier in the season. In that game, Rahul got his first Test hundred at Lord’s.
Despite all this preparation and attention to detail, once the game is on, he has this fantastic ability to switch off from it. At the end of the day’s play, he may be thinking about it, his batting may bother him, he will be itching to go back and try again, but at that point he can compartmentalise his life very well. He won’t order room service or brood indoors. He would rather go out, find something to do: go to a movie or watch musicals – which he loves. He will walk out to the sea to wind down or go to bookstores.
Rahul has been able to deal with all that goes on in cricket because of two reasons – he can put things in perspective and he can switch focus from one world to another when he needs to. Whatever happened in his cricket, at home he was always husband, father, family man. Never Mr Gloomy. He never came home saying, “Oh, I’ve had a bad day.” Unless asked, he wouldn’t speak about his “work”. Other than dropped catches.
When he was going through a very tough time, around the 2010-11 season, the one thing that bothered him was that he didn’t want to be playing if he wasn’t contributing and if he was taking a youngster’s place. He did think about retirement then. He had more than 10,000 Test runs, and he had always said that he would go if he was not contributing. “Because this is what I have stood for,” he said. To play well in tough conditions, play well abroad, to contribute to victories. We did have discussions about whether he should go at that time, and a lot of my answers would be about my gut. I always told him, “I don’t know about averages.” I just said to him that he was the one who knew everything about his game. In January 2011, after South Africa, on instinct I said to him, “Hang on, give it another series and then see if you are taking anyone’s place.”
Rahul has always had a very good understanding of what was important about his being in cricket and what was not. It can only come from a real deep love for the game. When I began to understand the politics that exist in the game, he only said one thing: this game has given me so much in life that I will never be bitter. There is so much to be thankful for, and regardless of everything, that will never go away.
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nbsp; Only once, I remember, he returned from a Test and said, “Shucks, I shouldn’t have done something… I got a bit angry today. I lost my temper in the dressing room.” He wouldn’t say more. Many months later Veeru (Sehwag) told me that Rahul had actually thrown a chair that day. “I’d never seen him like that and he threw a chair not because we’d lost but because of how we’d lost.”
He has always been even-tempered, on good days and bad. He never grumbles, and it is very, very difficult to understand what he is feeling, because he can internalise everything. He often said that to succeed in international cricket for such a long time, “I have only thought about me and my cricket… but I’m learning to be unselfish.” That said, he found a way to work his training around the family. He often fit in his five hours of training and nets when none of us were at home. If Samit needs help with his homework, Rahul will be there to help.
Of course we argue, like all couples do. We did as young parents, over who changed the nappies or why he didn’t get angry about this or that. Cricketers have to be diplomatic when talking to the media during series, but I remember telling him during the course of a phone conversation once, “Hello, I’m your wife. Don’t speak as if this is a press conference.” In turn, he gets irritated with me when I am being what he calls a little “wife-ish” and asking him why he did what he did and why he didn’t tick somebody off or say no to something.
If given a choice, he would never celebrate any of his on-field achievements at home, because, he said, his enjoyment came when he was on the field, batting or competing. What he wanted after that was to find out when he was going to bat again. I was the one who insisted that we rejoice when good things happened. Not by throwing a lavish party or anything showy, but just by bringing home some ice-cream. I often tell Rahul he is a very good husband but would have been a very boring boyfriend!
He has always had a wide view of the world and the ability to see the larger picture and take things beyond the trivial and the individual. After he received the Padma Shri in Delhi for 2004, along with Sourav, the next day he looked at the papers and said that to see just their photos on the front pages was unfortunate. Rahul was saying this at home, not to impress people as to how modest he was. He doesn’t like the word “hero” being used carelessly, because to him real heroes are soldiers, scientists, doctors.
In all these years he has let me be me. He didn’t care about the correct “cricket wife” image. He wasn’t fussed about anything – whether I worked when I wanted to, what I said to anyone. I’ve read a lot of stuff about how cricketers get “disturbed” when their wives are on tour. Rahul was fine when I travelled, both in the Pakistani winter, when Samit was three months old, and two months later in the West Indies. It meant that once we lived out of a hotel room for 69 days at a stretch; not easy with a baby.
Rahul enjoyed being a father and was also very, very patient. (Though he also knew that a dad who has fielded for 90 overs in the Caribbean heat is not going to be asked to change nappies!) We had our challenges as travelling parents. Samit once burned his hand in the West Indies when Rahul was on the field. At the end of it all, though, it was wonderful to enter the dressing room to celebrate India’s first series win there after 35 years. He insisted that all the wives and family on tour were invited into the dressing room and included in the celebrations – most satisfying for all of us who were travelling with the team. It was repeated in England the year after.
Next only to my father, I think of Rahul as the most non-materialistic person I have ever come across. Gadgets, gizmos, brands, are completely lost on him. I remember entering the room for the inaugural ICC awards event, when he looked at a car on display, the one that was to be given to the Player of the Year, and said, “Will be nice to get it.” I knew he wasn’t thinking about the car. The other nominees included big names like Brian Lara, Ricky Ponting, Matthew Hayden and Muttiah Muralitharan. The ceremony was very long, we had to go through many courses of our sit-down English dinner. When he was awarded the Player of the Year, he gave me a little hug before going on stage, and to me that said it all. It meant a lot to him.
Retirement will mean a big shift in Rahul’s life, of not having training or team-mates around him or the chance to compete again. The family, though, is delighted to have him back.
This article was first published on ESPNcricinfo on March 12, 2012
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‘When you’ve played at the top, it’s hard to settle for second-best’
INTERVIEW BY SHARDA UGRA
March 2012
How does a player pick the right time to retire? How did you? What’s the difference between a slump and a sign that your time is up? What separates doubt from foresight?
It’s actually very hard to tell if there is such a thing as a right time. All your career, you’re taught to never never give up. You’re fighting, you keep improving, you always think you can sort out problems. I never thought about going out on a high or going out on a slump. A lot of people told me: “You will just know, Rahul, when the time is right.” Obviously there are other things that come into consideration: where you are in your life, where the team is at that point of time, what the future challenges are, how you fit into that. There are the immediate challenges of tours like Australia and England, which you think are tough, and you want to try to go there and make a difference.
In the end it just comes down to knowing and being comfortable with it. And I just think I was most comfortable doing it at this stage. If things had not gone well in England, maybe I would have been comfortable doing it then. Obviously after England I felt I was in good form and that I needed to go to Australia, and I felt that it was going to be a tough tour and that it wouldn’t be right to walk away after doing well in England… it may sound silly, but just wanting to finish on a high – that hadn’t occurred to me, in the sense that I wanted to go when I was comfortable.
There was a period in 2008, the end of 2008, when I was really struggling and not getting runs, and there was a lot of talk of me being dropped. If I had been dropped at that stage, I would’ve still continued to play first-class cricket. Not with the intention of trying to make a comeback – I know that if I had got dropped at 36 or 37, the likelihood of me making a comeback would have been very slim. I wouldn’t have played for wanting to make a comeback, but because I still wanted to just play the game. It was a game I loved and I still enjoyed playing it. I probably would have continued playing Ranji Trophy at that stage. And how long that would have lasted, who knows.
But to end a career with the IPL?
In some ways it’s like a weaning-off period. Playing cricket has been such a big part of my life, so to just walk away might have been hard. Some of the senior guys who’ve retired and played the IPL say the IPL’s a good way, in some ways, to slowly wean yourself off the drug that is cricket.
What do you assess when making a decision to retire?
It’s a combination of things. The important thing to remember is how much you are contributing. That’s a major factor. As you get older these things do come in, and that’s why I said that England for me… it was important for me to keep contributing.
After retiring, did you think: what if this is a mistake?
I think the best question someone asked me about this retirement thing came from Eric Simons. I called him up and said, “Eric, I’m retiring.” And Eric said, “When you made that decision, Rahul, did you feel relief or did you feel disappointment?” And I had never thought about it that way. It was a feeling of relief and I did feel it. I’ve not regretted it.
I’ve lived this life for 20 years. I haven’t regretted it and I hope I won’t regret it. I don’t know, I might miss it. We miss a lot of things. We miss college, everyone wants to go back to Uni and live that life again, but you know that’s not possible. Hopefully you move on. You will know that there are other things to do and other challe
nges.
What about international cricket won’t you miss, apart from the travel and being away from family?
In a cricket career your life is in some ways controlled for you. You have no control over schedules, you have no control about where you want to play, you don’t have control over that as a cricketer. I think while I’ll miss the routine and knowing what to strive for, I think I’ll enjoy the flexibility of being able to make some choices about things I want to do. I’ll enjoy the luxury of now having that choice.
What is it about life after cricket that you think a player fears the most?
Each one has his own fears, when it’s something you’ve done all your life. And when it’s the only thing that you’ve known, it’s almost like starting out fresh again. It’s almost like going back to college, like going back to what you felt like when making a decision about whether you want to do commerce or engineering. The only problem is, you are doing it at 40 rather than at 17 or 18, and with skills you’ve worked on for 20 years at the exclusion of other skills. You have to start all over again. That, I think, in a lot of ways can be daunting to people, and it’s not easy, especially, if I may say so, because you are used to competing and playing at an extremely high level. You pride yourself on a certain level of competence and a certain level of ability.
Rahul Dravid: Timeless Steel Page 15
