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  It’s my relic from the ‘Summer of 42’.

  * * *

  Bankura, a small town several hundred kilometres away from Kolkata, is remarkable only for being unremarkable. Or at least that is how it used to be in the mid-1970s, when we moved back to India. A little over a year after my introduction to cricket, a little over a year after living in the city of Lord’s and the Oval, I found myself in a town many hours’ train journey from the nearest international cricket stadium (the Eden Gardens in Kolkata) and where the only link with live cricket was a short-wave radio set I was incredibly privileged to possess.

  Bankura: if you pronounce it right, in the proper Bengali way (not the way the English spelling on this page suggests you pronounce it), the name, with its emphasised nasal consonant and the rolled ‘r’ at the end, sounds – for want of a more apposite word – provincial.

  I hated the name when I first heard it. I hated it even more when I learnt that we would be stuck there for at least a couple of years.

  ‘Sounds awful,’ I told my mother. I think what I really meant was that it did not sound like London at all.

  You’d imagine that the friendship that I was just beginning to forge with cricket – in the desultory, casual, okay-I-might-be-interested-if-we-took-this-further way that most of my enduring friendships in life have begun – would just shrivel up and die in an environment that had everything to discourage its growth.

  Quite the opposite.

  My lifelong affair with cricket blossomed in Bankura not despite the lack of real action but because of it. Testosterone-crazed adolescents may not be getting any but they can’t help thinking about it all the time (‘If the wank mags are this good, how much better can sex be? How many times better?’). Just so with me and cricket. I became obsessed with the game through radio commentary and pictures in black-and-white magazines and heroic re-enactments of whole Tests in our backyard (‘If listening to a match at Lord’s can be like this, how much better would it be sitting there on a summer afternoon, with the slope at the Nursery End in front of me?’).

  In Bankura, I too fell in love, but it wasn’t quite the heady, blood-pumping thing conjured up by pulp fiction or frothy movies. There was an element of inevitability about it, prompted, I suspect, by the lack of any other choice.

  You didn’t go out with friends in Bankura (there was nowhere to go to). You didn’t watch TV (there was no television). You didn’t listen to music (there was no music store to buy tapes from). You didn’t go to the cinema (there was one cinema in the town and not once, in the two years that I spent there, did they show anything remotely resembling a film which my parents would let me see). You didn’t read much (the two bookstores sold school textbooks. Anything else had to be brought back from Kolkata on our occasional visits).

  Under the circumstances, the only avenue of entertainment was cricket. Even though I was nowhere close to the real action, at least I had the radio, newspapers, magazines. They were enough to keep me up to date. More than that, they told me everything I could want to know. For a six-year-old boy in Bankura, cricket was perhaps the only thing you could say that of.

  Not surprising, then, that that boy would grow up to be a little dysfunctional. His world view would be shaped by something which is (as cricket’s detractors love to say again and again) just a game.

  To me, cricket wasn’t just a game then – and hasn’t been ever since. It was life.

  * * *

  There is a theory in contemporary Indian cricket to explain why most of the current crop of young players – Virender Sehwag, Harbhajan Singh, Mohammad Kaif, for instance – come from satellite towns or small villages and not, as it once used to be, the big cities.

  The logic goes like this: unlike children in the big cities, boys from the suburbs and the countryside have no other outlet for their energy (no discos, no shopping, no video games, etc.), so they turn to cricket with unbridled enthusiasm. It is a theory I am utterly convinced by. For me, more than anything else, it has the ring of lived experience. The Najafgarh of Sehwag’s childhood echoes the Bankura of mine. (The fact that Sehwag rebelled against the unrelieved tedium of his surroundings to become what he has become – one of the world’s most attractive batsmen – and that I have rebelled against the experience to become what I have become – an obsessed moron who starts every time the Tube passes the Oval station – just goes to show why we have so many more critics than players.)

  * * *

  My parents’ money went much further in this nondescript town than it ever had in London. We lived in a huge but badly planned single-storey house with an overgrown yard (the landlady had promised to have it weeded, cleaned and trimmed before we moved in). To the right of the yard was a driveway perfectly placed to become my first outdoor pitch.

  My earliest memory of listening to cricket on the radio is inseparable from my memory of this house – and this yard and this strip of ground that passed for a pitch. I remember sitting hunched forward on a cane chair in the living room, the red, untiled floor cool beneath my feet, the looping branch of a guava tree and a formation of homeward-bound crows like smudged lines against a darkening sky. In front of me was an old Grundig radio: a wedding present my parents had carried with them to wherever their fairly peripatetic married life had taken them.

  The radio was more useful to them in Bankura than it had been anywhere else. (They, too, had no cinema to go to, no music stores to visit, no new books to buy, no clubs or bars at the weekend.) My father would twiddle the knob till he got the BBC. Short Wave 2, I remember. The voice of the commentators on Test Match Special floated into the room, transforming it, and transporting us all.

  Fred Trueman, Henry Blofeld, Brian Johnston, Don Mosey, Christopher Martin-Jenkins: I knew their names and their voices by heart. After I had thought about it enough (not difficult, there wasn’t anything else I thought about as much), I attached faces and gaits and characteristics to them. I was certain I would be able to recognise any of them if I passed them on the street. (When I first saw a picture of CMJ, I realised, with a shock, that he didn’t look a bit like what I had imagined. It was one of my first small lessons in the gulf between imagination and reality.)

  I did not always understand the reasons for their sudden boisterous laughter, nor the jokes that led up to it. But the tone of humorous bewilderment during ‘Richards, believe it or not, nought’ was not beyond me. In those evenings in the gathering gloom of a backwater town in Bengal, they conjured up for me a beautiful notion of the game. And if I saw the game more through English eyes than Indian ones, there was double-edged irony to it: the curious clash of colonial and post-colonial values that I did not even comprehend.

  By the end of that summer – the summer of 1976, when Viv Richards, single-handed, had taken it upon himself to dismember the England bowling (829 runs in four matches at an average of 118.43) after a certain pre-series remark from an Englishman in which the words ‘grovel’ and ‘West Indians’ had been used in close proximity – I knew the English grounds as though I had been to each one. All those grounds had become for me a sylvan utopia unsullied by reality.

  Years later, as a student in Britain, I was taken to Lord’s for the first time. I had been up the night before in a frenzy of excitement, and had dressed with great care in the morning. I still have a picture of myself in a tweed jacket (as English as I could make myself), maroon tie and white shirt, leaning against a board which said ‘No standing when there is bowling at the other end’, my face creased in the kind of grin that becomes the idiotic or the deranged.

  Once we’d been through the Long Room and emerged on to the balcony of the members’ bar (more photo-ops: from here, I could see the players’ balcony from where Kapil Dev had held aloft the Prudential Cup in 1983) and I realised that the tour was over and that that was all there was to it, it all seemed terribly anticlimactic. The ground was not bathed in the sort of sunshine with which I had presumed Lord’s always to be awash. (As a matter of fact, it rained for
a large part of the day and we didn’t get to see much cricket.) The grass did not seem as green as I had thought it would be. The slope at the Nursery End seemed to have a less of a gradient than I had imagined. What, I ask myself now, did I expect? A hill inside a cricket field?

  And the players – county players playing an insignificant match on a rain-spattered afternoon – seemed to be going about their jobs with as much enthusiasm as the milkman doing his rounds in the morning. (Where was the veneration, the genuflection at the shrine of the game?) I wonder now what it was that would have made me happy. And I don’t know the answer.

  Lord’s had been a construct of my imagination. It was a construct bred by the isolation in which I had listened to the radio commentary; by the clipped tones and accents which were so removed from my own; the remoteness of a place so far away that it was in a completely different time zone: and my fervent desire (beneath the threshold of my consciousness but no less strong for being so) to fashion another world, somewhere I could escape to from the surroundings I found myself in in the summer of 1976.

  Now, at Lord’s at the beginning of the 1994 county season, the real reality had stepped in.

  * * *

  Of course, much had changed in the intervening eighteen years. Perhaps, most noticeably, in the amount of cricket being played. In 1975, for instance, the world saw seventeen Tests. Three decades on, in 2005, that number was up to forty-three. Another example. In the 1970s, India played thirteen one-day internationals; in the 1980s, 155; in the 1990s, it was 257.

  This surfeit has killed the sharpness of our memories. I still remember, in vivid detail, India’s tour of the West Indies in 1976. Especially the third Test in Port of Spain: sitting up in bed till the small hours with my fingers curled around a mug of Bournvita and Dicky Rutnagur and Sushil Doshi on All India Radio; Brijesh Patel racing to his forty-nine not out during that incredible 400-plus run chase after Gavaskar and Vishwanath had scored centuries to lay the foundations for victory.

  In contrast, when I try to recall India’s 1996 tour of the Caribbean and the match that we ought to have won but collapsed and lost instead, I can’t. Without looking at the scorecard, all I can say with any certainty was that Tendulkar was captain. And yet every ball of that Test was beamed live to my living room. I had watched. And I have forgotten. It has become one among the hundreds of matches that we see every year now. When my daughter watches cricket, she can, by flicking the remote, switch seamlessly between Brisbane and Bridgetown, Harare and Hyderabad. The rarity has vanished.

  Along with the rarity, the preciousness and worth of a great performance have also diminished. Too many runs are scored now, too many wickets taken for even the most dedicated follower to keep track. (In the 1980s, Indian batsmen scored seventeen centuries in one-day internationals. In the 1990s, that number more than trebled.) With the spiralling numbers, we have had a spiralling number of superlatives; they have become the currency of daily use. For commentators now, every shot is magnificent, every catch is superb, every ball a beauty. Restraint and understatement, never easy qualities to achieve, have been wantonly sacrificed in the pursuit of excitement.

  And there are the casualties too. Now that so much cricket is broadcast live, we are in the danger of losing something precious, namely imagination – the gift that still enables us to visualise Stan McCabe’s 232 by reading Neville Cardus’s description, the gift that made me fall in love with the game, the gift that makes us all become fans.

  However, there may be signs of a revival. The delicious paradox is that while technology was once responsible for imagination’s banishment, technology may be responsible for its return. And it is cricket commentary on the internet that has made this possible.

  Like radio and unlike TV, ball-by-ball commentary on the net manages to create the notion of an inviolable world. It requires the fan to invest thought; it demands of him complete engagement and intelligence for its full enjoyment. From the words that keep coming up on the screen – furiously typed, with a sense of urgency that comes with the commentator trying to keep the reader up to date all the time (more difficult even than radio: it takes more time to write than to speak) – the fan has to conjure up his notion of what is happening on the pitch.

  Television tells it like it is in real time; what you see on the screen is what you get. When you are following cricket on the internet, the report is coming to you at a remove: not only is there a time lapse between the report and the events it describes but it is always filtered through the eyes, brain and hand of the guy who is writing it. Far more than watching cricket, listening to it (or reading a ball-by-ball) engenders a rapport between the fan and the commentator (or reporter). And if immediacy is, in a sense, sacrificed, intimacy is gained.

  Intimacy is the common denominator between radio and the internet. But the net takes the idea of inclusiveness further. It expands on the idea of sharing between commentator and listener and creates a whole chat room full of cricket-obsessed people.

  Intimacy, inclusiveness and imagination: for me, these are the things that make an obsession full-blown. I don’t know how many six-year-olds are cementing their love affairs with the game by following it on the internet.

  But they and I will be family.

  * * *

  In his absorbing book A Season with Verona (travel writing, cultural studies, analysis of mob psychology and football fandom all packed into a season watching the Italian team Hellas Veronas fight relegation from Serie A), Tim Parks reflects on the etymology of the word ‘fan’. It comes, he says, from the Latin ‘fanaticus’, which means ‘worshipper’. The team becomes the god; the fans become, during matches, a sort of zealot, a ‘weekend Taliban’.

  By the time we returned to Kolkata from Bankura, I had become that sort of a Taliban, a full-fledged cricket fundamentalist. And as in London, my mother stoked the flames of this fanaticism.

  She taught me fielding positions by sketching a rough approximation of a cricket field, pencilling in first slip, third man, square leg. She subscribed, on my behalf, to a weekly sports magazine called – unsurprisingly – Sports Week. My first scrapbook of cricket pictures – mostly in black and white, mostly rather grainy – was culled from this magazine. She helped me snip out the pictures (the only pair of scissors in the house were huge – you could use them as garden shears or as a murder weapon – and I was too young to be left alone with them), let me muck myself up with a pot of glue, suggested artistic angles at which I should place my clippings and finally wrote imaginative headlines and captions for each player page in variously coloured felt-tipped pens.

  All the while, I honed my game. Batsmen were my idols. I spent hours impressing our landlady’s grown-up son by shouldering arms to balls outside the off stump. (A rare Indian quality, though I say it myself.) There was nothing restrained and passive about the action of leaving the ball, though. I left balls not with a wary uncertainty but with a contemptuous glare, arms swirling in an ostentatious arabesque.

  Bowlers were my villains, a notion strengthened by the West Indian pacers’ intimidating performance against India in the 1976 series. The grace and fluidity of a fast bowler’s run up, the guile and subtlety of a spinner’s art were lost on me. Bowlers were there, in my view, to allow batsmen to be heroes, to assume centre stage, to appropriate for themselves the pivotal – and most memorable – moments in the narrative of a match. In the two years in Bankura, I had batted and batted whenever I played and cried and cried (and was deemed young enough to get away with it) if someone knocked over my stumps or caught an ill-timed, cross-batted swat.

  By the time I arrived in Kolkata again, all I wanted to do was watch a proper batsman in action on an international cricket field.

  The time wouldn’t be long in coming.

  * * *

  Block J at the Eden Gardens is one of the worst places in the world to watch cricket. It runs from about wide midwicket to deep backward square leg if the batsman is at the pavilion end, so you are about as w
ell placed to see the turn of a ball or the authenticity of a shout for leg before or the swiftness of a batsman’s reflexes as he pivots for a short-arm pull as you would be standing on the road in front of the stadium. Before the 1987 World Cup final it was uncovered, leaving spectators exposed to the merciless midday sun. And the cheering, jeering, raucous crowd (those who had begged, borrowed or stolen for an inexpensive ticket to a day’s cricket) were the kind of people that the members of the Cricket Association of Bengal, from their stands on either side of the pavilion, looked down upon with a mixture of contempt and deep-seated resentment. (‘God, what do they want to come to the cricket for?’)

  None of which was of any consequence to me as I found myself on my concrete bench on 2 January 1979.

  On one side of me was one of those irritating teenagers who seem to believe that because they are fat and need a hell of a lot of space to accommodate both their buttocks on the concrete, the boy next to him is obliged to sit with his knees pressed together all the time. On the other side was my aunt, who was exactly the kind of cricket follower that I, later on in life, would scornfully avoid while discussing cricket (‘not a real fan, not one of us’; by then I had become a member of the Cricket Association of Bengal), but who had kindly volunteered to chaperone me on the final day of a Test match that had sparked to life. In front of me was a tall, broad and loud man who effectively blocked out my entire view. I had to stand on the seat to get any real sense of the play (and risk being pelted by oranges, abuse or worse) or else crouch forward till I practically had my head in a lock between the sides of the men sitting in front of me. My uncle (a real fan, I would admit then as well as later), who had actually got me the ticket, had not been able to get three seats side by side; he was on the other side of the ground.