ISSUE 44

(1)
At Amanishah Cricket Club (ACC), the first three weeks were known as The Honeymoon period. The coach and the captain made sure the newcomers, the ‘virgins’, were f***ed in every hole. Extra rounds of stretching exercises followed by hundred metre dashes and ground fielding drills in scorching summer heat. The virgins would be kept far away from the willows and the nets. And if they tried to approach the current bunch of players, for help or even to chat, they would be sledged and made to attend to them – carry their kits, tie their shoelaces, bring equipment from the storeroom. The thing is, everybody assessed the new players all the time – their attitude, their strength, their game – since nobody’s place in the club’s XI was secure, and who knew if the club’s ‘next big find’ was in the new lot. The idea anyway was that you had to earn your time in the nets, just as you had earned your membership with this exclusive club.

Shah, our skipper, took special pleasure in harassing our latest virgin, Manan, during this year’s honeymoon period. Thin built and wiry limbed, with sunburnt cheeks glued to the bones and dry hair always ruffled, Manan looked more like a homeless drug addict than a professional sportsman. If we ran five times on the track around the football field, he would complete only two rounds. After every hundred-metre dash, in which he would be among the last ones to finish, he would collapse on the grass, gasping for air. The four-piece leather ball, hard as stone, left his soft palms and fingers bruised, making him wince with pain every time he caught the ball.

It astounded all of us that he still showed up every morning. It astounded us more that he made it to the club at all. He was just so strange. When the coach would give him time off, instead of sucking up to him or to Shah, which everyone with the slightest instinct for survival inevitably did, he would retreat to some corner in the field, oscillate with his head bent down, pacing back and forth, talking to himself. Often he would brandish a notebook from his kit, which had more books than bats, and write down whatever it was that he wrote down. If it was to impress the higher powers, it obviously wasn’t working.

Still, over the course of The Honeymoon, it became an indisputable fact that we had a malnutritioned, unusual, lover of the game in the squad who wasn’t looking to be a professional athlete. Was he a poet, a philosopher, as some saw him? Was he a jackass, a chutiya, as Shah got used to calling him? Or was he a madman, a lost wanderer, here by accident?

We didn’t know until he got his turn in the nets.

(2)
As usual, he and some other newbies were practising high catches when the coach hollered ‘Oye! Pad up!’  To the coach and the captain, players didn’t have names – they were ‘Oye,’ ‘Abe’, ‘Aey’. Manan took a young-Sourav-Ganguly-like guard, head up, all his weight on the bat, toes on the leg stump line. It was an outmoded technique, a style more suited to the batsmen of the 90s era, who were reluctant to look ugly, and he was going to irk the coach. I could almost see the coach shouting: oye, will your mother die if you stand straight?

Surprisingly, the coach asked Bullet and me to share a fresh ball, and Asif to bowl his slow, loopy left arm spins with an out-of-shape old ball whose threads were coming off. A perfect recipe to show a newbie his place – the old ball doesn’t rise above the ankles, Asif offers no pace to play any shots, and Bullet and I would make the new ball sing. If I say I felt bad about the boy, I’d be lying.

First ball and he drove me behind square with panache. Bullet too, he cut through the point with ease. So maybe he was good outside the off stump? We gave him no room, bowled on his pads, but he offered every ball the bat’s full face, standing very, very still. His shots, with low back-lift, were only an extension of his defence – they would not fetch more than a run most times, but we couldn’t extract an edge or get him bowled or leg before. Everything we threw at him either met the middle of the bat or was left alone. Asif, of course, Manan couldn’t get away at all, but, with his pointy, powerless shoulders, he dead-batted the deliveries on the stumps and swiped the ones outside off or on his pads with whippy wrists.

Wherever he came from, whoever he was, he could be the Alistair Cook we could use, someone who would give our flamboyant Pollards and Pandyas a chance to milk forty overs of an innings. When the boy finished his session I gave him a silent nod of appreciation, which he acknowledged with a nod back. Shah, of course, took me to the parking lot and gave me an earful for going easy on the kid.

(3)
Soon after, I was waiting for my bus outside St Xavier’s College, ogling girls who were beyond my league, girls who would talk in English and travel in city buses confidently with their waists showing beneath their short tops, when I saw Manan standing at a zebra crossing, waiting for the traffic to clear so he could cross it. I hollered his name, and, upon noticing me, he waved cheerfully and walked up to me.

‘Check those ones out,’ I said, pointing to two girls having sugarcane juice. He looked at them from the corner of his eyes and then turned his head down.

’Good going in the nets,’ I said, correcting my demeanour. ‘You are improving.’

‘Oh, I am surprised myself. I am attributing my progress to my mind getting accustomed to the bowlers here. Maybe against unseen bowlers, I will suck. Why maybe, I will definitely suck.’

‘Don’t you come by a red Scooty?’

‘Oh. Yeah,’ he said. ‘It is at the club. Got punctured.’

‘Well, there is a repair shop right there…’

‘Oh, I have forgotten my wallet. And no phone. I mean, I didn’t forget my phone, I don’t have one. No phone, no wallet, so no Scooty.’ He tilted his head towards the ground and, shaking his head, smiled a broad smile. ‘Yeah, I am stupid that way.’

‘You were planning to walk in this heat, huh? What were you thinking?’

‘Yeah, I didn’t think much. I was thinking about my backfoot game then I thought I might as well walk and think about it. Solves both the things – thinking and the problem of going home. So yeah that’s what I thought.’

‘Do you like sugarcane juice?’

We sat under the shade of a peepul tree on metal stools that the juicewallah cooled by spilling water on them. The water evaporated almost as soon as it touched the metallic surface but it made the stool bearable for our battered buttocks.

‘It’s 42 degrees already. God knows how much hotter it is going to get,’ I said. ‘The coach should understand it is impossible to practice in such heat.’

‘It’s May. That’s how it is every year.’

‘Can I ask you a question if you don’t mind? How come you joined ACC?’

‘It’s quite near to this café I write at.’

‘What I am asking is … your name isn’t Munaf or Moin or Mushtaq.’

‘I didn’t get you.’

‘You are a temple goer, no?’

‘Oh.’ He paused for a second. ‘Oh, is there a rule?’

‘Haha – not really.’

‘But is this not normal?’

‘You are the first Hindu to join ACC.’

‘Oh, shit. Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend anyone. I just googled for clubs and applied. Didn’t think much.’

’What do you write in your diary? Are you writing a book?’

‘Zen in the Art of Cricket! Haha – sorry, yeah, that was lame. No, just notes. I mean I am too much inside this thick skull of mine. I write to get things out, feel lighter. Cricket, I conjectured, would force me to be more in-the-moment. Whatever I think about cricket, I write it down so that when I play, I play empty headed. The underlying idea behind this endeavour is to end the affliction of my compulsive thinking. Anyway, it’s just…’ He let out a big sigh. ‘How’s your hamstring?’

In our conversations, I would get used to hearing this English word too often, ‘anyway’. A big sigh followed by an anyway. He would start explaining himself, get real indulgent about it, then, he would notice his audience – which was mostly me, stop mid-sentence, utter an ‘anyway’, and change the course of the conversation to something more genial. One might say it was a bit smug on his part, but it never affronted me, perhaps because his assessment was fair.

Presently, he sighed again and said, ‘I see how silent you all are in the club. Sincere, disciplined. No jokes, no pranks. I always thought cricket would be practised with more passion and fun. I mean, it’s cricket, right?’

‘That’s what separates club cricketers from all the gully cricketers. We are not fooling around, we are making a career.’

‘But aren’t you all here for the love of the game?’

I laughed at his naiveté.

‘We all love the game, we do. But that’s not why we are here. We are here because many of us have nowhere else to go. We are poor and bad at studies. Shah, he has the most realistic chance of making it into the T20 teams. He gave trials for Rajasthan Royals last year, got good feedback. But, the rest of us – Bullet hopes to become an umpire. Naved wants to be a school PT teacher, he is already assisting our coach in the evening sessions. As soon as Rahmat earns twenty thousand rupees a month as a delivery man, he will get married and leave cricket. Others want to apply for jobs through sports quota or network through corporate tournaments to open an agency or something.’

‘What about you?’

‘I help my father on our mustard farm. That’s what I will end up doing. He has given me two years. If I don’t make it into the district team, I will have to leave.’

‘How do you make it into the district team?’

‘For starters, I will have to shine in the Air India tournament.’

‘Hmm. That will be tough.’

‘Thanks!’

‘Don’t take this wrong. Just that it is easy to make you bowl the way a batsman wants you to. Let me explain…’

What surprised me was not that the explanation was bang on, but that my ego wasn’t hurt at all by his sincere truth-telling.

I was a man of instincts. I ran fast, hit the deck hard, and thrived on the energy on the field. Off the field, it was all about getting stronger and feeling confident about my body and skills. My methods had turned me into a decent club level player, but I had known for a while that to jump into the big league, to be amongst the stars who were head and shoulder above their peers, I needed something more.

We made a pact of sorts. I was to push him for fitness and he was to help me with the thinking part of the game. Daily, Manan and I reviewed our sessions. Then, over two glasses of minted sugarcane juice we talked about all things cricket – famous innings and spells, quirks of players, future of the game, acclimatising with pitch conditions, even ‘mental health’.

(4)
The Air India Inter Club Tournament was just a few days away and there was a sense of occasion at the nets. This tournament was a mega event for us club cricketers because of the instant limelight it promised. Not only was the tourney covered in the local newspapers, it was covered by invisible scouts and veteran cricketers and presided over by umpires and referees who had been on international duty. Anybody who made a mark here was sure to make a career leap. I was confessing to Manan how it might be a make-or-break year for me when Shah came marching towards us. He looked furious.

‘Oye jackass! Do you have any idea what you have done?’

‘Umm … what is this in reference to?’

‘It is in reference to your fucking contempt and disrespect for all of us, and your playing with the career of another player.’

‘This cannot be true, Shah,’ I intervened. ‘You must have heard something wrong.’

‘Oh, so you are standing up for your new friend, is it? This person is nobody’s friend. He will abandon you one day. I know his ilk. They belong to nobody. Not even to their family.’ Manan stood up and, despite the fiery accusations, responded in his typical even tone. ‘If you could tell me what exactly is troubling you that will be helpful.’

‘What’s troubling me is that you haven’t attended even one evening marathon. What’s troubling me is that your ACC t-shirt and parking stickers are still with the admin. You never came for team lunches at the coach’s house. Understand? Do you even know our gardener’s name? Do you know it, fuckface? How many players do you know by name? Forget names, do you even know their faces?’

‘What are you trying to say, Shah?’

‘I am saying he doesn’t give a shit. And I don’t want any such player in my team.’

‘Oh, I am in the team?’
‘Thanks to the two good shots you play in the nets, the coach included your name in the squad. But he won’t select the final eleven. If you don’t change your manners, all you will do is serve Glucon-D and lemon water.’

‘If you want, I will withdraw my name.’

‘See? See that? You fucking should. The players I want in my team should fight to be in the team and you have taken the place of one such player.’

‘Shah, he is a kid. Go easy on him.’

‘Stop taking his side or you will face consequences.’ He pointed a finger at me and warned. ‘And don’t go by his looks. This man is older than all of us in the team. It’s time he showed some maturity too.’

(5)
That was the last time Manan and I met at the lorry. When he came the next day to the ground, he came wearing the club’s white polo t-shirt. His Scooty brandished the club’s permit in the front. He shook hands with players, exchanged smiles, and tried to infiltrate groups during breaks. In the evening, he joined us for a run and, from what I heard, he stayed back for a glass of kulhad milk with Zafar and Naved. If Shah was pleased – or disappointed – he didn’t let it show on his face. But I did. As he mingled with others, Manan, for inexplicable reasons, stopped talking with me. He avoided my eye and on the three or four occasions I tried to strike up a conversation, he replied in hmms and nods and excused himself. It left me confused and a tad angry.

I concentrated on my game as the intensity of our preparations increased. There was an air of confidence in our camp. The draws were in our favour – the most feared clubs of Mumbai and Surat were grouped at the same table, and that increased our odds. The tournament was to be held in the newly renovated Barkatullah Khan Stadium, a ground where Sachin Tendulkar had hit an international century, and, having not played before with state-of-the-art facilities, we were pretty excited. We also felt we were hitting the peak at the right time as a team, winning friendlies with schools, colleges, veterans, corporate teams … whoever we could convince to play a congenial fifteen or twenty overs match with.

In these matches, Manan was surprisingly vocal. He was backing bowlers, correcting field positions, playing mind games with batsmen. He would run to high-five me when I would take a wicket but he would run back to his fielding position just as quickly, with no signs of our old chemistry showing. I could have been any other teammate.

It was on the last day at ACC, before we left for Jodhpur for the tournament, that he approached me. I was in charge of the stock and keeping a count of used and new balls to be taken for that night’s train journey when he entered the storeroom.

‘Can you spare some time?’

I posed a stiff face and carried on with my work.

‘I will understand if you are busy.’

‘I am busy.’

‘I just wanted to say sorry. I treated the ground as a theatre. I was an actor the whole time and I didn’t want you to be a part of the play.’

I at once melted but continued focussing on packing the duke balls and keeping their count on a notebook with a stoic face.

‘Besides, there is a rare Sachin video that I wanted to show you.’

‘Alright. Sugarcane juice?’

‘I have something else in mind.’

I put on the extra helmet he had brought with him and we drove on his puny red Scooty, suffocating with the extra load, down to a small lane intersecting Mirza Ismail Road. An old, dilapidated, three-storeyed building without name or board stood in front of us. Other buildings in the lane had stores of marble and stones on the ground floor and workshops on the floors above. I could not fathom why Manan would bring me here.

We entered the building. There was no light in the passage – no windows or bulbs – and it took some time for my eyes to adjust to that darkness in the broad daylight. I cautiously climbed a stairway behind Manan. There was an old office on the first floor, a travel agency, for a print out on the door advertised discounted flight tickets to Malaysia and Thailand, and on the second floor, I noticed a faded signboard lying on the floor that I couldn’t read. I climbed slowly, a hand on the wall, carrying my kitbag like a rucksack on my back, and I discerned not a single soul nor heard any sounds, barring Manan’s footsteps, on my way up.

A door opened and a blinding shaft of light entered my eyes. I found his angelic silhouette surrounded by golden light waiting at the entrance. ‘Welcome to Cocoon,’ he said. I didn’t see Manan’s face but he must have smiled that smile of his that he brandished when he revealed, slightly proudly but without meaning any insult, the weaknesses of a player or the key to playing a particular bowler that others hadn’t found.

Who would have thought from outside that the roof of this godforsaken building housed an open-air café? Half of it was covered under a green shade, the kind which people fix in their driveways to park their cars. There were three rectangular tables, each with four jute muddhis. One table was occupied by a middle-aged Japanese or Chinese couple. From the two speakers hanging from the canopy, a calming instrumental music was playing. On the walls were graffiti of Hindu rishis in meditative poses, exhaling smokes, their third-eyes wide open. I had never been to such a place before. It looked kind of illegal. I learned later it was visited only by international tourists living in its super cheap hostel on the floor below.

Since it was cloudy, we sat in the open area. A woman, who, I learned later, was a German married to an Indian man and was in charge of the place, appeared, and exchanged greetings with Manan. She gave us a notepad and a pen to write our orders. I couldn’t help but admire her Shiva-like bun and the rudraksha beads in her wrist bracelet.

‘What kind of a place is this?’ I asked.

‘An unlisted place. People find this place only through word of mouth. These folks here take an hour to bring any food you order – haha. Well, except for my black coffee. For the last five months, I have been coming here straight from the net sessions. I shower on the floor below, change and stay here till evening.’

‘What do you do?’

‘Drink cup after cup of coffee in this heat, like an addict. And try … I try to write.’

I nodded. The natural question to ask would have been about his writing but he always evaded them. Besides, I wasn’t completely myself. First, he avoided me for days, now he suddenly brought me to this alien place to patch things up. I didn’t know what was going on in his mind.

‘Shah was right. I am not a team player. I am too self-absorbed. The woman who I just talked to in German, I forgot her name the minute after she had first introduced herself. I don’t know the waiter’s name either. I don’t want to know. I want to be a ghost who does not interfere with the world. And I want the world to not interfere with my small existence.’ He spread his hands around. ‘This is who I am. Not the son of my mother or my teacher’s student or some employer’s employee or a club’s cricketer. This.’

The waiter left a small packet wrapped in a newspaper on our table and confirmed our food order.

‘What was it you wanted to show me?’

‘Oh, yes. That.’ Manan opened the packet carefully and spread out its contents on the table, cupping them between his hands to protect from the slight breeze. I couldn’t believe what I saw. ‘I thought you didn’t smoke!’

‘Umm …  tobacco I don’t,’ he replied. ‘This is kind of holy … I know you don’t approve. But this is something I would want my mother and father and grandmother to try, you know what I mean? Not cigarettes. Not alcohol. Not even the books I read or the movies I watch. But this. Anyway, I brought you here to make a suggestion. How do you like it at ACC?’

‘It’s like a home.’

‘Like a home. Hmm. I guess I won’t circle around – there is this academy in New Delhi. My uncle’s someone’s someone works there. Point is they are looking for a tall left-arm fast bowler with a good build. I thought they would like you.’

‘I can’t go to New Delhi. I don’t have money…’

‘It’s fully funded for a year if you get selected, which I know you will. You, of course, get paid handsomely for any matches you play. And, if you are one of the top performers, they have ties with academies in Australia, England, they send players. It’s hi-tech, it’s … Majumdar, Chopra they all came from this system. You don’t have to make a decision now. Just go for the trials.’

‘Why do you want me to go there?’

‘I don’t want you to go there, I want you to get out of here. You have two years left before you turn to farming. ACC won’t get you far, buddy.’ He rolled up his cigarette and waved to the waiter for a lighter. ‘I have realised the same thing with writing and literature. The world is moving at a faster rate than suited to us traditionalists. So it is with the game. The club’s methods are outdated. It will be hard to leave, I know, but think about it.’

He handed me a name and phone number and excused himself to smoke at the other end of the terrace. I tried to see what he saw here every day. The listless eagles sketching short arcs in the grey sky. The volumes of city smoke that swam this way from MI Road on a mild, almost imperceptible, current. The two labourers toiling to construct what looked like a toilet on the terrace of the neighbouring building. The murmur of alien languages from the adjoining tables. The grind of stones from the workshops below. And I realised I didn’t know this boy, this man. For some reason, I’d begun to believe, however different his background, his motives to play the sport, he had blended with us. Was one of us. But, as I saw him then, taking deep puffs of poison, his eyes closed, his mind’s eye perhaps turned inwards and thinking about whatever it was that he thought about, he seemed far removed from his surroundings and me.

(6)
A brief panic ensued in the team at the railway station when there was no sign of Manan, no word from him, and the train was about to arrive. Both the numbers provided in his application form were out of reach. Most of my teammates speculated he was late due to the untimely rains or had met with an accident or was at another platform.

The coach and Shah took me aside in hope for an answer. ‘Is he coming?’

‘I don’t know. He didn’t tell me.’

‘Do you think he is coming?’

I looked at Shah and then at the coach and, unable to voice my answer, shook my head in the negative.

‘That’s alright,’ Shah said.

But the coach roared at him. ‘I told you not to take him in the team. I know his ilk. They belong to nobody. Not their tribe, not their family … enough of your captainship. Now on, it will be as I say – your keeper will open…’

As the coach gave a lengthy, anxious discourse to Shah on the changes that should happen in the team, I excused myself.

It dawned on me that not only was he not coming to the Air India tournament, but he also was not coming back to ACC, to our lives again. We had seen the last of him.

I bought a small notebook from a shop at the railway station and in the night, unable to sleep, wrote down, unfiltered, whatever thoughts came in my mind – the changes in our batting order, my new-found respect for Shah as a leader, and my failure at anticipating what transpired.

Even if a person is an open book, I realised, one might not be able to read them – the words are there but what do they mean? One’s reading depends on the questions one asks. The better the questions, the better the answers. When I talked with Manan, we talked heartily, we talked openly, but we ended up talking about cricket. I never got round to asking the questions that I should have asked. Shah did and, in some aspects, he knew Manan better than I did.

I climbed to the upper berth and declined to come down for dinner, pretending to sleep. The team was assessing its prospects in the tournament, and I was assessing mine – with them, with the club, with a new club in New Delhi, with cricket.

‘Can I talk to you?’ Shah tapped on my legs and asked gently.

We opened one of the doors and sat on the floor of the speeding coach, our legs on the stairs. It was early morning. The train was passing small stations, small towns, railway crossings, determined as if to get us on time. Shah was describing the politics behind the new bowling machine the club was planning to buy that would help batsmen play fast bowlers of international standards. It took my mind to a question that was troubling me.

‘Shah, I saw this video on Youtube. Sachin Tendulkar’s interview,’ I said. ‘In a match against West Indies, Sachin was explaining to Harsha Bhogle, that he was keeping his mind blank as usual, his eyes on the ball in the bowler’s hand when suddenly he just became the eyes. He saw the ball released, he saw his body adjusting, moving, taking a position, and he watched his bat come in a straight line to hit a back foot punch. It was a four. He didn’t play that shot, he said. It just happened. Have you ever experienced that?’

‘Don’t make cricket so mysterious,’ Shah said. ‘God is mysterious. Life is mysterious. Cricket is just a game. Watch the ball, hit the ball.’

Shah was right – if there was some answer, some experience, that cricket could provide, so also could kabaddi or football. And perhaps so also could tilling in my father’s field or welding in a mill. Zen was in the art of doing anything, if it at all anywhere was.

‘Come, let’s go for a patrol. Call the search party.’

And so, Shah and Naved and Zafar and I, we went from bogey to bogey, looking for pretty girls or pretty young mothers, rating them, comparing them, encouraging Naved to talk to one. I saw myself acting as the old me would have, but I was only half there, with my friends, my brothers, my ilk. The other half was listening to Manan.