You Must Like Cricket? (10 page)

T
he pillows are
puffed up against the bedstead. The TV, a newly acquired black-and-white set with a varnished, wooden body and a long aerial that gets in the way when we negotiate the narrow bit of floor between the bed and the TV, sits on a table with a wobbly leg. I am sitting on the bed between my parents, twitching, barely able to keep still. They shush me as I start up my own running commentary. They're excited too, but they're trying not to let it show. The house is silent. The walls can barely contain the quietness.

25 June 1983, Saturday. Every Indian cricket fan remembers exactly how he watched the Prudential World Cup final between India and the West Indies at Lord's. It is central to the life of anyone who follows cricket in India.

We lose the toss, and are put in to bat. Gavaskar is caught behind off Roberts. 2 for 1. No one thought we would get this far; we'll never get another chance. Now it looks as though reaching the final is as good as it gets.

As Gavaskar walks back, I suppress an urge to stand up and cheer. Since Viswanath's career ended, my antagonism towards Gavaskar has intensified. I swallow a snigger every time he fails. Though that does not happen too often, he's had a poor run this tournament: 19, 4, 0, 9, 25 and now 2. I'm pleased, but this is tantamount to being unpatriotic. (At the Eden Gardens that winter, I barely escape being thumped by a clutch of young men in the stands when I gleefully shout ‘Yes!' after Gavaskar is out first ball against the West Indies.) I can't help it. Gavaskar is the establishment personified, dour, safety first, always correct. And yet he is so popular. For a fourteen-year-old, nothing can be more shocking. (With age, I can see that iconoclasm for its own sake is worth nothing. Over the years I have come to recognise Gavaskar's greatness, to understand that without him there would have been no Tendulkar or Dravid. It is a pity that it took me so long to see it. It is too late now. You can be fourteen only once.)

Krishnamachari Srikkanth plays what will become known before long as the shot of the final: on his knees, taking Roberts from well outside the off stump and sending him rocketing to the fence. In 1983, Indian cricket is sufficiently immature – and sufficiently diffident about itself – for a fan to remember a player for just the one shot. Twenty years later, it's hard to see Srikkanth making today's one-day side. (It is a wonder, given his inarticulacy and his tendency to be as irresponsible with his words as he was with his bat, that he has become a television commentator. Or perhaps it is not such a wonder after all, given the state of TV commentary in India.)

We've had to take the bedroom curtains down. A couple of dozen kids from the slum across the way have begged us to. Now they're outside on the street, clambering over each other's shoulders to catch sight of the game. This is 1983: even many middle-class homes are still without TV sets.

Each time I turn around, I see a new face. These young men have a rota system going, I realise. They perch on their friends' shoulders for a certain number of overs, then swap places. Their cries drown the cheering of the thousands of Indian hopefuls at Lord's.
‘Guru, guru, jio jio!'
Come on, come on, you are the kings.

Srikkanth isn't listening. He cracks six more boundaries, then he's trapped in front of the stumps by Marshall. 59 for 2.

Mohinder Amarnath, for long considered India's best – or at least bravest – batsman against genuine pace, puts together a stand with Yashpal Sharma. Amarnath is playing the sheet-anchor role, but he needs to press on. They're plodding. Sharma carries a calculator in his head, they say; it must be on the blink today. Outside, the boys have fallen silent, apart from the odd swear word. My mother gives them dark looks.

I am thinking of the exam I am supposed to sit on Monday. It has been a disastrous summer for studying. For the better part of the past month, I have been glued to the telly, following India's fortunes. At the beginning of the tournament I didn't think we would go far enough to upset my revision schedule. I was able to avoid studying without feeling any guilt about it. ‘Enough time, I'll stop watching the cricket after India have been knocked out.'

By the time India came up against England in the semi-final, it was clear that wasn't going to work. Now I argue to myself, with a fair degree of persuasiveness, that if we win, I will do well in my exam despite my evident lack of preparation. If Kapil gets his hands on the World Cup, it has to be a year of miracles.

Michael Holding pegs back Amarnath's stumps to make it 90 for 3. The cavalier Sandeep Patil is in next – he took six fours off a Bob Willis over just a few days ago. And then there is Kapil. When he is out there, really, anything is possible. The atmosphere in the bedroom has picked up again.

Twenty-one runs later, India have lost Kapil, Yashpal and Kirti Azad. Patil does not believe in hanging around. He is nudging singles and twos, going at nearly a run a ball with Roger Binny at the other end. India bat deep, down to their number ten –wicketkeeper Syed Kirmani – but the ebullience of the afternoon has evaporated. The young men at the window are getting wistful: it would have been nice to have put up a decent fight, they murmur.

I am worried about my exam, really worried. Being faced with the prospect of flunking isn't funny. And it seems a certainty now. According to my theory of miracles, if India lose on the pitch, so will I in the examination hall. Because I have not put in a stroke of work.

At 153, Patil is the eighth man out. Kirmani and Madan Lal try to mount a rearguard action, but batting through the allotted sixty overs is beyond them. In the fifty-fifth over, India have folded for 183.

We don't have a whiff of a chance. I spend most of the lunch break playing a percentage game: given the hours I have left tomorrow, what exactly should I try to cram?

When the West Indies innings begins, Balwinder Sandhu bowls the ball for which he will be remembered for ever. Pitched outside off, it holds its line and then cuts back sharply off the seam. Greenidge
shoulders arms
. He turns around to see his stumps shattered. No one can believe their eyes, least of all Greenidge. (Later, after Sandhu had returned to the obscurity he came from, an uncharitable and probably apocryphal joke did the rounds: the ball hit a worm, a pebble, an umpire's counter; that's why it moved off the pitch. It certainly couldn't have been Sandhu's doing.)

Viv Richards, the Chewing Gum Champion, walks in and finds his rhythm: savage yet languorous, he cuts, drives, pulls the bowling to shreds. It is getting very bloody indeed. I catch my breath despite myself. There is something about this sort of batsmanship, about its sheer imperiousness, that makes you marvel even if you are being hammered. Richards in full flow is all about violence made beautiful, about fearful symmetry.

Haynes is holding up the other end. The West Indies are running away with it.

My mother has not cooked dinner; it is her small way of giving herself a treat. I am asked, considering how things are going, if I will volunteer to fetch naan and a curry from a nearby restaurant.

I am getting terrified about the examination. It was stupid not to revise. One can push one's luck only so far. It is
not
the year of miracles. Unable to bear the torment – and unable to stand the continual reminders of my impending doom – I agree to go out.

That is when it (like
everything
) happens.

The Kwality is a middle of the road sort of place that serves a decent curry. On a Saturday evening, it's normally full of boisterous, middle-aged men who have told their wives that they are busy in meetings. Tonight there are only a couple of waiters standing next to a radio at the bar. I plonk myself down on one of the sofas and try to catch their eye.

It is no use.

‘Score?' I ask, in a voice which at high pitch has begun to crack embarrassingly.

‘55 for 2.'

‘Really? Who's out?'

‘Haynes.'

‘Oh. Makes no difference. Will butter naan and mutton do piazi take very long?'

One of the waiters glowers at me and stalks off towards the kitchen, pushing the door that separates it from the dining area so hard that it keeps swinging, to and fro, in large, rapid arcs.

The other waiter slumps on the bar. The radio plays on, not loud enough for me to hear.

Suddenly, the waiter lets out a whoop. He lifts the radio, holds it to his chest with both hands, then puts it back on the counter again and, yelling ‘Richards! Richards!', arms outstretched, head steady, body tilting from side to side, he begins to imitate a little boy miming an aeroplane.

Other waiters come running from the kitchen and soon I am in their midst, all of us going round and round in the empty restaurant, each screaming our own crazy yawls.

So there you are. The defining moment of Indian cricket's defining game – and I didn't even
see
it. I was running round in circles with a bunch of waiters, waiting for a takeaway curry.

Later, I will see this moment millions of times – on the news, on videos, on documentaries about Indian cricket and great matches (in this part of the world, there is one every week on some channel or another). Somehow, even after so many viewings, the thrill of the instant, its unexpected, heart-lurching happiness, has not been sucked dry.

Richards pulling Madan Lal, miscuing it a fraction, only a fraction, and the ball tracing a parabola, destined to fall into a region where no fielder can be seen, and then Kapil running backwards, running, running with the sun in his eyes and, I'm sure, his heart in his hands, till he has it in his cupped palms. Had Kapil not hung on, Richards could have told him that he had dropped the World Cup.

The waiters can't wait to be rid of me. Before long, the naan and the mutton come packed in a white plastic bag. Grease runs down its seams. As I walk out, I see the two men slouched over the bar. The radio has got louder.

By the time I have half walked, half run back home, swinging the plastic bag with an expression of triumph that suggests I have taken Kapil's catch myself, it is 66 for 5. Madan Lal has picked up Gomes and Kapil has taken his second crucial catch of the game: Clive Lloyd off Roger Binny. The champions are on the ropes.

My family, like the rest of country, I imagine, is too dazed to speak coherently.

‘Richards, Gomes . . . Lloyd!'

‘What a catch.'

‘Kapil.'

‘Madan too.'

‘They won't get out of this hole.'

‘Don't speak too soon.'

‘Here, take the curry,' I say. ‘We ought to eat it before it gets cold. Can we have it on the bed?'

We dip our naan into the curry, wiping off the gravy from the tinfoil. Bits of it dribble on to the bed. We're all stuffing our mouths without looking at where the food is going.

Sandhu returns. He snaps up Faoud Bacchus, caught behind. It is 76 for 6.

Jeffrey Dujon and Malcolm Marshall begin to put together a partnership. Knowing them, and knowing how small a target they have to chase, I know it's too early to celebrate.

I keep looking at my watch. It's as though I am sitting in a cinema and it will tell me how much longer there is to go. I cannot bear to keep watching the match. I want it to be over, one way or the other.

Amarnath, trusted, reliable Amarnath, helps me out by bowling Dujon. 119 for 7. The boys at the window have started a chant; fireworks are going off all over town.

The rest of the match is a bit of a haze. Amarnath gets Marshall, Kapil traps Roberts in front of the wicket and I am waiting, we are all waiting for the moment. And then it comes: Holding swivels and turns away and Amarnath is running down the pitch and there is Kapil and Yashpal and Patil all in a mad scramble for the stumps as thousands and thousands pour onto the ground and the players weave in and out, afloat in the sea of people, on their way to the pavilion.

The spray of champagne from the balcony, the droplets catching and refracting the late afternoon June sunlight. A group of men smiling as they have never smiled before. It is hard to make oneself heard at home. Everyone is talking at the same time and the crackers are drowning us out.

On Sunday, I sit with my head between my books and up in the clouds. Scraps of conversation drift in from the adjoining room; my parents, uncles and aunts are discussing last night's game, reading titbits from the day's papers to each other. I plough on with my studies. Even miracles need something to work with. There is too much to revise; there is too little time.

I take the exam on Monday morning. It is as disastrous as I fear. The results appear a fortnight later. I pass. It must have been the cricket, I think. There was simply no other way I could have got through. Who could have expected otherwise in the year of India's World Cup triumph?

* * *

How did it happen? I have wondered about this so many times over the past twenty-five years. And why has it never happened again? India was certainly not the most talented side in the 1983 tournament. (And we've had several better teams since.) No one picked it as a dark horse. It did not have a decent track record. It had had far less practice in the abbreviated form of the game than teams like, say, England or Australia.

So how did we do it?

We had great players like Kapil and brave, committed ones like Amarnath. They were lucky. They were plucky. (Remember, India beat the world champions not once, but twice.) But more than anything else, everything came together for India that summer in a way that things sometimes do in team sport: when all the units in a side weld together, when one player inspires the others, when the cliché of one for all and all for one becomes a demonstrable reality.

The World Cup victory changed Indian cricket. It gave us the confidence to believe that we could compete, that we could actually pull off the improbable.

It also made one-day cricket the more popular – and often the more important – version of the game to fans in India. Previously we'd been hopeless – pathetic – at the one-day game. (The achievements that we could claim were laughable. The slowest innings of all time? S. M. Gavaskar. He batted through sixty overs for thirty-six not out. I love the not out. With victory, we discovered that we'd hated limited-overs cricket not because we were purists but because we had been so bad at it.