You Must Like Cricket?

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Title Page

  1 ‘Go, go, go, kill them!’

  2 ‘How does Sachin Tendulkar pronounce his name?’

  3 ‘How can a grown man drop his pants like this?’

  4 ‘Could I touch your hand just once?’

  5 ‘In the year in which . . .’

  6 ‘And they make millions from endorsements’

  7 ‘We won’t let them off if they look like winning’

  8 ‘B for L, J for D’

  9 ‘?!?’

  10 ‘Today’s the day for all this madness’

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Soumya Bhattacharya grew up in London and Kolkata. His writing has been published in the New York Times, the Sydney Morning Herald, Wisden, New Statesman, the Guardian and the Observer. He is currently an editor on the Hindustan Times. He lives in Mumbai. This is his first book.

  For Oishi

  There is a calm I haven’t come to yet

  ‘Disappear’, REM

  My moonstruck soul I now decide

  To launch upon the whimsy tide

  ‘Dream Song’, Sukumar Ray

  (translated from the Bengali

  by Sukanta Chaudhuri)

  You Must Like Cricket?

  Memoirs of an Indian Cricket Fan

  Soumya Bhattacharya

  1

  ‘Go, go, go, kill them!’

  Nothing is like that state of half wakefulness at seven in the morning after having stayed up late to watch India win a one-day international cricket match which you’d given up for lost. Absolutely nothing.

  That’s the trouble with writing about it.

  It’s not like waking up after great sex, the kind you’ve been wanting to have – waiting to have, with predatory intensity – for years and then suddenly found. It’s not like the day after landing a first job or a flat or a car. It’s not like waking up after you became a father for the first time.

  You instinctively know what it is not like. But when you try to make sense of what it is like, you’re struggling for analogies. You’re pushed into a corner trying to find an equivalent experience – something similar in degree, if not in kind – to approximate that sense of wonder, of residual thrill, that ludicrous relief, that goofy grin and absent-minded air of the morning after. In a way, it stands to reason: you can only explain it to someone who knows quite what it means.

  Let’s just put this on record then. Watching India clinch a tight one-day game is comparable with one thing: watching India win a Test match. (Now that, to think of it, is better.)

  Maybe casting about for a comparison is going down the wrong road. Maybe describing those moments is a better idea.

  So here I am early on a Sunday morning (some hours after watching the NatWest Trophy final between England and India in July 2002), fresh with lack of sleep, light-headed with no booze from the night before and feeling like (oh no, there I go again), well, like I’ve watched an incredible game of cricket in which we went and did just the opposite of what we’re terribly good at doing: we went and won a match that was nearly lost instead of going and losing a game that we’d all but stitched up. (The ‘they’ and ‘we’ are already beginning to get mixed up. Never mind, it will happen more and more. It is one of the things that makes a fan a fan.)

  This is not the last time I’ll repeat the details to myself. There are friends who care about these things; there are relatives who don’t but will be forced to listen to them; there are the newspaper reports to dissect – all of them; the highlights of the game to watch; the repeat telecast of the whole match the day after and then of course the video. From how far outside the off stump did Yuvraj Singh pick the one which he hoicked over widish mid-on? What was Tendulkar doing, letting Ashley Giles get him again?

  The details then bear repetition. At least, they do for me.

  Six hundred and fifty-one runs in ninety-nine overs and three balls for the loss of thirteen wickets. Marcus Trescothick got a hundred. Nasser Hussain got a hundred. Mohammad Kaif nearly got one. Sourav Ganguly and Virender Sehwag scored 106 runs in ninety-two balls. Yuvraj and Kaif put on 121 runs in eighty-five minutes. India got the last fifty-nine runs off fifty balls. India won – their first championship win in the last ten attempts.

  Statistics are like skeletons. How they come about is the flesh and blood of the game.

  But for those of us whose minds the day after a game like this are photocopy machines gone berserk, spewing out identical images over and over again, everything counts: the skeleton, the flesh, the blood, the breath, the life. We want the whole damn package. Cricket for us is as alive as the person we share our lives with.

  My wife is stirring. Her hair is short and mussed up. I roll over on my side and kiss the nape of her neck. It’s a good-natured peck, not an invitation with erotic charge. It is distracted. She knows. Years of living together tells her this. She’s been through this – gone through with this. She’s promised not to mind. Not the day after. (She will, when this goes on, this distraction, this preoccupation with things that are not on her radar, there to a lesser extent but still there a week from now. But that is a week from now.) For now, she chooses not to mind. She smiles, faintly. A flutter of eyelids as she wakes, as she senses, immediately that it’s a Sunday but not quite a regular Sunday. She remembers last night. The game. She gets up and pads towards the bathroom.

  Our daughter is still asleep. She sleeps on her stomach, her face towards me. My heart lurches whenever I look at her like this. I never cease to wonder that I have had anything to do with her being there at all. I don’t move towards her as I usually do. I want time to myself before the day begins to unfold, before its ebb and flow pulls me away from this total recall.

  I reach for a cigarette. The coffee can wait. I lie on my back and watch the ceiling turn into a giant television screen.

  * * *

  Trescothick and Hussain are savaging the Indian attack. A second-wicket stand of 185 off 177 balls is taking the match away from India. And this in a final at Lord’s – that most English of English grounds I’ve always thought of as the real home of cricket. Here was where the empire struck back in a moment charged with history and irony in India’s most unforgettable one-day wonder, the 1983 World Cup final. And now this, at the end of a summer in which the team has played magnificently.

  The big guns (Sourav, Dravid and Tendulkar) have fired; the talent of the new lot (Sehwag, Kaif, Yuvraj and Zaheer) is undisputed so far; the side seems to have grit, it has shown resolve, the guys are holding their nerves in tight matches. Why, India is playing like Australia, damn it. So it is doubly galling to see all this being thrown away, being crushed by two men who couldn’t care less about what it would mean for us to lose this final after having lost the last nine we’ve played.

  Chokers. Again.

  Kumble gets Trescothick. Flintoff – the guy who had taken off his shirt and waved it at the stands and done a bare-chested victory lap at Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium last year – has joined his skipper and is keeping the run rate at around six an over. Hussain gets his hundred, his first in seventy-two international games. He gestures to the press (who haven’t been his biggest fans); he points to the number 3 on his shirt. He means that he is – contrary to what certain commentators think – good enough to bat one down for England. The match is becoming one-sided enough to allow for the drama of such personal statements.

  A flurry of late wickets (two fall with the score at 312) but they reach 325. No team has chased as many runs to win a fifty-overs international game. Not yet, at least.

 
; Everyone has written India off.

  My mobile phone trills. The first text message arrives during the lunch break. (It’s late evening in India.)

  ‘Buried again?’ a friend from Delhi asks. He is a guy who studied at the best law school in the country and then decided to become a journalist. We’d met as two rival reporters on the same beat. We had common interests – like cricket. We became friends. That was a decade ago.

  Since then, he has left journalism and gone back to law. We still have common interests – like cricket. We are still friends. His wife – like mine – has no passion for the game. He seems to have given her a choice: he’ll either hit the bottle or watch every game he chooses to. She has chosen the cricket. He does not mind. It is a choice that he has engineered.

  I decide not to answer.

  ‘You’re fucking watching or what?’

  The beep is insistent. It demands a response. ‘This is the season for miracles’, I type out for the effect of the words, for the oracular quality they seem to convey rather than for any other reason. I don’t believe in happy endings. I think I’m too old even to allow myself hope. We are agnostics, both of us.

  ‘Fuck you. Should have gone out for a film and dinner.’

  Trescothick’s century is being replayed on the screen. So is Hussain’s. Where they got their runs from, how many balls they took, which bowler they plundered for how much off how many balls.

  Television has made cricket more scientific, more arithmetical, among other things. It breaks down the whole; it resolves the game into the sum of its parts. It gives you insights you wouldn’t get at the ground. (Did you know that this is the ninth time that Tendulkar was out in the third ball of an over? Wow.) Some of it is useful. More of it is meant for the number cruncher. A lot of it is junk.

  Statistics, as the Indian player-turned-commentator Navjot Singh Sidhu tells us till I want to strangle him, are like bikinis: they reveal as much as they conceal.

  It works. And it doesn’t. Because the whole of cricket is much more than a sum of its parts.

  I watch. Fascinated. Appalled. India bat in less than half an hour.

  * * *

  Sourav and Sehwag walk out in the gathering glare of the floodlights. One commentator remarks – again! – how closely Sehwag resembles Tendulkar. Both are short, stocky, happy to use the bat as a bludgeon, and possess more talent than an entire batting order put together.

  Why won’t they leave Sehwag alone? He comes across as a polite, modest, unassuming guy and he doesn’t speak much about this comparison business, but it can’t be fun to be told all the time that you are like somebody else.

  As Salman Rushdie said after people told him, post-fatwa, to get his appearance altered and to make a fresh start, get a new life, ‘I don’t want somebody else’s life, I want my own.’

  The English newspapers have been saying that there are so many Indian flags in the crowd you can hardly believe India is playing away from home. It has been that kind of a summer, really, that kind of a trophy. It’s not just that the support for India has been unequivocal. The exuberance of the fans has rippled across the grounds till it has become a wave.

  Not many of these supporters have come from India. Travelling to away games is a luxury because few have the money to get past the pound-rupee conversion rate (more than Rs80 to the pound). Most of them are migrants, second generation British Indians, dancing the bhangra, draped in tricolours, unambiguous about where their loyalties, at least on the cricket pitch, lie.

  Is Norman Tebbit watching?

  We’re off. And away. India love to crumble when faced with a colossal total. But this evening, the openers are playing as though this is the first innings of the game, as if they are setting the pace of the match.

  The hundred comes up within fifteen overs. Sourav is batting like his real opposition is Sehwag: he, as captain, must outscore the new star. But it’s healthy competition and England are beginning to droop. Hussain has that murderous expression on his face.

  On the off side, Rahul Dravid had once said, there is God, and then there is Sourav. It’s one of those days when you begin to think that on the off side, there is Sourav, and then there is God.

  Another text message. This time from Chirantan, one of my closest childhood friends. He lives in Delhi these days, so we don’t watch cricket together any more. We grew up together, went to the Eden Gardens together; once he picked his way through a tangle of outstretched legs to spit on a spectator who was obstructing our view.

  He is a serious bloke, Chirantan. Serious about his cricket. He is in Kolkata for a few days and we had planned to watch a bit of the final together. Like old times. Now that doesn’t seem like such a good idea. We’re going to lose, I think. But Chirantan is undeterred. He is on the road and is asking about the score. The roars coming from inside the houses of the middle-class neighbourhood through which he is driving tell him that India’s reply has begun well.

  The streets are deserted this Saturday evening. If you had taken a walk when the game began (as I did), you would have thought it was a public holiday. As the England innings progressed, the city seemed to turn in on itself, becoming quiet and introspective. You could hear the commentary from every television set inside every flat in every borough across the city.

  In the impoverished neighbourhoods, where large families can’t afford their own TVs, money has been raised to hire sets for the duration of the tournament. It’s common in Kolkata when championships like this one are on; it’s imperative when India do as well as they have been doing in England this summer. Gaggles of unemployed anxious young men squat in front of rented televisions propped up on cardboard packing cases or wooden crates. These men are the most outspoken, the most boisterous and uninhibited of India supporters; there’s no middle-class self-consciousness to cramp their style. Or their vocal support.

  But the England innings has shut even them up. This is not the Indian team’s fault, they think, because most of them believe, in the great tradition of the sport they follow, that cricket is a batsman’s game, tailored for batsmen, won or lost by them.

  Perversely, the bowlers get away with a lot. These fans will not blame the bowlers for allowing the opposition to pile up an intimidating total. No, it’s the batsmen’s fault. Why couldn’t they have got the runs when the other side did? Not today, though. This is beyond us, they murmur, this is beyond any team.

  ‘106 for 0,’ I write back. And then, ‘Sourav, Sehwag on mission impossible.’

  The headline writer in me always takes over on occasions like this.

  ‘Will reach your place in half an hour’, comes the reply.

  Suddenly it all begins to go horribly wrong. Tudor gets Sourav; Sehwag perishes to Giles; Dinesh Mongia comes and goes; Tendulkar looks out of sorts and is then done in by Giles; and Rahul ‘The Wall’ Dravid, so immaculate, so dependable, crumbles.

  From 106 for 0 to 146 for 5. Half the side out with the addition of forty runs.

  ‘Score? Score?’ Chirantan asks.

  I don’t bother to reply.

  ‘And we’re throwing it away again’, writes my lawyer friend from Delhi. It’s hard to bear the torment.

  On television, a sanctimonious commentator calls for more resolve and discipline. He might as well have said ‘India need more balls’, or perhaps, to borrow a line from Eddie Murphy, ‘more testicular fortitude’. That’s what he meant anyway.

  I don’t want Chirantan to come over now.

  I want to suffer this agony on my own, in silence. I want to grit my teeth, mute the volume and watch till the bitter end.

  It’s funny, this. Watching cricket with other fans, in a cheering, arguing group is something I love when things are going fine. Then we become part of this backslapping, beer-swilling clique, high on locker-room humour and memories of other victories in other games. ‘Remember Sharjah 1998?’ ‘Oh no, this is more like Old Trafford during the World Cup.’ ‘Come on, Kanpur in 1989 was more exciting.’

&nbs
p; We speak in a code of our own, throwing out dates and names, games and grounds, and each one of us knows what the other means. On those occasions, there is enough bonhomie to go around. Watching India win a game on my own is never as much fun as watching it with people who are as overwhelmed by it as I am. It fosters a sense of belonging like few other things.

  But at home alone, jumping up and down in front of the sofa as victory nears is embarrassing. It makes me feel self-conscious. On the other hand, jumping up and down along with a whole lot of other people or hugging complete strangers at the ground makes perfect sense. In the mind of the fan who is scenting victory, there is always security in numbers.

  But what happens when the game is slipping away, when India are on the brink of getting thumped? Then I just want to hide away. Watching becomes a masochistic activity, a secret anguish. Watch I must but I must watch in the privacy of my living room. It’s a strange sort of protectionism. I can’t bear to hear the players being sworn at. And I can’t suffer the blackness of my mood being lightened by a casual remark, a stray joke. A perverse pleasure can still be a pleasure.

  Defeat is not meant to be taken lightly. Whoever said you needed to be objective about the game? Whoever said it was just a game anyway?

  The 150 has come up – still for five wickets – and I am about to call Chirantan to tell him that we ought to wait till the Test matches start. The bell rings. He is here.

  ‘Tendulkar out?’ he asks as he comes through the door. The collective groan from inside the houses as he drove past has confirmed his worst fears.

  I don’t reply. He flops down on the sofa.

  Yuvraj Singh and Mohammad Kaif have come together. With 180 runs to get in twenty-six overs, they are cobbling together what the commentators call ‘a semblance of resistance’. Yuvraj cover drives to the fence. Kaif pulls backward of square for four. These two are not taking any chances. We aren’t seeing wild slogs here but percentage play, sensible cricket shots which are finding the gaps. Hussain still looks relaxed. In the pavilion, as the camera zooms on his face, Sourav’s face is not even grim: it is empty.