You Must Like Cricket? (13 page)

On my way to work on Wednesday morning, I see that the collage is back on the wall of the Red Rose Club. It looks rather fetching. Somebody must have stayed up all night.

* * *

The odd thing is that few here find this sort of behaviour strange. The media reports incidents of fan frenzy (the spiteful and destructive as well as the way over the top, almost idolatrous celebrations) with disconcerting matter-of-factness. Not surprisingly, outsiders don't look at things in quite the same way. The recent outpouring of public grief has even made its way into the London broadsheets.

Reading about it in the
Guardian
, a friend of mine sends me an incredulous email from London. ‘You mean they are threatening players' families after they've lost to a side that has beaten just about everyone else in world cricket? What are the papers saying?'

‘Well,' I wrote back, ‘if you're asking whether anyone's offered a rousing condemnation or if there has been a campaign to remind fans that their response has been a little excessive, there has been nothing.'

‘You should send the fuckers to England. No World Cup on terrestrial TV. Not even highlights.' My friend, a freelance writer, has been keeping up with the World Cup on the internet and in the papers. He resolutely refuses to pay Rupert Murdoch his shilling. He is evidently proud of the fact.

‘That's why cricket is what it is in England. That's why it is what it is in India too,' I write back.

The typical Indian cricket fan's response to his team's exploits appears even stranger when compared with the way he bears subcontinental life's sundry other cock-ups.

In the national banks, for instance, it takes hours to fill out a form. This is how it works. To get your form, first find the guy whose job it is to tell you who to get the form from. The hierarchy is rigid. You can't just, at random, find the guy who will
actually
give you the form and ask him for it. He will either not be in, or in but not where he is supposed to be. He may be just a couple of paces down the corridor as you hunt for him. He may know you're looking for him. He will do nothing about it. No one else will offer to help. No one else would, in any case. Responsibility is compartmentalised; accountability does not exist. Once your man takes his seat and you shuffle up to the counter, he might decide to be too immersed in some other work (like reading the paper or minutely examining the underside of a coaster for dirt) to give you the time of day. And he may decide to trot off again before you have managed to ask your question. Eventually, when he does divulge his precious information (you must prise this out of him), your quarry will not be in his seat. Then the whole process will start all over again.

I can recall no instance of a bank officer being beaten or abused. I can think of no instance in which his home has been attacked or his family threatened.

Nearly every form of public exchange involving a government employee in this country produces these circuitous, infuriating delays. We have learnt to accept them, to convince ourselves that this is merely how it is and get on with things. Trains are inordinately delayed; the post takes ages to arrive; when phones go out of order, bribery's usually the only way to get them fixed; buses are uncomfortable, irregular and as capable of killing as a trained soldier. But we don't kick up a fuss about it. Of course we have processions and demonstrations and strikes which bring cities to a standstill, but these days they seem more like ritual parodies of protest than displays of anger in any
real
, spontaneous sense.

So what is it that makes us work ourselves into such a genuine rage when we see India fail on the cricket pitch?

For starters, we take cricket seriously because cricket is really serious business now. And because it embraces (or so we believe) all of us: players, officials, journalists, television executives, tobacco pushers, cola giants and fans – especially fans. The British writer Tim Adams, in a discussion of the professionalisation, the commodification, of the game of tennis, turns to the cultural historian Johann Huizinga for an explanation: as players have become serious businessmen, mini-industries, ‘A far-reaching contamination of play and serious activity has taken place. The two spheres are getting mixed. In activities of an outwardly serious nature hides an element of play. Recognised play, on the other hand, is no longer able to maintain its true play character as a result of being taken too seriously and being technically over-organised. The indispensable qualities of detachment, artlessness, and gladness are thus lost.'

Cricket has of course become over-organised. And it is definitely taken too seriously. That's because we all think that we are part of it. Indian cricket is like a giant corporation in which every fan believes he has a stake. It's my company too, the logic goes, so I must be concerned about whether its stocks are rising or falling.

Then there is the money. Cricketers in India earn lots of it. They're among the most highly paid men in the country. But here is the thing that infuriates: they don't make their money from match fees, from their performances on the pitch (at least, not directly); they're rich because of all their brand endorsements.

Tendulkar, for instance, would earn about ten times as much from his endorsements – being the face of a car, bike, credit card and cola – than from his match fees. It's the one area where he is not unique. Most top cricketers' earnings from match fees account for only a small fraction of their annual income.

This is where the paradox (along with envy and the resentment and much of the rest of it) arises. When India were performing so poorly in the early stages of the 2003 World Cup, there were widespread calls to boycott products that the players endorsed. It was seen, more or less unanimously, as the most fitting riposte to (and the cruellest punishment for) their failure to live up to the nation's expectations. Hit them where it hurts most: their pockets.

The Indian cricket fan has developed a curious attitude towards these endorsements. When cricketers are not playing well it's not just the fact that they make so much money that provokes his resentment. It's that the money is earned for
off-field
activities. The fan sees the man on the field and the man who earns more in a year than he will earn in ten lifetimes – by peddling a car he can't afford – as two separate entities. And he can't, in his mind, reconcile the two. He adores the one; for the other, he reserves the sort of derision that the underprivileged always have for the privileged. For him Tendulkar is god; Brand Tendulkar on the other hand, is, well, just a brand.

It doesn't help that no other athletes make anything near the kind of money that cricketers make. India's top tennis duo Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi, for instance, have won numerous Grand Slam titles. Their career earnings, from prize money, is substantial. Yet, when they endorsed products (they used to: once the duo split, neither was worth very much as far as the companies were concerned), they made, according to reports, less than middle-ranking cricketers.

At one level, because the fan sees the player as a brand, he tends to expect from him what one would expect from any other brand, a fridge, say, a television, or a car: value for money. (You would be mad, wouldn't you, if your car, for which you have paid good money and which you quite look forward to driving to work every morning, refuses to start three times a week?)

Logically, constant exposure on television should make players more human. But, the fan often asks, how can someone as human as you and me be so ubiquitous, so omnipresent? When a game is on, the companies make sure that ads featuring the players run between every over. Imagine Dravid patting the ball back for a caught and bowled one minute and then cracking impeccable boundaries through the covers in a mobile phone ad in the next; or Tendulkar miscuing a pull and then, in screaming yellow T-shirt and sexy wraparounds, entreating us to drink a cola.

I have always wondered why the average Indian does not carry these feelings over into other walks of life; why, for instance, he does not decide to boycott the banks for the pathetic level of service they provide or advocate hanging corrupt, self-serving politicians. My guess is this: we have little that can be compared favourably to the rest of the world, little to make us proud. Cricket is one of the exceptions.

Indians need cricket to remain an exception. We can't allow the players to slip – it would be too much of a blow to our sense of self-worth.

T
here are occasions
when people want to pity me – and want me to pity myself – because I am a cricket fan. They think it is not quite, well,
healthy
, for a grown man to stay up half the night watching India play New Zealand away from home, going to work late so that he can catch the play till tea and then staggering home to grab a few hours' sleep before staying up half the night again.

And this, for days on end, for an entire three-month tour.

Sad bastard, they think. (They don't say it – not that often, not in so many words – but I know, because they look at me in the way I would look at someone who hears the word ‘cricket' and thinks of insects.) Social life? A blank. Sex life? Doesn't even bear talking about.

I know all this. I don't particularly care.

A fairly typical exchange:

‘No, I can't make Thursday evening, There's a World Cup game on, you see.'

‘Yeah, I know,' our friend says. She's inviting my wife and me over for drinks. ‘It's Pakistan versus Holland.'

‘Yes, that's right. So I can't make it. I'm sure Chandrani will manage. Why don't you talk to her?'

‘It's Pakistan against Holland, for heaven's sake.'

‘Hmm, Pakistan against Holland. Day-night. Half-past five start our time.'

‘?!?'

‘I'm curious about how Waqar will bowl and I want to see if Anwar is in good nick. We play Pakistan soon, you see.'

‘You are a really sad bastard. I feel sorry for you.' She puts down the phone.

I don't, as a rule, feel sorry for myself. I pity those who pity me.

All rules, though, have an exception. Here is the one to mine: the only time I feel ashamed to be a cricket fan is when India play Pakistan.

It's not easy to talk about this. It involves scouring the memory for things that are best left undisturbed. It is like dredging a river for a drowned man. We don't really want to find the body, but we know that we have to.

India-Pakistan games are my worst cricket memories not because, as most of my friends think, India tend to lose. India beat Pakistan fairly regularly at neutral venues – and without fail during the World Cup. But the result is not what makes me embarrassed when I anticipate, watch or remember an India-Pakistan match. It is the baggage the game brings with it: the whole backstory; the tale of two nations sundered at birth and bitter rivals for more than half a century; the manner in which that rivalry has appropriated the contest; the media frenzy that makes these encounters at once more important and less important than a cricket match; the irrationality of fans' expectations; the fangs-bared jingoism. It is, believe me, not pretty.

And
being there
makes it seem worse. I
was there
– at the Eden Gardens in February 1999. I wish I hadn't been. But you can't change the past; all you can do is live with it.

* * *

It was the fourth afternoon of an absorbing Test.

This was the first match of the first Asian Test Championship, a triangular tournament of Test matches between India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka to determine the best five-day team on the subcontinent. The tournament had been the ICC's idea. As a means of generating revenue, it was an unquestionable winner. As a means of getting to see India play Pakistan in a Test match, it was a rare treat.

The two teams squared up at the Eden Gardens on 16 February. Saeed Anwar and Shahid Afridi walked out to open the Pakistan innings. A collapse the likes of which had seldom been seen at the Eden Gardens followed almost immediately. Within nine overs, Pakistan were 26 for 6. Afridi, Anwar, Ijaz, Wajahatullah, Youhana and Azhar Mahmood had all gone, prey to a burst of inspired bowling from Srinath and Prasad.

One hundred thousand people kept up a continual roar. Those who had been late getting in were unable to find a place to sit. The Indian cricket fan, a superstitious creature at any time, was not going to take any chances.

‘No place here now, go back and return tomorrow morning. You might ruin the spell,' said the man to my left, his bellow belying his size and his desiccated appearance. The group of young boys he had been addressing – he would never have dared to speak to them like that anywhere outside this stadium (or, come to think of it, anywhere inside this stadium in other circumstances) – smiled and looked sheepishly at the scoreboard.

Someone must have squeezed in somewhere during the drinks break. Or so my meek but menacing neighbour concluded at the end of the day. Because the spell was broken after that first hour. Salim Malik put together a typically gritty thirty-two; Moin Khan made seventy, an innings of patience and guile; and Wasim Akram flailed the bat at whatever came his way to score a cavalier thirty-eight off fifty-two balls. When Pakistan eventually folded for 185, the last four wickets had added 159 runs. The total seemed almost respectable.

It began to seem more than respectable. India made 223 in their first innings. Only Sadagoppan Ramesh made a half-century.

Team games do not, by definition, provide the platform for the sort of who's-quickest-on-the-draw, gun-blazing, kill-or-be-killed showdown that individual sports do. But a particular duel between two individuals within the context of a match provides a mini-theme, a subtext, as it were, at the centre of the larger confrontation. The gladiatorial aspect adds a different texture to the proceedings, an added prickle of excitement and anticipation.