My cricketing days

 India won the cricket world cup in 1983. The entire country got so inspired that millions of childhoods and boyhoods in the 80s and 90s of the last century were almost hijacked by the cricketing spirit. People walked, talked and ate cricket. We did the same in our village. It was more or less hit-and-run cricket on the uneven stubbed ground. It was all about wild swings and weird heaves. It hatched shocking and dramatic events sometimes. Farthest from any cricketing technique, the chance factor was the real master of the game.

Anand decided to be the fastest bowler in this part of India. I was maybe in eighth class then. He ran in from the bunchgrass shrubbery, beyond the boundary line, and would throw terribly unpredictable deliveries. He was concerned about speed only, so any direction, height, width, line or length hardly mattered to him. In any case these were very fast deliveries. Add to it the fact that it was a cork ball, almost double the weight of the usual leather ball, uneven pitch and the completely unguarded batsman (almost naked from the cricketing gear point of view). No wonder the equation turned almost disastrous for the poor batsman. In such conditions the bowlers were demons and they ruled the game. We played six or eight over matches. It was all that was needed to chuck out the entire batting lineup. The entire team’s score would be usually in measly twenties. Someone going into double digits was equal to hitting a ton.

I was facing the crazy speedster that day. He ran in like a rampaging bull from the edge of the pond and threw it with so much force that it came almost parallel and hit me on my left cheek. I instantly collapsed. I envisioned surreal crystallizations of night-sky constellations in broad daylight. Helmet, pads, guards were the things which most of us hadn’t seen even once in life. Still most of us dreamt of playing for India one day. Vow, the innocence of childhood! They lifted me and put me on a greener part of the ground. Very caring on their part I have to accept. It was terribly painful. But full credit to the bowler that he had hit it so perfectly, nicely we can say, at the luckiest point on my cheek that my jaw, teeth, tongue and bones cannot complain at the memory. There was no damage. A slight deviation in angle or positioning would have shattered my jaw. Yes, the cheek muscles can complain a bit because I carried a big laddoo on my cheek for many days. Our science teacher Master Surest chuckled with glee whenever he saw me. He hated any kind of game or physical exercise. Science and mathematics was all that meant to be the focus of cosmos to him. Looking at the laddoo he seemed to have drawn satisfaction that at long last the art of game was defeated by the art of science.

Bhindo also used to try fast bowling. Imitating Anand, he would also run from the boundary line. But he was so fragile and weak in limbs that his delivery arrived as a perfect spin ball and I would usually hit it to the fence. He possessed a very big calculating mind in a small body. Maybe chess was good for him but he stuck to cricket. I was the one who symbolized an all-encompassing rival to him, almost equal to an enemy in the childhood world. Only God knows why there was such proliferation of antagonism in him at my merest sight. Whenever I hit him for a four or six, he would cringingly walk down the pitch and would gnash his very cute buckteeth like a stinging rabbit, ‘Ma kasam, I would hit you for a six on your first ball to me!’ So trying with an incisive longing to keep his kasam, he got bowled by me on the first ball itself. Actually seething with anger and hate he blindly ran down the pitch and it was easy to scatter his wickets when he lowered his guard so madly. His kasam lay tattered with the wickets. The world slipped away from under his feet. His heightened sensitivity hitting a tornado, we found him crying profusely behind a heap of bricks. His eyes were red with tears and the unkempt kasam. I had to say sorry to save his life. Clean-bowleding such guys is almost like stirring a proverbial hornet’s nest. Who knows such crazy boys might run into a speeding truck to save themselves from the unbearable pain of defeat. I loaned him a few comics which he never returned; maybe as a revenge to settle the scores with me.

Bhindo was junior by a year to me in the school. A very hardworking student, he would mug up the content like a parrot and reproduce it on the answer sheet to lay claim among the first three in the class. Once during the exam, Bhindo was heard sobbing very painfully. It was already ten minutes since the paper started. Many students had started with a writing sprint like the athletes shoot off like a rocket in 100 m race. But Bhindo was caught in a logjam. He had forgotten the first line of the answer. He got nervous and more so as he saw his nearest rival, a serious and self-contained guy, scribbling away his answer at a smart pace. Every passing second was acute and upsetting. Sobbing and tears running down freely from his big male goat’s eyes, he was heard pleading to the rampaging rival, ‘Randhir, Randhir, don’t be so bad. Kindly tell me the first line!’ He could garner some sympathy for all his tears. A kind teacher had to stop his piteous sobbing by telling him the tormenting first line. Bhindo stood second that year. ‘If not for that pagal first line I would have beaten you fair and square!’ he congratulated the boy who had scored over him.

I was a slightly build boy but others held the view that I possessed stamina and strength normally expected in a hefty boy of that age. Acknowledging the energetic verve in me, the kabbadi boys would sometimes include me in the game. So I sometimes participated in kabbadi games as an extra. Bhindo felt crestfallen. Egged on by the simmering flame of competition, he also had to be a kabbadi champion, if I was taken as an extra by the muscular boys of that game. To be honest it was incredible audacity on his part given his fragile body. He didn’t know the risks of this game of raw strength. He nearly died under a heap of burly ruffian kabbadi boys. There he came out stumbling and floundering, the stems and stalks of his pride almost uprooted by the rotund boys of kabbadi. He cried piteously and blamed me for hatching a plot to break his bones.

If he saw me running, he would declare that he would break the national record in running one day. And he carried his vendetta with his growing years. When I cleared the UPSC mains and got interviewed for the coveted Indian civil services, a visibly shaken Bhindo paid me a visit. ‘Subhash Chander Bose had cleared this exam! How can you do it? I cannot believe!’ he threw it in my face. He declared in full honesty that I was spreading lies. I showed him the interview letter. He read it with shaking hands. The paper literally got burnt under his malevolent stare. He crashed into a chair with a heavy gasp, completely muddled and passive. I had to offer him a glass of water to help him overcome the shock.

To me it was light and entertaining. In the jolly backdrop of such mild skirmishes our roller coaster adolescence brought us to the threshold of youth and its serious matters about career and job. Thank God he got appointed as a government primary school teacher and I’m just a non-descript village-based writer. This at least gives him a semblance of solace that life is worth living at long last.