Just Not Cricket

Life was perfect.

16 years old. Warm, sunny days. A huge green maidan. A big gang of friends.

It was the summer vacation after the SSLC exams. The only thing Anand and his friends did all day long was play cricket.

If they didn’t do that, they would have to think about marks and college courses and they would rather not do that, thank you. Their parents were doing enough worrying for them.

By convention, the ground was reserved for football in the early hours. But after 9 in the morning, it was the sole preserve of cricket-crazy boys of all ages, shapes, and sizes. After 5 in the evening, it was back to football.

There was a reason for this. Those were the times when cricket had not really caught on among the youth of this small town and football was what the general public was crazy about. It was rare for a player to play both with equal interest. The footballers considered the cricketers snobs and the cricketers in return abhorred them as louts. The social backgrounds from which the proponents of each game were drawn were markedly different.

After several clashes in which stumps, bats and boot spikes played no small role, though luckily without any serious bodily injuries, the warring parties had entered into an uneasy truce. The early mornings and late evenings were left to the hard, fast game of football and the hot interim hours earmarked for the comparatively slow, dreamy game of cricket.

The trick was to get to the ground as early as possible, in time to get into the playing eleven. The unlucky ones would be forced to watch from the sidelines till the next match, in which they had priority.

Anand and his cohorts were always there by the time the footballers cleared out. They usually all got into the first match, their regular opponents being the gang from the next block.

The matches were hard fought. The spirit of rivalry (you couldn’t truthfully call it friendly) reigned supreme. Success was lauded and placed you on the shoulders of your peers. Failure invited instant and extreme ridicule.

Uprooted stumps, dropped catches, wides, a ball smashed out of the ground…these were the subjects of the boys’ nightmares that summer.

Anand and his cohorts fared pretty well and were no easy walkovers. But the game of cricket, with its attendant cliché of glorious uncertainty, is not always kind. Many were the days that Anand himself was the reluctant recipient of remarks aimed at putting down his ability, intelligence, and ancestry. Skins, by necessity, had to ape rhinoceros hides. But then, everyone had tongues and used them at every opportunity to good effect. Sledging, contrary to what the Press says, was not invented by the Aussies.

Shambu was the most formidable of the players Anand and his team usually met as rivals. An extremely quick bowler and an excellent bat. Lightning on the field. Above all, a master of the derogatory word.

If there was anyone Anand would have loved to see lie low in the dust, it was Shambu. And what is more, he would have probably used the opportunity to kick him in the ribs too.

The last three days had been unbearable. Anand’s team had been losing steadily and vitriol had flowed from Shambu’s tongue in a constant stream. What was more, his stumps had been uprooted three times by Shambu in succession. In his consternation, he had also floored two easy catches.

That evening, Anand went home straight from the field, skipping the usual sit-down chat with his friends at the local restaurant. He didn’t see any point in discussing the day’s frustrations threadbare as they had been doing for the past two days in succession. He had decided to go into training instead.

Inserting a cricket ball in an old sock, he suspended it on a string from a low lying branch of his mother’s favourite mango tree and began practicing his shots. That was when he felt someone watching him intently.

Sivan. The gardener’s son.

Though Anand knew him by sight, they were not friends. He rarely came to Anand’s house. They had never spoken to each other. Anand had spotted him amidst the football crowd that thronged out of the ground in the mornings, but they had never even exchanged smiles.

For a long time, Anand ignored him and went on with his mock batting. Then on an impulse, he asked Sivan whether he would like to play.

Not that he believed Sivan knew anything about the game. He was not even in pants and was wearing an old mundu.

But then Sivan said yes and Anand tossed the ball to him. There was something in the way he caught it that made Anand wonder.

Does he really know how to bowl without bending his arm, Anand thought to himself, as Sivan hiked up his mundu, turned his back and began walking away from him. Not very long run up at all. But no time to think of that. Sivan was running in with an easy loping motion. A perfect delivery, elbow unbent.

The ball came in low and fast and struck Anand sharply in the shin. He hadn’t spotted it at all.

As he ruefully rubbed at the smarting red stitch mark impressions on his shin and strapped on his pads, Anand swore to himself never to let appearances deceive him again.

Sivan was good. Extremely good.

He tested Anand with his pace throughout before donning the pads himself and dealing with Anand’s bowling with elegant ease.

Anand thoroughly enjoyed his evening.

After the session, he requested Sivan to stay back after his football game the next day. Then he spent the rest of the evening calling his friends. As he spun the black rotary dial on the telephone, he experienced a sharp uplifting of his spirits.

The next morning, when Anand’s team entered the field, Sivan was one of them. Dressed in an old T-shirt and barefoot in a pair of shorts, Sivan definitely did not look the part of a cricketer. He could hear Shambu’s sneering comments on Anand’s team selection, to the guffaws of his cohorts. Anand’s team members did not look too sure of his wisdom either.

Anand did not bring in Sivan to bowl until Shambu got to the crease one down. He had hidden him deep down at third man where the ball did not go expect once.

The sneer on Shambu’s face lasted until Sivan walked to the end of his bowling mark, turned around and came running in. After that, it was all he could do to bring his bat down to prevent the ball from rattling into his stumps.

The innings Shambu played for the next four overs, pushing and prodding at the ball and never getting an opportunity to be his usual flamboyant self, must have been the most miserable one he had ever played in his life. And the walk back to the pavilion when Sivan finally ended his misery by trapping him leg before, must have been the longest and loneliest he had ever had to face.

When their innings started, all Anand had to do was watch from the other end while Sivan carted Shambu all over the field. They won the game without a single wicket down.

Three games they played that day, three games in which Anand’s team ground the opposition into the dust without breaking a sweat.

And Anand enjoyed every minute of it. His tongue worked overtime, much sharper and brilliant than ever before.

Shambu’s heydays were over.

Sivan remained a regular fixture of Anand’s team the rest of that idyllic summer.

More cricketers started coming early to the ground to play football and more footballers began staying back late for cricket.

This summer, as Anand drives by the ground, it is full. Hordes of boys, playing cricket and football to their hearts’ content.

When ice breaks, it breaks in ways one never predicts.