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  Afterwards, when the glamour had worn off, what struck me most about that first conversation was how it seemed to epitomise the English view of Indians. It would be repeated time and again over the years. It’s a surefire conversational opener, a safe, neutral topic. If you’re Indian, you must be crazy about cricket.

  Some of it has to do with the fact that it is the only game that India is really ever any good at. If you’re Brazilian, you must be crazy about football. It is a stereotype we all acknowledge. Whenever I meet anyone from Brazil, I always ask why so many of their footballers have various versions of the name Ronaldo. One Brazilian woman I met in Mauritius replied, ‘Dunno. I don’t really watch football. I’ve lived in Baltimore all my life.’

  India has been playing international cricket since 1932 but, in a way, it all started with the 1983 World Cup. The fact was that India did not merely win the tournament; it was the year which marked the beginning of India as a cricket superpower – and the gradual shifting of the game’s heart, soul and bank balance from Lord’s to Kolkata.

  The image of India as a nation fixated on cricket became sharper during the 1990s. This was the decade in which perhaps the single most significant social change of recent years occurred in India: the arrival of satellite television. Cricket’s viewing figures shot up, of course, but it wasn’t merely about the numbers of people watching. Satellite TV made the game far more accessible and far more plentiful for the average fan. He could now, from his living room, just as easily watch the Ashes as the match being played in his hometown.

  As viewing figures grew and the game became stronger, everybody wanted a part of it. Cricket was making incredible amounts of money from advertising and TV rights. In no time, and in a tournament being played outside India, billboards of Indian companies could be seen in the stadium. By the time the World Cup came around in England in 1999, several of the main sponsors – Hero Honda, LG, Pepsi and Emirates Airways – were targeting subcontinental audiences.

  This, of course, was a period in which cricket was being marketed as a global game. With tournaments in non-Test playing nations like Canada and the Netherlands, the sport’s reach was widening. The subcontinent played the key role in expanding its frontiers. India began to wield more clout in the running of the game as a whole. Jagmohan Dalmiya, one of its shrewdest administrators, became boss of the International Cricket Council.

  Today, in the first decade of the new century, much of the money that keeps cricket financially healthy comes from India. According to Time Asia, of the $45 million that the England and Wales Cricket Board received for the right to show the 1999 World Cup, India and Sri Lanka accounted for more than half. And that was small beer. In the next round of deals, the ICC received $550 million for sponsorship and broadcast rights to two World Cups (2003 and 2007) and three champions trophies. This would not have been possible without advertising and satellite-TV money from the subcontinent. A huge chunk of the 1.25 billion global television audience for the South African World Cup was Indian.

  TV gave the Indian fan not merely a more diverse menu; it offered his obsession wings. Suddenly, we were exposed to fandom in the international sense: faces painted in the country’s colours, banners and placards, the Mexican wave and the chants. Seeing what our counterparts did in other parts of the world gave us a template. Young people going to the grounds in India or watching the game from their living rooms realised for the first time that there existed a code of conduct for supporters, liable to be adapted differently according to the demands of each ground or team, but a code of conduct nonetheless. (The Bharat Army, an indefatigable – and indefatigably good-humoured – band of expatriate Indian supporters who danced the bhangra at cricket grounds, was modelled on the Barmy Army.) Before long, fans – and players – from this part of the world began to realise that they were more crucial to the health and the future of the game than they had hitherto believed.

  Nearly three decades ago, I considered any cricket played on the subcontinent as an approximation of the real thing. That happened on English cricket grounds. A seven-year-old Indian today believes that the game played on his home ground is the genuine stuff; all else is merely a watered-down version, a pale imitation of it.

  The manner in which India has made cricket its very own – in terms of the money it generates, the frenzy it engenders and its intrusion into every area of public life, from pop culture to politics – is a marker of India’s post-colonial present. Like the English language itself, cricket was a game that was made popular in India by the British. And like the English language, it has, over the years, been appropriated by Indians in a very Indian way. It is not just that cricket now touches more hearts and fosters more excitement in India than in the land of its birth. Even the enthusiasm – its pitch, texture and unbridled overflow – is very different on the subcontinent. (Multiply by one million the kind of atmosphere you get at an India game at an English ground and you are beginning to get there.) The empire has taken England’s national game, subverted accepted notions of how fans respond to it and turned it into something that is its very own.

  When Time Asia ran a feature on the eve of the 1999 World Cup, it stumbled upon a touching, funny anecdote that exemplifies how deep this idea of cricket being an essentially Indian sport has now taken root. The magazine interviewed a young boy, Sukhdev, who played, in front of an admiring, unemployed audience, a serious game of cricket in the shadows of Delhi’s Red Fort. ‘[Sukhdev] is confused about where the game originated; he believes it began in the subcontinent. “The English,” he says, “must have stolen it from us.”’

  The advertising industry – always a prism through which social trends are reflected – was one of the first to cash in on this. A slew of brands began to use cricketers as ambassadors. And as they successfully raised the sales of colas or credit cards, they began to be seen as sure bets for commercial success, even if the products they advertised had little to do with the game. Driven by the millions he made from endorsements, Sachin Tendulkar became the world’s richest cricketer. Cricket was no longer a game any more. It had become Cricket Inc.

  Followers sensed that the cricket pitch was one arena (perhaps the only arena) in which India could hold its own against the rest of the world. It is a situation which has not much changed in the twenty-first century.

  Today, India is an emerging economic superpower. Jeffrey Sachs, special advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on millennial development goals, said in a recent interview that ‘India is poised to become one of the three large economies of the world. By the mid century I think India could overtake the US by absolute size.’

  But this is only part of the story. Seventy-two per cent of India’s population still lives in the hinterland, many of them in shocking deprivation. That is why, despite its growing global status in information technology, India has, according to a recent study, eighty-four television sets per thousand people (America has 938); why it has 7.2 personal computers for every thousand people (Australia has 564.5); and why the internet reaches only two per cent of the population (in Malaysia, that figure is thirty-four per cent).

  The gulf between the educated, urban elite and their fellow countrymen in the vast rural hinterland is widening by the day. Cricket has become their only common ground. For the urban rich, more than anything else, cricket has fostered a strong sense of national identity. For many people my age or younger, who have grown up in an independent country and are too distanced from the pangs of either Partition or the thrill of not being under Raj rule, the game has become the most triumphant mirror of the ideas of nation and patriotism.

  But for millions of Indians (the ones who live on minimum wages, never take holidays, have no other avenue of entertainment and can only afford merely a community television on which to watch the matches), exulting in the success of eleven men on a green field is as close as they will ever get to success. These Indians are not proud of their city/town/village, their politicians, their backgrounds, their career
s; they have little to look forward to in terms of what their country might have to offer them or what they might be able to give themselves. They have only the cricket.

  Any outsider on a visit to India can see them – watching the game on their community TV, standing in a huddle with their noses pressed to the window of an electronics store, attending a victory procession after the game is won. They can see what all this is about. And they will go back home and talk about it in wonder.

  * * *

  In the winter of 1993, I surprised myself for the first time in my life with the intensity of my obsession: on impulse, I took a plane from London to watch the final of a limited-overs tournament back home in Kolkata. And yet, it was not quite entirely on impulse. It might have been madness (a lot of people told me that it was certifiably loony, that a passion for the game was acceptable, likeable even in an innocent, pleasant way, but travelling from London to Kolkata to watch a game was taking it a bit too far) but there was some sort of method to it.

  On the occasion of its diamond jubilee, the Cricket Association of Bengal had put together a one-day championship involving India, Sri Lanka, West Indies, South Africa and Zimbabwe. It was called the Hero Cup. The final, scheduled for 27 November at the Eden Gardens, would cap three weeks of high-quality cricket.

  At first, it had just seemed like a nice idea. Then, as I began to think about it, it became clear that my longing to be there need not remain merely a longing; it could actually be done. Not very long after I first thought of it, going back home for the cricket seemed the only course of action open to me.

  Perhaps it was because I had not watched much cricket involving my country for a long time. (India had played only Sri Lanka in Tests during 1993.) But when I decided to buy my ticket I had no idea that India would actually make the final. So it must have had more to do with watching cricket in India than watching India play.

  The distance I had put between myself and cricket in India in physical terms had strengthened the emotional bond between myself and the game; it had sharpened my desire to see the game in India, to see, with new eyes, how much of what I said about it to my English friends was accurate.

  Haven’t people done more inexplicable – and worse – things on a whim?

  It was quite a price to pay, it turned out, for a whim. Especially for someone who ate only a banana for lunch every day for a month to raise the money for the ticket. The travel agent, a Bangladeshi, had his cramped, airless office off the Bayswater Road. He sat behind a chipped Formica desk and swivelled around to the calendar tacked up behind him when he heard my request.

  The chair squeaked when he turned. One of the wheels did not work. The venetian blinds at the other end of the room were crooked. One of the slats was missing, letting in the feeble November sunlight.

  He scratched his chin and said it would be difficult, getting a ticket now, at such short notice in the winter when so many Indians were travelling back home, and asked if it would do to leave a fortnight later. When I explained that I didn’t merely want to go but in fact had to go on precisely the date I said, he conceded that it could be arranged, through great enterprise and resourcefulness on his part. Besides, as a fellow Asian, he promised me a discount. He booked me into an Aeroflot plane from Heathrow to Dum Dum airport.

  Only later, when I compared prices with Bengalis that I knew in London, did I realise that he had ripped me off. But that afternoon, as I walked out of the agent’s office and into the stream of traffic on the Bayswater Road, my heart was singing. I had a ticket to the final at the Eden.

  My parents were aghast when I told them. Many of my friends back home thought it was some kind of a joke. But those I knew in England did not find my plan as outrageous as I had imagined they would. My tutor, an Australian who was a member of the MCC, felt the break would do me good. And that this was as good an excuse to go home as any.

  Now it seems to me that what I was doing was, in a way, expected of me by the people I had come to know in England. It fitted the notion that they had of the Indian cricket fan who would go to any lengths to satisfy his desire to watch a match at his home ground. It made them feel vindicated; it confirmed what they thought they knew: if you’re Indian, you must be crazy about cricket.

  * * *

  To make my homecoming sweeter, India reached the final. But the real cracker of a match – the match that became part of Indian one-day cricket lore and added to the myth that Sachin Tendulkar was already becoming – was the game India played against South Africa at the Eden on 24 November.

  I was on the plane at the time.

  I heard and read all about it once I’d landed. In fact, my parents – who by the time I arrived had overcome their reservations about my trip and were overjoyed at this sudden opportunity to see me again – recounted the details to me as we drove home from the airport.

  I saw the rerun later on TV. South Africa fielded first. India ran up a meagre 195 in the full quota of fifty overs. Mohammad Azharuddin, in sublime touch throughout the championship, scored ninety off 118 balls in that cavalier-careless-caressing manner that only he had with the bat. (It was so calming, so de-stressing to watch him. It always is, I suppose, when you see something so awfully difficult being made to appear so ludicrously simple.)

  When the visitors began their reply, Anil Kumble and Ajay Jadeja quickly pegged them back. And despite a valiant sixty-two from Hudson, South Africa came into the final five overs needing forty-five to win the game. But they fought back, and with one over left they needed just six to win. As skipper Azharuddin and the seniors – Kapil Dev, Prabhakar – went into a huddle to decide who should bowl those final make-or-break six balls, audacious, unfazed-by-the-big-occasion Tendulkar, only twenty-two, walked up and asked for the ball.

  Azharuddin gave it to him, though it was never absolutely clear if he did so because he had pretty much run out of options, because it was a tactical master stroke or because he was too taken aback by Tendulkar’s guts.

  In any event, Sachin had the ball. Fannie de Villiers was run out off the first delivery coming back for a second run, and South Africa’s last batsman, Donald, came in. Sachin bowled three consecutive dot balls. Off the fifth, Donald and McMillan scampered a single. McMillan managed only one off the final ball, leaving India winners by two runs.

  Those three successive dot balls, the nerve, the gall, the extraordinary steeliness to take on that final over in front of a capacity crowd in such a game, these were the blocks that went into building Tendulkar the hero. Valiant. Selfless. A doer at the death.

  After that game, no final could come close in terms of the excitement. And the match itself was a bit of an anticlimax.

  India batted first on a crumbling wicket and, after a good start, lost their way in the middle overs. Azharuddin stroked a cameo of thirty-eight and Vinod Kambli (who has now left cricket to make a career for himself in India’s other mass passion, films) held the innings together with a sixty-eight from ninety balls. India reached 225 for 7 and when the West Indies came in, 100,000 spectators at the Eden were looking forward to a contest.

  Brian Lara’s dismissal opened the floodgates. From 57 for 1, the Caribbeans went on to lose their remaining nine wickets for only sixty-six more runs. Anil Kumble picked up the last six wickets for four runs, in six overs and two balls.

  In the end, India won by 102 runs. Not too many people minded that it had been so one-sided. The chanting and the singing that began in the stands of the Eden carried on well into the night in streets across the city.

  We would not recognise how much we would cherish this win (and for how long we would have to do so) until a few years later. It was the last tournament victory India would manage at the Eden in the twentieth century. And this would be (perhaps because India won so convincingly) the last time for many years that a big game would end in Kolkata without crowd disruption.

  In my case, nothing was about to take the sheen off the joy of watching India win, especially having travelled thousand
s of miles merely to see a final at home. It seemed like something a schoolboy dared not have wished for had he been imagining the perfect end to a fairy-tale quest.

  But there were disturbing undercurrents to my happiness.

  Lying awake in bed that night, I tried to figure out how closely the Eden that I had seen that afternoon had mirrored the ground, cricket culture and ethos that I so enthusiastically spoke about to my friends in London. In November 1993, the Eden Gardens was still recognisable as the stadium of my childhood. There was no electronic scoreboard; no fibreglass roof; no new stand above the sightscreen opposite the pavilion; no air-conditioned boxes for corporate bigwigs.

  Still, things seemed to have changed since I had last watched cricket there. Then it struck me that perhaps they hadn’t. Perhaps I had simply failed to notice the changes before. Or more plausibly, perhaps I had edited them out of my memories because they were so unwelcome.

  The bloodthirsty cries of ‘Jeetega jeetega, India jeetega’ (‘India will win, India must win’); the rapid consultation with the radio commentary to check a player’s name; the booing when a perfectly good ball was not scored off; the applause for the slashed four that just eluded the outstretched finger of the fielder at third man: all these had not been mentioned in my accounts abroad of a prelapsarian Eden. I suspect I knew that the serpent had already slithered into the garden; I had chosen not to notice it.

  There were other reasons for my selective representation. I had not, for instance, ever mentioned the growing number of unruly spectators in the members’ stands to the right and left of the pavilion. I mean, who’s bothered about them? Not an Englishman who wanted a picture of cricket in India. Those details were too minor, too insignificant, not part of the larger picture, I’d thought. Best to gloss over them.

  My stories, I now realise, were a means of escape. I was expected to narrate – excitedly – tales of charm and fervour and clean, wholesome enthusiasm about cricket on the subcontinent. And that is what I had done. I had been playing my part by conforming to the notion of the stereotype. I had chosen the easier route. (In a place so far from home, with people I knew so little about, it had seemed the only route.) By trying to present the stereotype, I had become a stereotype.