You Must Like Cricket? (6 page)

So that first summer was wonderful. Apart from the actual cricket. Which, as far as India were concerned, was appalling.

When India arrived in England, it had a team that seemed to be at the peak of its prowess. Over the previous three years, the Indians had beaten the West Indies in the West Indies and England at home and away.

My parents, who had not been in England for India's victory in 1971, were looking forward to the series. From my mother's excited exclamations and hurried preparation of lunch on the first morning of the first Test at Old Trafford, I gathered that something very special was about to unfold.

India lost the first Test by 113 runs.

By the time the team came to London for the second Test at Lord's, my parents' exuberance had subsided somewhat. Before the series began, they had been smirking as they went about their daily rounds: hospital, grocer's, newsagent's, school, supermarket. ‘Just wait. Wadekar and his men are here. They'll show you a thing or two about cricket.' That first Test had wiped the smile off their faces.

In retrospect, especially given how the summer turned out, I feel so sorry for them – this couple in their thirties from one of the world's poorest countries clinging on to the hope that eleven men in white would let them hold their heads high in the land in which they now lived. They came from a country which had none of Britain's creature comforts and affluence. Here, they were there as poor relations in every sense. And they were often faced – despite the best and kindly efforts of many of the English friends they had made – with contempt and condescension. Cricket would help them to get level.

Somehow, my parents had expected the Indian cricket team to exemplify the best of what India had to offer. They wanted to see the empire strike back.

The Lord's Test told them that they would have to wait a while longer. England won by an innings and 285 runs. And the summer of 1974 became the ‘Summer of 42'.

England won the toss and batted, rattling up 629, powered by centuries from Amiss, skipper Denness and Greig. India replied with 302 and followed on. No one had expected the capitulation to be so abject. With only Solkar reaching double figures (eighteen), the Indians were all out for forty-two in the second innings.

The defining moment of the summer had come. For my parents, it was shocking. Did the fact that the humiliation was happening merely a few postal districts away as they watched it on live TV make it any worse? They didn't say. It was, though I didn't identify it as such then, my first taste of the bitterness and the sense of betrayal that a sporting defeat can engender.

I do know that for the rest of the summer, my parents never brought up cricket when they spoke to English people. But the guys at the hospital, grocer's, newsagent's, school and supermarket were only too keen to talk about it. ‘Don't worry. It was too cold. Your spinners couldn't grip the ball. It will be better in Edgbaston.'

It wasn't. India lost this one by an innings and seventy-eight runs, making it a three-nil whitewash.

Unlike my parents, at the time I felt no shame. There's something about children that makes them want to be on the winning side. (Well, adults do that too. Only, they don't always admit to it.) As a four-year-old living in England, I had no specific fondness for India. I knew that was where I came from but I had neither any vivid memory of it nor any particular association with it. Home was where your parents were. India's loss on the pitch didn't result in a loss of prestige for me as it did for my parents. The notions of nation, pride and belonging still meant nothing to me. I saw my parents were hurt but couldn't quite understand what the fuss was all about. More than Gavaskar or Wadekar, I was keen to watch Denness or Lloyd or Amiss bat. They were the ones who got the runs, so they were more fun to watch. It made perfect sense.

Two important things from that summer. First, cricket and I had made friends, though we hadn't yet gone all the way. It was fun but just another thing one did in the summer holidays. (It would be a few years before it would become all I did: the rest of life was what happened between overs.)

Secondly, I found my first cricketing hero: Mike Denness. It was a fleeting fling and did not last beyond that year. But I still have something to show for it: it's what my mother calls my ‘Mike Denness jumper'. It's a V-necked chocolate and beige thing. After the end of the series, Denness gave a TV interview wearing it and I made my mother knit an almost identical one for me. It's still inside a suitcase, stuffed with mothballs. My mum plans to give it to my daughter once she finds her first cricket hero.

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.