It is difficult to build a new life in a new city. More so, when it’s your first time away from home and you’re only playing at being an adult. In such times, it helps if you have family around you. And the wonderful thing about families, as someone once said, is that ‘…much like damp on the walls of Bombay apartments, [they] can spring up anywhere given the right conditions’.1
I have written about the families I forged during my initial years in this city, in an earlier issue. The first consisted of the two people with whom I shared a rented apartment. And the second, was born out of sport: the amateur football club, Lex United. Much has changed in the past decade, but these bonds have endured. So you can well imagine my anguish, dear reader, at the mere hint of any discord within these families. Particularly when the person responsible for such discord is me.
Over the last few weeks, I have become persona non grata to some members of Lex United. I have been accused of ‘being difficult’ and ‘throwing tantrums’. The word ‘diva’ has been used, but not in a way that I’d be flattered at being compared to Beyoncé. I have, let us not mince words here, been made a villain. The reason? My refusal to join them in playing box cricket. (Those unfamiliar with this abridged version of the gentleman’s game will find this video edifying.)
Before you, too, jump on the bandwagon and label me anti-national, let me assure you I am no hater of cricket. But box cricket is where I draw the line. I cannot bring myself to participate in that odious activity. If you will permit me, I will tell you why.
As a child, I was obsessed with cricket. Not so much the act of watching it, but that of playing. We played cricket on the terrace where a lofted shot sending the ball over the parapet not only meant running down six storeys to retrieve it, but also (and this was heart-breakingly worse) being declared out. Or in an empty garage, where the notorious one-drop-one-hand rule sounded the death knell for straight-bat defence. We played on the road, in school corridors, and occasionally, on playgrounds.
Many of these games involved only three or four players; and when even these scant numbers were unavailable, I devised a solo-cricket game I could play indoors. Using an actual cricket ball inside the house was, of course, out of the question. At all of eight years, I was wise enough to know that damage to our interior decor was inversely proportional to my physical well-being. The situation required an alternative solution.
I would crumple a sheet of newspaper, wrap it in a polythene bag, and loop multiple rubber bands around the bumpy sphere until it was condensed into a bouncy, and harmless, ball. Toss it against the wall and it would gleefully ricochet, swinging this way or that every time it hit its elastic seams. Any flat surface - a hardbound diary, a pencil-box, or even my palm - could serve as the bat to swat the ball away for a six. And thus, our living room would transform into a stadium reverberating with chants of ‘Ro-han, Ro-han’.
From such heady heights, I suppose there was only one direction in which my cricketing career could go. In one season of leather-ball cricket coaching, I played three matches and with binary precision, notched up scores of 0, 1, and 0*. I had no aptitude for bowling and dropped two catches. Cricket had chewed me up and spat me out. I accepted my remarkable lack of talent with stoic equanimity. Perhaps sports, I consoled myself, was not for me.
A few years later, football would offer redemption.
I should admit I am bang-average at football2. My footballing philosophy is quite simple. I rely on energy and industry, to plug the gaping holes where skill and technique should exist. When I moved to Bombay, in my early twenties, both energy and industry were available in ample measure.
In those early years, our football games were exhilarating; both teams would battle furiously, straining every sinew to claim victory and week-long bragging rights. At the end of the ninety minutes, we would stumble out of the turf and watch the next group of people take the field. Often, they would be carrying a bat. A set of stumps would be placed in the middle of the turf. After a few minutes of gentle jogging, they would take up their positions and a game of box cricket would begin.
When cricket broke my adolescent heart, I did not become a bitter ex. I harboured no ill feeling against this sport that had scorned my love. My own humbling experience made me recognize the talent and ability required to flourish as a cricketer. I grew to respect the determination of those in grimy whites - hunched under the weight of their kit bags, hanging off their wiry frames like a shrouded corpse. To cricket, I would not hesitate to send my best regards and good wishes.
So when I stubbornly refuse to play box cricket on football turfs, you will know this is not about cricket. In fact, it is not even about box cricket. It is about me.
It is about that time in my life when - drunk on adrenaline and the hubris of youth - I could laugh at a few portly, middle-aged men trying to get some exercise. That fickle, but intoxicating, feeling of physical superiority as I watched them struggle to run a few paces. It is about the scorn and pity those stodgy figures invoked. About the righteous anger that bubbled within me, at our turf - the hallowed arena for our ‘serious’ and ‘intense’ contests - being used for such farcical, sedentary games. It is about the refusal to acknowledge that the high-octane football matches that fueled our pride all those years ago, are now beyond our reach. About the irrational and futile bid to defy the passage of time, to cling on to the past. The fear that a young group of footballers will look at us - as we arrange the stumps and go through the gentle warm-up routines our broken bodies allow - and flash us mocking smiles. It is about resisting the inevitable. It is about not wanting to grow old.
After all, as Oscar Wilde so eloquently wrote, the tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.
It was me. I said it. Is it a cheap stunt to replug oneself? I don’t care. Lord knows that writing a good line is an excruciatingly rare event for me, so when it happens, I am sure as hell going to thrust it in front of your face more than once.
Not as atrocious as I was (am) at cricket, but when the bar is that low, everything else compares favourably.
Related on so many levels it's not even funny. I have sniggered at people bringing their cricket kit to football turfs, mostly, as you mention here, while walking out after an intense, bruising game. xD I can't imagine being that person now and looking younger footballers in the eye hahaha