You Must Like Cricket? (19 page)

The cricket suffered.

I kept track when I could. But when you are out in rural Bengal covering a drought, when the ground is cracking up and the villagers look like they'd kill for a drop of filthy water, you don't ask the nearest guy for the score, do you?

In the years since, I have done my best to achieve a work-cricket balance (or rather a cricket-work balance): I have offered to write about it so that I can watch it (this does not work so well if you're working on the crime beat at the time); I have got myself promoted (so that I can tinker with my work schedule – I've gone to work before the cleaners arrived and left by late afternoon or early evening so that I could catch a match in a different time zone); I have even, to my shame, claimed that my mother was in hospital in order to take the day off.

But the cricket has suffered.

These days, I'm less bothered about the social respectability. I need the money.

* * *

One of the problems of being a cricket fan in his mid thirties is that no one takes you seriously. Most people think it's about as mature as wetting the bed. As I get older and more impatient and less inclined to laugh at the world, it grows boring explaining to people that loving a game (okay, loving a game
a lot
) does not necessarily make me maladjusted.

There's a general assumption that sport is a childish, frivolous pursuit. That it is not worthy of the degree of emotional and intellectual engagement that politics, classical music or Estonian films merit. I'm often told that cricket is basically twenty-two grown men meeting in a park to throw things at each other. (Imagine being interested in
that
.) But in these terms Mozart was messing around with doh ray me; Shakespeare was juggling twenty-six letters. Most seven-year-olds manage eight notes and the alphabet. If you can hum piano concertos over your coffee, you are an object of respectful fascination. If you can trot out the Indian batsmen's averages during their 1971 tour of the West Indies, you are a crank. Benign, perhaps, but a crank.

Which is why these days, sometimes, I have to resort to subterfuge.

A couple of years ago I had to go to a funeral which clashed with a Test match India were playing against Australia. So I made a plan. For the period when I would be away from a television set, I asked a friend of mine to text me the score at the end of each over. When I say ‘the score' I understate things somewhat; it was more in the nature of a running commentary, like the live reports you get on the internet. My friend must have typed his fingers to the bone. (The logistics of it all still cause me some puzzlement. Amid all this furious texting, when did he actually get a chance to watch the cricket? Anyway, I am grateful to him – I ought to take this chance to let him know.)

At the funeral, I looked suitably sombre, if a little distracted. As I explained to one curious relative, as I picked up yet another message, things were difficult at work. My bosses were unsympathetic, my colleagues recalcitrant. They wouldn't leave me alone, even today of all days.

Ten, even five years ago, I would not have bothered with this elaborate charade: I simply would not have attended the funeral. Now I go – I can't be bothered with making my excuses. It seems like a waste of time. I find the explanations I am obliged to put forth irksome. I don't find the jokes amusing.

Of course, I don't do much to help myself. No fan does.

Not so long ago I went to a dinner party in London where I didn't know a soul. (The friend I was staying with brought me along – he felt he shouldn't leave me sitting in front of the TV with my lager and cigarettes; he really should have known better.) I was a little nervous, and as a result, I drank rather more than I should have. While I did not have a glass in each hand
all
the time, I ended up rather substantially drunk.

The drink did not help with my nerves. In fact, it made me edgy, and it gave me the courage to let my edginess be evident. At one point in the evening, I found myself in front of a po-faced young woman who, her fingers wrapped around the stem of a glass of wine she had barely touched, asked me about right wing Hindu fundamentalists in India and the riots in Gujarat. ‘Yeah, well, oh Gujarat. Very embarrassing. I mean, they are, they just burn buses and kill people. Mmm, complex issue, you see. I don't have much time for that sort of thing really,' I said. (This was, I could see, unforgivable.) ‘But I do have time for cricket. India is away in South Africa and . . . um  . . . with the time difference, you know, you wouldn't happen to know the score, would you?'

Po-Face stared at me. I could just as well have made a clumsy grab at her. We did not speak again. I left shortly afterwards, without my friend.

* * *

The night India beat the West Indies at Port of Spain in 2002, a close friend of mine lost his mother (a sudden heart attack – she didn't last till the hospital). I remember the phone call; it came in the middle of a whoop-and-whirl I was doing on my own in the living room. I couldn't take the smile off my face even as I drove to the hospital to comfort my friend. There were hundreds of young men out on the streets, celebrating. They thought that I was on a celebratory drive of my own.

I can no longer pretend that how my team performs on a cricket field will determine what happens in the rest of my life. I've left exams behind me; these days there is just too much at stake. As we get older and marry, have children, we become more vulnerable. There is so much more to worry about, so many more people who by being hurt could hurt us too. I don't want to tempt fate.

And yet, sometimes I find myself returning to the old notions, hoping that if things go right on the cricket field, good fortune will be matched elsewhere. It's a comforting illusion – it makes the complexities of adulthood more manageable.

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.

T
hirty 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 enough for the world to have changed beyond recognition.