You Must Like Cricket? (8 page)

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I started playing cricket by myself soon after I arrived in Kolkata from Bankura. The idea must have come from the story I had heard about Bradman: belting the ball at a garage wall all day on his own in Bowral. I took that bit of lore, refined the system and modified it to suit my purposes.

There was a small strip of wall adjoining the front door of our house in Kolkata. To get to that door – and the wall – you had to pass through a large iron gate gnawed at by rust, and a small cement courtyard. On either side of the cement courtyard, there were two sections of overgrown mini-lawns and trees. The courtyard was my pitch; the lawns my outfield; and the wall my bowler. With my left hand on the grip of my bat, I would throw the ball at the wall with my right and, by the time the ball had rebounded, get into position to play it.

This wasn't just practice. These were proper Test matches. I batted for both sides; I played the role of a full-house audience (clapping and roaring within a stadium can be convincingly simulated by curling your tongue inwards till it touches your palate, gathering a fair bit of spittle and rolling it around rapidly inside your mouth and blowing out very hard through a narrowed mouth. It isn't as difficult as it sounds. And it really works: try it); and I was scorer and radio commentator. I was utterly unselfconscious about the bizarre sight I presented until one day I caught sight of an old woman who lived next door looking at me through the window with a mixture of amazement and alarm. The match was particularly exciting, and as India, with only a wicket in hand, needed ten runs to beat the West Indies, I'd become a little overwrought in my commentary. The old lady must have thought that I was demented. (I probably was. I certainly looked it.)

I used to cheat a lot in those matches. (I admit it, ‘cheating' must seem rather a strange way of putting it, given that it was my game, and my rules – but that's how it felt to me.) Bowlers I had little time for ended up with pretty ragged figures by the time I had finished with them. Batsmen I was fond of almost always got big scores. India almost always won. I have never ever felt as omnipotent and powerful as when playing that game in the courtyard. I controlled not merely the pace of the match but held in my hands its fate, as well as the fates of all the players involved.

There was a certain skewered integrity to the cheating. I never allowed the same batsman too many big scores on the trot, and I tried to make India suffer the agony of an occasional defeat. In a way, this made sense. The bedrock of this entire elaborate charade was verisimilitude. I had to maintain a semblance of actuality for the game to seem
authentic
– and therefore, the victories to seem plausible and, most importantly, pleasurable – to myself. I had to be careful not to let fantasy and desire throw that completely out of the window. Not completely.

One Indian batsman used to score consistently heavily in my fixed matches – far more consistently than his record suggested. In real life, Gundappa Viswanath was one of Indian cricket's nearly men: he averaged 41.93, never a loser, no way, but never as much of a star as, say, Gavaskar or Kapil. He never really fulfilled the enormous talent that he so obviously had.

I thought I saw myself in him. Whenever we can't become achievers, we love to flatter ourselves with the delusion that we are at least
under
achievers; that, if nothing else, we have potential. It is so much better than being a
non-achiever
. His underachievement made Viswanath more human; at the same time, his achievements made him more of a hero.

Viswanath was hardly the obvious choice for a kid growing up in the 1970s. Sunil Gavaskar, Viswanath's brother-in-law and great friend, was the playground favourite. Picking Viswanath over Gavaskar was like choosing
The Queen is Dead
over
Sgt. Pepper's
or
Revolver
as the best album ever. I was loath to be as reverential towards Gavaskar as most cricket followers were. Viswanath was flawed, fallible and fickle; he was also, on his day, as divine with a bat as anyone could ever be. He was our symbol of the counterculture.

No one in India – and very few anywhere else in the world – has played the late cut as late or as fine as Viswanath. I can't think of anyone who played the shot that Viswanath made his trademark – the half cut, half drive square of the wicket – with as much impetuosity or impish cheek. Against super-quick bowlers a foot taller than he was, this five-foot-three-inch man would leap,
with both feet
, a good six inches in the air, to flash between point and cover. Watching it made you want to genuflect in front of him.

I unfailingly did.

But for every breathtaking shot, there seemed to be a corresponding soft dismissal. And the more I cared, the more it amused my family. They took every opportunity to kid me about it. Whenever my mother made ice cream at home, she etched ‘G. R. Viswanath' on top of the slab of vanilla before serving it to us, the name of my hero sitting there ready to be cut into bits and eaten. This elaborate ritual would usually take place after another innings in which Viswanath had flopped, another occasion on which he had failed to match the form which he showed in my courtyard matches. Since this happened rather often, my mother had more opportunities to tease me – and test my loyalty – than I would have liked. I would howl with a sense of outrage and humiliation and often refuse to eat my portion. (A noble sacrifice in my scheme of things, second only to offering to give up watching cricket.) Soon, I found a way out. I would smudge Viswanath's name from the top of the slab before my mother could bring it to the table or, in a particularly black mood, replace it with ‘S. M. Gavaskar' and scoop spoonfuls into my mouth. Everyone at home, of course, had decided to become a Gavaskar fan.

When I was eight, the same uncle who took me to the Eden Gardens had a daughter. We all used to live together in the sort of joint family that is becoming increasingly rare in India these days. As soon as my cousin had learnt to speak, I taught her the names of all the players in the Indian Test team.

I also taught her something else. In an endearing half lisp and without understanding a single word of what she was saying, she'd reel off a little chant I had made up. Roughly translated, it goes something like this: ‘Gavaskar makes a duck every time he goes out to bat, Viswanath a century.' (This was patently untrue. Gavaskar made about three times as many Test hundreds in his career as Viswanath did.)

My family, of course, found a way to counter this. At the end of January 1979, I came back from our annual holiday to find a sheet of A4 paper pinned to the door of my room. My uncle had left me a message: ‘Gavaskar: 0 + 120: makes a duck? Viswanath: 100 – 91: makes a century?' The Delhi Test against the West Indies had just finished. Gavaskar – playing in the manner that he had in the rest of the series – had made 120. Viswanath had scored nine.

I tore the paper off the door and ripped it up. The holiday had vanished in an instant. I knew I was back home.

I never blamed Viswanath for all the humiliations that I suffered for his failures on the pitch. I never found much to blame him for at all. That is the way with heroes, or at least the heroes we find in our childhood. It's impossible to be objective about them. As I have grown older and more cynical, I pretend that I am above the banalities of hero worship. Nowadays, when things go wrong for a player I like, I try to get criticisms in first before someone can call me on it; I try to see things for what they are: a bad shot is a bad shot, a lean trot a lean trot, it happens to the best of us. I have learnt to assume an expression of weary resignation, to develop a disdainful shrug and turn-up of the lips.

But I know I am being disingenuous, trying to disown my childlike devotion. The difference is, when you are a kid and someone is running your idol down, you wipe his face in the dirt with a ferocity that you reserve for little else in life. Or you smudge his name from a block of vanilla and gulp it down as your eyes sting with tears.

It was not that Viswanath did not give me reason to cheer.

The bat, for him, was not so much bludgeon as brush. Some of his strokes will stay with me for ever. One of my most unforgettable images of him is from the first day of the Eden Gardens Test against Pakistan in February 1980. He came to the wicket with one ball left before lunch. Instead of patting it back, the little man cracked an audacious square cut that raced away to the boundary, the silly-point fielder looking both silly and pointless as he ducked for cover. It had been a good-length delivery; Viswanath made it look like a half-volley.

He gave us more substantial, more conventional gifts too. There was his double century against England in Chennai in 1981–2 (the first and last time he made a double hundred in Test cricket). His fighting ninety-seven against a rampaging Andy Roberts when the West Indies came to India in 1974–5. (I'd been too young to appreciate it but I took pride in the memory.) His match-winning 112 during India's fourth-innings chase of 403 against the West Indies in Port of Spain in 1976.

There was one incident which tells you all you need to know about Viswanath. During the 1980 Jubilee Test against England in Mumbai – his only Test as captain of India – he recalled Bob Taylor, whom the umpire had given out caught behind, back to the wicket. Taylor and Botham went on to add 171 runs. India lost the game.

But he had done what he thought was right. He was always humble, polite, he eschewed controversy, he wasn't driven or ambitious – in short, he seemed a throwback to another era. By the closing years of his career, a time in which cricket was beginning to acquire a ruthless, competitive edge, he seemed positively anachronistic.

I can't even imagine him in today's professional sporting world. Viswanath communicated such a sense of sheer joy through his play, such elegance and good nature that it is impossible to imagine him fettered by a mundane commercial world of image, endorsements and politicking.

And that was why we loved him. We sensed that he conformed to our
notion
of the game; he epitomised the schoolboy's idea of what cricket should be. Cricket is not all about heroism, sacrifice, nobility, artistry and joy. It wasn't even when Viswanath was playing. But how could we fail to adore someone who made it look as though it was?

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For many of us, sportsmen become prisoners of a particular image. Whenever I think of Bjorn Borg now, it's of him on his knees on Centre Court, in his striped Fila shirt, clenched fists raised towards the sky after yet another Wimbledon victory. My image of John McEnroe is not of the graying, balding commentator (nor of the graying, balding player of the late 1980s and early 1990s) but of a scowling teenager, hair erupting from beneath a flaming headband, racket in tailspin as his foot readies to connect with it. I see Diego Maradona amid a shower of confetti, biceps bulging as he holds aloft the Jules Rimet trophy.

Ever since 25 June 1983, Kapil Dev has been defined by one image: white, even teeth beneath a thick moustache, a smile that can't quite make up its mind about whether to take what's happening seriously, his large hands wrapped around a trophy that no Indian had ever believed he'd get his hands on. India's captain with the 1983 World Cup. Kapil's Devils. World champions.

It is an image that is a tribute to Kapil; it is also one that does not do him justice.

Because Kapil Dev was more than a captain who pulled off the impossible, who scripted on behalf of an entire nation a drama magical enough to
still
seem, after twenty-three years, a fairy tale. He was a man who changed the course of Indian cricket. And the picture of him that every Indian fan remembers gives us no glimpse of that astonishing story.

I first saw him – on TV, in a highlights capsule – during his Test debut in Pakistan in 1978.

There he was, not yet twenty, rustic, untutored in the middle-class decorum at the heart of Indian cricket teams, that unprecedented thing in our history: a genuine fast bowler. For a country famous only for its batsmen and its spinners, this was, in itself, a phenomenon rare enough to take your breath away.

Here's another picture, from that first tour: Kapil runs in to bowl, gracefully gathering speed as he coils himself into a pre-delivery leap (another thing which we've never seen before: an Indian new-ball bowler
leaping
into the delivery stride, elegantly side-on, and then comes down hard on the deck with his left foot to release a perfect outswinger.

Kapil was a gift to Indian cricket because he revealed a side of the game that had been alien to us, a place where we'd never been. Also, and just as importantly, as his career flourished over the next decade and a half, he showed us just where we, as a cricketing nation, could go. We never knew where he would take us next. But we were always willing to let him take us there.

His biggest contribution to Indian cricket was not the matches he won, though he won many; it was not the 5,248 runs he scored, nor the 431 wickets he took, though that was a lot of runs and a lot of wickets – probably no Indian all-rounder will ever get close. The greatest thing about Kapil Dev Nikhanj was that he was, as Mukul Kesavan wrote in
Wisden Asia
, ‘our talisman of hope and adventure'.

Kapil meant so much to so many of us for so long because he stretched boundaries, because he redefined what subcontinental cricket could mean, both on and off the pitch.

In 2001, seven years after he played his final Test, I spent three days with Kapil at a weekend golf do in Mauritius. The organisers had roped in a clutch of celebs – like Kapil – to play, and a clutch of hacks – like me – to write about it. My wife was then eight months pregnant. I turned the invitation down at first – I couldn't leave her on her own. But then I heard that Kapil was going to be there. There was nothing else for me to do: I gave in to temptation.

I had had one previous encounter with Kapil. (As far as Kapil knew, there had been no such meeting ever.) During the Pakistan-India Test at the Eden Gardens in 1980, I had seen him waving at me from the players' balcony. I could have sworn, despite the distance of several hundred feet, that our eyes met, that he was waving at me. I believed this so completely that I told friends and relatives the story without a trace of self-consciousness, never imagining that they would not believe me.