You Must Like Cricket? (20 page)

* * *

This Indian team, however, made a habit of triumphant occasions.

India drew the 2003 Australia series 1–1. In the final Test in Sydney, they ground Australia into the dust with their batting. Only Simon Katich and Steve Waugh, in his farewell Test, denied the tourists victory. Soon after, India did what they had never done before: defeat Pakistan in Pakistan in a Test series. Talk about India being the second-best team in the world – this was before England's 2004 renaissance – was swirling in the clear air of the Australian summer and the smoggy Indian winter.

The victories in Australia and Pakistan weren't India's only convincing performances. Since 2001, India had beaten England and the West Indies away (they don't often win away games, no matter how weak the opposition) and if they didn't quite manage to win either of the two series, they came close. In 2004 India beat South Africa at home; and though they lost to the Australians, they were the only team to take a Test off the Aussies that year.

We were watching the best Indian side of all time. Not that we acknowledged that fact very often. One reason for that is that although cricket fans like making comparisons between teams from different eras and arguing about which was the best, they don't really want to come up with an answer. (Because that would put a stop to the discussion.) But there were other reasons too. Our reluctance to admit that we had a terrific cricket side on our hands was partly superstitious. We feared that if we flaunted our beliefs – allowed that yes, we were that good – the spell would be broken. Better to be underwhelmed – and underwhelming – than sorry.

Most importantly, we didn't praise this side enough because we always thought it could do better: because the players had raised our expectations to the point where they were so consistently high, so outrageous, that it was impossible for the team to match them, no matter how well they played. (When Pakistan fought back to draw the first Test of the 2005 series against India, most of us behaved as though we had lost. It never occurred to us that not too many years ago, had we managed to avoid losing to Pakistan, we would have behaved as though we had won.)

Even if the current side shows signs that it is slipping a little, this has been a great century in which to be an Indian cricket fan. From that Test series against Australia in 2003, through one-day tournaments, home Tests, away Tests, we've been given more moments of joy than ever before.

Away wins in Test matches are a fair indicator of how accomplished a team is. In my first twenty-six years as a cricket fan, between the tour of England in 1974 and the Bangladesh series in 2000, India won eight Tests away from home. (During the 1990s, for instance, they won just once: against Sri Lanka in Colombo in 1993.) Between November 2000 and April 2004, they managed ten Test victories on foreign soil.

Now that scares the hell out of me.

Following Indian cricket, for the thirty-odd years that I have been doing it, has largely been a matter of betrayed hopes. I have endured years of miserable days and nights, when one good bowling performance, one gallant innings in a lost cause –
always
in a lost cause – was all we had to be proud of. Wretchedness was the cornerstone of my life as a cricket fan. And now I have this.

This continuing success is so odd that it is hard to come to terms with. It seems unnatural. (I find it easier to deal with the failures – I've had more practice at that.) For someone like me, even four years of victories can be only a temporary distraction from the real business of Indian cricket: failure. Sometimes I find myself hoping for the bad times to begin again – at least then the worst will have happened, I'll know where I stand. (It's like going to the dentist: the anticipation of the pain is worse than actually being in the chair.) And I can sense their approach: a Test series drawn at home against an indifferent Pakistan; then a series loss to Pakistan in Pakistan; a lost Test to an injury-hit England side; the departures of coach John Wright and captain Sourav Ganguly. In the spring of 2006, despite the team's astonishing one-day record, it is beginning to seem as though the familiar is not very far away.

But I worry far more for the younger generation, kids who are twelve or ten or eight years old, or perhaps not even that. We are all part of the same club, the same family of Indian cricket fans, but the rules are a little different for them. These kids have grown up with success. What must following India seem like to them?

They must believe that if you support a team properly, if you will it to do well with all your heart, you will be rewarded. Happiness will be yours. They think it is bloody cause and effect, see? They do not know; they have yet to find out.

When they do – and they are bound to sooner or later – they will realise that there is nothing so logical about this exercise; they will have to learn to live with random failure and unrequited love. They have been witness only to the vertiginous ascent. And, unlike me, they do not suffer from vertigo.

* * *

On the first four days of the Eden Gardens India-Pakistan Test in March 2005, I go to my club for my daily swim, not in the morning as I usually do, but late in the evening. At this time of day, the place is filled with elderly men who aren't here for the swimming. They treat the pool as a huge, communal bathtub: they wallow in the water, discuss the business of the day, then head upstairs to the bar for a few whiskies.

These men have never had much to do with me. They think I'm too young – and therefore too callow and ignorant – to belong to their club, where you don't count for anything unless you have been a member for at least a couple of decades. Given that you have to be thirty to join, that means you shouldn't really open your mouth until you're well over fifty.

It is instructive to see how a person gets into cold water in winter or early spring; it tells you what sort of a man he is: some dive in, fearless; some walk down the steps gingerly, curling up their toes, letting the water inch up their bodies, and then stand, shivering, their bodies only half submerged; some run down the steps, eager to get the uncomfortable part out of the way, and head off towards the deep end with hurried strokes. Whatever method the old men choose, it's over soon enough. They take their rightful place at the shallow end. On this particular evening, the second of the Test, Pakistan are 273 for 2 at close of play in reply to India's 407. Today's topic of conversation is why we have a really crap cricket side.

‘Hopeless lot. In our time, you know . . .'

‘They'll lose this Test and then the series.'

‘Ganguly should be sacked.'

I am leaning against the wall at the shallow end, panting, my lungs shot after all the cigarettes I've smoked today (well, every day for the last twenty years). I am quiet, listening. I know my place.

‘What do you think?' one of them suddenly asks, turning towards me. ‘What do you young people think? Should Ganguly be captain or what?'

‘Well, yes, I think so. I mean . . .' I start.

But a flurry of voices – ‘Rubbish'; ‘You have no idea you're talking about'; ‘This is the kind of stupidity that lets him off the hook'; ‘Drop him now, I say' – stops me finishing my sentence and we are off. I have hardly ever exchanged a word with these guys, there exists a sense of mutual suspicion and distrust between us, but now we are talking, arguing, shouting each other down to make ourselves heard, as though this is what we do every evening after work, as though this is what we come to the pool
for
. I never get my lengths done that day. And I head upstairs with them to the bar soon afterwards.

Three days later, on a warm, spring-almost-summer Sunday afternoon, India complete a memorable victory. I'm watching the game on television; I still can't face India-Pakistan at the Eden. Just after three o'clock, as Harbhajan Singh takes the wicket of Danish Kaneria to put India one up in the series, my phones begin to go crazy – as they always do on such occasions. I know how to handle this: cradle one phone between my left shoulder and my cheek, use the right hand for text messages and the left to take the other phone off the hook and tell the caller that I shall be with him in a moment. This is the first time that India have beaten Pakistan in Kolkata. I know this, but my friends are telling me anyway. I'm not complaining. (How can I? I call several people who don't need telling either and go ahead and tell them too. None of us can get enough of this.)

I feel wound up, restless. I can't sit still even to watch the awards ceremony and the interviews and the post-match analysis. I go out into the still, moist afternoon. The heat hangs like a low cloud over the city.

It is the day after Holi, the Indian festival of colours, and the streets and buildings are still awash with the previous day's revelry. There are victory processions on the streets, garlanded posters of the players held high like standards at the front of a triumphal march. Young men have brought out yesterday's colours, they're dancing, chanting, dipping their hands into paper bags full of pink and red and green and orange and throwing the soft powder heavenwards. The colours dissolve in the afternoon glare like the wispy, blue-grey smoke from the countless cigarettes and crackers all around us.

Every house in the street has its TV set turned up as loud as it will go. It's as though we can't quite take it in, we won't be able to believe it's really happening until the cheering from the stadium is loud enough to drown out the rest of the world. With every roar that goes up, there's a corresponding roar from the people out on the street, until it becomes hard to say where the Eden ends and everywhere else begins.

I park my car on Harish Mukherjee Road – the ‘No Parking' sign is so smeared with colours that's its nearly illegible – opposite a hospital that advertises its prosthetics clinic with the sign, ‘Legs for the legless'. It is a silence zone, but the ‘No Horn' sign has been obliterated too. Everywhere you turn there are cars draped in India flags honking their horns. The passengers are opening the doors, jumping out to join a procession led by residents of the adjoining slum.

‘So you must like cricket, eh?' people from England, from Australia, from South Africa, ask me when they find out that I am Indian. You need to see us to really know the answer to that, see us out on the streets in the afternoon heat, radiant faces shining through all the colours on this Sunday afternoon.

‘Cholun dada, aajkei to din'
(‘Come on brother, today's the day for all this madness'). One of the guys comes out of the march running towards me as I stand leaning against my car, watching. I ask him what he does for a living. He never finished school, he says. His father died when he was thirteen and he had a mother and three sisters to support, so he found work as a household help. That was five years ago. Now he does odd jobs when he can get them – at a garage, washing cars in the neighbourhood, running errands for the clerks in a government office – but he hasn't had one for a few weeks now. Where did he watch the game? On the tiny set in the local tea shop, packed into a square foot of space with ten of his friends, all of whom are now out with him on the street.

He smears my face with colour. ‘Could I borrow a cigarette from you?' he asks. I fish out my packet, give him one, light one for myself and, with awkward dance steps, join their swelling procession.

The Calcutta Club swimming pool, where much of this book was written – at least in my head.

Fellow India fans – the true believers.

Tristan Jones, my editor. For
that
e-mail. And everything else thereafter.

Purabi and Dilip Bhattacharjee, my parents. For keeping the faith.

Chandrani, my wife, my best friend. For being there. For being you.

Thank you.

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Copyright © Soumya Bhattacharya 2006

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