Kircket

All the plastic chairs are taken, but I haven’t stayed an extra day in Singapore just to stand for eight hours with the baking sun on my neck. The ticket seller, a stern looking woman with a blood-red bindi, has warned me not to enter the cordoned off section of the Ceylon Sports Club marked “members only.” But as soon as she resumes plucking tickets out of a small green booklet I grab my chance and part the crowd with a few well placed excuse-me’s.

I settle into a chair with faded pink upholstery and chipped varnish. Though I’m a little worried about impending humiliation-a tap on the shoulder and a nod toward the exit-it seems worth the risk. From here I have a clear view of a rolled down television screen on which eleven men in green and two in blue have entered a packed stadium in distant Karachi, Pakistan.

On screen, Sachin Tendulkar lashes the ball to the fence. On my right, six rows of men on molded plastic chairs erupt: “HOI, HOI, HOI, HOI.”

“They are Indian workers,” explains the man next to me, a retired Singapore-Indian civil servant with two-day stubble and a rolled up newspaper with a picture of a Chinese girl in an orange lollipop-swirl bikini. “They come whenever there’s a match.”

There are about 350 of them, migrant construction workers from Tamil Nadu, India’s southern-most state; small, gaunt men with toes poking out of scuffed sandals or rubber flip-flops. The lucky ones have claimed the white plastic chairs behind a red tape barrier. The rest stand knitted together at the back or spill out cross-legged on the floor, squeezed against the bar to my left and several rows deep in the space between the screen and the first faded pink chairs.

This is not the first time I’ve hunted down a cricket match in a city not my own. Almost exactly a year ago, I was on the edge of my seat in a stranger’s darkened apartment in New York as India and Pakistan clashed in South Africa in the World Cup. I’ve lingered over matches in hotel rooms in Kuala Lumpur, smoke-filled sports bars in Jakarta, messy dorm rooms in Princeton.

But this match is special. India are playing in Pakistan for the first time in seven years. A lot has happened in the interim: nuclear weapons tests, a mini-war in Kashmir, an Indian plane hijacked to Afghanistan, a terrorist attack on India’s parliament, more than a million soldiers eyeball to eyeball on the border for the better part of a year.

India get off to the kind of start television commentators like to call explosive. Or the kind they might call explosive if I could hear them. Where I sit you can watch, but you can’t listen. The speakers are positioned somewhere in the sea of white plastic chairs, as though to reward the ears of those whose eyes must strain the most, though I’m not sure that anyone can hear a word above the clapping, whistling and hooting.

 Of all of India’s defeats, none is seared as deeply in our collective memory as the one in Sharjah in 1986. After that day Sharjah was no longer a place-an Arab city where they sometimes import cricketers to entertain the Indians and Pakistanis who do all the work-but a byword for India’s infinite capacity to lose.  
     
One man in the crowd stands out. A coarse green shirt hangs on his narrow shoulders and his eyes look like he awakes to nightmares.

“Boundary-aa!” he exhorts the Indian batsmen to pummel Pakistan some more. “Boundary-aa, Six-aa! Boundary-aa, Six-aa! Boundary-aa, Six-aa!”

The man charged with meeting his demand is Sachin Tendulkar, perhaps the most iconic figure in India. If you were to combine the popularity of Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan at the height of their powers you might get an approximation of what Tendulkar means to about a billion Indians. It has been 14 years since he first appeared on our TV screens, a scrawny 16-year-old with golliwog hair who could already wield a bat like an executioner’s axe or an opera conductor’s baton.

Pitted against him is Shoaib Akhtar, nicknamed the Rawalpindi Express, the latest in a long line of marauding Pakistani quicks. Akhtar shakes his movie star mane and steams in to bowl-to hurl a white ball across 22 yards at almost 100 miles per hour.

“BOUNDARY-AA, SIX-AA!” screams the man in the green shirt.

Tendulkar smashes the ball and it soars into the Karachi stands. 350 Indians in Singapore are on their feet, their arms outstretched skywards.

“WHOA, WHOA, WHOA, WHOA,” I bark, pumping my clenched right fist.

My first memories of cricket go back to 1978. Another contest between India and Pakistan, this one after a 17-year hiatus in which the two countries had done their fighting on the battlefield rather than the cricket field. I was almost ten-years-old in 1978. My brother had just been born, and my mother was on maternity leave from her government job. I have this picture in my head of walking from the black and white Philips TV in the living room-we called it the drawing room- and coming to a stop outside a bathroom door with peeling white paint to ask my mother a question. I can’t quite remember what it was-maybe the meaning of LBW or the difference between off spin and leg spin-but I’m pretty sure that she knew the answer.

Apart from a girl in third grade, whose name I wrote over and over in a narrow school diary covered with blue plastic, cricket first revealed my obsessive side. I memorized nicknames of West Indians who had played before I was born and batting averages of South Africans whose careers were short-circuited by apartheid. I collected little black and white photos of cricketers in floppy caps and gambled (only with duplicates) with the neighborhood urchins, throwing a picture in the air and shouting “chit” or “photo” as it spiraled to the ground. I lacquered my bat with too much linseed oil and spent scorching summer afternoons thwacking it with a cricket ball in an old sock to improve its “stroke.” I discovered that my mother really didn’t know that much.

Tendulkar gets out. There’s a moment of stunned silence, then another player walks in to wild applause. This time the loss does nothing to slow India’s momentum. Another Indian batsman slams the ball across the ropes and the man in the green shirt is on his feet slicing the air with his arm as he mimics the umpire’s signal for four. “No single! Only four and six!” The camera cuts to a pair of commentators-an Australian and a Pakistani. “Manjrekar coming! Manjrekar coming!” shouts the man in the green shirt invoking the name of an Indian commentator.

You can tell a lot about an overseas Indian by his relationship with cricket. There are those who give up their Indian passports but never give up on the team. To them I ascribe qualities like self-awareness and self-confidence. The other type is personified by the Indian who lands up in Silicon Valley, wipes his mind clean of cricket as though he’s rebooting a hard drive, and starts cheering for the San Francisco Giants or the 49ers. He embodies the slavish side of the Indian personality, the capacity to be dazzled by toilet paper and Burger King.
 
India lose a few wickets and the tempo slows. The man has slipped off his sandals and unbuttoned his green shirt. He slouches in his plastic chair sipping a large brown bottle of Baron’s beer with a yellow straw. He says something out loud in Tamil. A man with neatly combed hair sitting behind me leans forward.

“You see even an illiterate fellow like this has good knowledge about the game,” he says.

“He’s probably not illiterate. Most South Indians are literate these days,” I respond.

“Okay, but I mean he’s not educated but he still knows a lot about the game. What he is saying is absolutely correct.”
  
 You can tell a lot about an overseas Indian by his relationship with cricket. There are those who give up their Indian passports but never give up on the team. To them I ascribe qualities like self-awareness and self-confidence. The other type is personified by the Indian who lands up in Silicon Valley, wipes his mind clean of cricket as though he’s rebooting a hard drive, and starts cheering for the San Francisco Giants or the 49ers. He embodies the slavish side of the Indian personality, the capacity to be dazzled by toilet paper and Burger King.

The arbiter of correctness is named Keerthi and works as a software manager for the Singapore branch of Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s Halliburton.

By now I’m quite sure that the stern lady with the red bindi is not going to kick me out. I get up to find something to eat and the cross-legged men on the floor pull up their bony knees to let me pass. In a shaded corner just outside the viewing area, large bowls of food sit in a glass cabinet. I pay five Singapore dollars for a paper plate piled with steaming rice, a yellow daal with small pieces of eggplant, shredded cabbage with onions and cumin seeds, and curried mutton ribs. I ask the girl behind the counter to halve the mountain of rice on my plate and she repeats this to the man who had scooped it out from a hot box with an urgency that says she approves of such forbearance.

The Indian batsmen fail to step things up in the last five overs but, thanks to the electric start, they still manage to pile up 349. To overhaul it, Pakistan will have to make the highest score ever for a team batting second. The players file off the field and the screen fills with a commercial for Molty Multifoam Mattress, apparently the best guarantor of a good night’s rest in Pakistan. The man in green has rebuttoned his shirt. He smokes a cigarette, drained, as though a battery in the back of his head has died.

It has been more than four hours since the match began, but the crowd’s enthusiasm shows no signs of flagging. An Indian bowler, Zaheer Khan, strides halfway down the pitch to glare at a Pakistani batsman in the exaggerated way the hero in a Hindi movie glares at the villain. The construction workers titter like schoolgirls. A little later, L. Balaji, a new boy from Tamil Nadu, claims the first Pakistani wicket, sending a batsman’s off stump cartwheeling. We stand up and roar.

“Tamil Nadu Singhamda,” screams the man in green.

“That means Lion of Tamil Nadu,” explains Keerthi.

Another wicket falls, the scoring rate remains tepid, and it begins to look like this match will be one-sided. The Pakistani batsmen are wading into quicksand. They must score quickly to have any hope of reaching the target, but the more they hurry the more likely they are to lose wickets. I’m happy. I haven’t come seeking a cliffhanger.
    
     
My throat feels sore so I step outside again for something to drink. When I return, clutching a Styrofoam cup filled with tea, I see a white plastic chair being passed down a row of workers.

I reach out and pass it on as well before settling down to sip my tea, sweet, milky and especially satisfying for having cost only one dollar. It’s only a few minutes later that I notice that the man in the green shirt has disappeared.

“Where’s he gone?” I ask Keerthi, pointing with my eyes to where he had been, to my right, in the first row behind the tape barrier.
   
 We’ve grown so accustomed to failure that some of India’s most cherished sporting accomplishments are defeats–Milkha Singh edged out of the 400 meters bronze at the Rome Olympics, P.T. Usha breasting the tape fourth at the 1984 Los Angeles games. People still talk about almost winning that game against England at the Oval in 1979. Long ago, I concluded that as a nation we actually prefer the sweet sorrow of the near miss to the unfamiliar tang of victory.
 
“He said something unsportsmanlike so they decided to punish him. That was his chair they were passing around.”

“What did he say?”

“He said something like ‘You Pakistanis, learn to play.'”

“That doesn’t sound that terrible.”

“It’s not sportsmanlike. His friends are the ones who decided to punish him by taking away his chair.”

Keerthi says this with pride. I can’t see what the fuss is about. In my book as long as you cheer the Indian players equally, as long as you cheer the Muslims as you cheer the Hindus, and Tamils and Punjabis as you cheer Maharashtrians and Kannadigas and even the slacker Bengali captain, it doesn’t really matter what you say about the other side. I wish the man in green would come back.

The game is comfortably headed India’s way and then suddenly it isn’t. The quicksand that ought to have reached the Pakistani batsmen’s thighs by now is still below their knees. They plunder India’s captain for 14 runs in one over. We can see Pakistanis dancing in the stands in Karachi. The Ceylon Sports Club is hushed.

Being an Indian is probably easier than being a Pakistani, especially now that we’re known for software and their biggest exports are nukes and terrorists. But being an Indian cricket fan has always been a tribulation, and there isn’t a single one out there who doesn’t have scars on his soul. We lost that series in 1978, going down 2-0 in three matches. In the third, at the same stadium in Karachi as today’s game, two cocky Pakistanis-Imran Khan and Javed Miandad-mauled the Indian captain Bishen Singh Bedi’s lazy, loopy bowling, effectively ending his career. Bedi’s son was in my school at the time. He was a quiet boy, maybe six or seven years old, probably dealing in his own way with being the only person on the planet named Gavasinder. I remember him being pushed around in the schoolyard by a couple of my classmates.

The disappointments kept coming. A year after that tour to Pakistan, I sat up late in the kitchen one night, a crackly transistor radio glued to my ear as India came up nine short of an improbable 438 for victory against England. A quarter century later, I can still hear a Hindi commentator repeating over and over that “India’s position is rather fragile,” words that would etch themselves deeper in my brain with each passing year. In 1983 India pulled off one of cricket’s storied upsets by winning the World Cup.

Yet, though I rejoiced with the rest, in my heart it always felt like a fluke, God’s private joke allowing a group of mild-mannered trundlers to put a spoke in the mighty West Indies machine.
   
At last, the man in green returns. He has recovered his chair and moved it a little to improve his view. He stretches his legs and smokes a bidi.

“Sachin coming four wickets,” he declares. “No six, only wicket! No chance four, no chance six. Only wicket. Wicket! No six, no chance pa. Confirmed wicket.”

As though by magic, Sachin Tendulkar is handed the ball. He’s a pedestrian bowler, but the man in green has acted as an oracle before and our spines stiffen with anticipation. Tendulkar ambles in and bowls. Yousuf Youhana lifts the ball into the air. It lands in the stands-six runs! The man in green slams his hand on his chair so hard that I worry the plastic may crack.

“SACHIN WICKET!” he screams.

The prayer goes unanswered. Tendulkar continues to take a pounding. After a while, Keerthi leans forward again.
    
 When a match goes down to the wire like this, Indians smell defeat. “Indians lack killer instinct,” someone in the audience will inevitably say, or “Pakistanis are fighters.”
I’ve heard these words as a graduate student in America, where cricket was all that filled the silence on the rare occasion that I found myself at a dinner table with Indian engineers or physicists. I’ve heard it in Jakarta, at the restaurant with lace curtains and too much green chili in the saag where I sometimes watch matches. I’ve probably said it a few times myself, and I’ve always believed it.
 
“Tendulkar is going for good-length balls and Inzy is hooking them off,” he says. “Instead he should go for a short delivery.”

Keerthi not only knows a lot about cricket; apparently he also knows a lot of cricketers. He used to live in Madras and can reel off names of friends in the Tamil Nadu side. There’s a V. Sivaramakrishnan, who once toured Sri Lanka with the Indian team. He’s not related to L. Sivaramakrishnan, the famous leg-spinner. There’s someone name Girish, who I haven’t heard of either. I ask Keerthi if he knows Sadagoppan Ramesh, a classy left-hand batsman in and out of the national squad. He says they’re good friends.

Balaji returns to bowl again. “Tamil Nadu Singham,” shouts the man in green. But this time Balaji is bludgeoned. A Pakistani slaps the ball for the second four of the over. “Good shot,” says Keerthi. The British packed their bags 54 years ago, but he’s still bent on watching the gentleman’s sport like a gentleman. I wish he would go home.

The camera turns to the Karachi crowd. They’re waving green and white Pakistani flags. A man in a loose salwar kameez whirls like a dervish. I read the lips of a little boy mouthing “Pak-is-tan, Pak-is-tan.”

Of all of India’s defeats, none is seared as deeply in our collective memory as the one in Sharjah in 1986. After that day Sharjah was no longer a place-an Arab city where they sometimes import cricketers to entertain the Indians and Pakistanis who do all the work-but a byword for India’s infinite capacity to lose.

It was a tournament final and for much of the day India looked the better team. But Pakistan fought back until finally they needed four runs off the last ball, not impossible but far from easy. India’s captain pushed his fielders to the boundary ropes in a defensive ring. Chetan Sharma, an innocuous striver, the only kind of fast bowler India seems capable of producing, ran up to bowl to Javed Miandad, the same Miandad who had thrashed the Indian bowlers in that series in Pakistan eight years earlier.

Miandad calmly lifted the ball over midwicket for six. In India, the next day’s papers reported people dying of heart failure brought on by the excitement, though maybe it was really grief that killed them.

It was around that time that I stopped playing cricket. I was never terribly good at it-the bottom always dropped out of my stomach when I faced pace-and then one summer I discovered, of all things, table tennis. You could play TT, as we called it, no matter the weather, and the room with the lopsided table where I whiled away evenings smashing forehands and slicing backhands was right next to the mud-floored court where the neighborhood girls played badminton.

Someone bowls a good over. Keerthi says, “Come on guys. Conserve the next four overs exactly like this. Don’t give runs.” This redeems him a little in my eyes, but then a Pakistani batsman cracks a four and Keerthi says “very good shot.”

Javed Miandad has long retired, but he refuses to go away. The Indian newspapers I read online every morning are full of stories about him in his new incarnation as Pakistan’s coach. Just the other day, Miandad mocked one of India’s promising new fast bowlers as the sort of kid you can find in every back alley in Pakistan. It hurts because it’s probably true. The camera zooms to the Pakistani dressing room balcony. Miandad waves his arms wildly at the batsmen in the middle.

“Oyeh, oyeh,” hiss the construction workers. Their loathing is mixed with fear. It’s as though Miandad is a cricketing version of Freddy Kruger, back to preside over a new generation of our nightmares.

Pakistan need 34 of 24 balls. A comparison chart comes on screen and you can see the Pakistani worm stabbing upwards toward India’s. When a match goes down to the wire like this, Indians smell defeat. “Indians lack killer instinct,” someone in the audience will inevitably say, or “Pakistanis are fighters.”

I’ve heard these words as a graduate student in America, where cricket was all that filled the silence on the rare occasion that I found myself at a dinner table with Indian engineers or physicists. I’ve heard it in Jakarta, at the restaurant with lace curtains and too much green chili in the saag where I sometimes watch matches. I’ve probably said it a few times myself, and I’ve always believed it.

A Pakistani wicket falls. We get up and scream. I shake hands with the man in front of me, an older man in ironed blue jeans and laundered white Nikes. “I think we’ve just broken the sound barrier,” he jokes. But he’s not smiling. It’s pitch dark outside now and pouring. The workers who had started the day with the sun on their backs have inched deeper into the clubhouse.

We’ve grown so accustomed to failure that some of India’s most cherished sporting accomplishments are defeats–Milkha Singh edged out of the 400 meters bronze at the Rome Olympics, P.T. Usha breasting the tape fourth at the 1984 Los Angeles games. People still talk about almost winning that game against England at the Oval in 1979. Long ago, I concluded that as a nation we actually prefer the sweet sorrow of the near miss to the unfamiliar tang of victory.

Yet, I can’t help but notice that something might have changed. Even as Pakistan lope toward the target the Indians refuse to give up. For the first time I can count half a dozen players in the Indian team whose shoulders never droop, who don’t look defeated. They form the core of a side that has notched up a few big wins: beating England in England two years ago, pulverizing Pakistan in last year’s World Cup, squaring a test series against mighty Australia.

Perhaps it’s economic reform that has instilled this new self-confidence. When I was growing up, in Indira Gandhi’s socialist India, we were somehow aware that Pakistanis drove better cars and ate real ketchup. Our only consolation was that we made our own cars and our own crappy ketchup-so what if it tasted like pumpkin.

But India now has beauty pageants and coffee bars. The average Indian has become wealthier than the average Pakistani, or at least less poor. India still makes cars and ketchup, but real cars and real ketchup. Judging by the commercials, across the border they sleep on Molty foam mattresses and wash their hair with English Anti-lice shampoo.

Pakistan need 17 runs off 12 balls with four wickets in hand. Keerthi’s phone rings. “Hello…Ayo, very neck to neck now. India can lose… Ayo, bad.”

Ten runs needed off eight balls. The batsman hits the ball hard and high. Two Indian fielders race toward it. One slides away at the last minute and Mohammad Kaif, the safest pair of hands in the Indian side, pounces on the ball. Out! The Pakistanis in the stadium are silent. So are we, too tense to celebrate. The man in green sits squashed against a corner of his chair, fingers locked.

Nine needed off the last six balls. They get three and then it’s Sharjah all over again. Pakistan need six runs off the last ball. A pace bowler from Delhi (Ashish Nehra) will bowl to an experienced Pakistani batsman (Moin Khan). Nehra bowls. Moin swings. The ball soars into the sky-and straight into an Indian fielder’s hands.

My eyes linger on the screen for a few second to make sure that it’s really over. Then I look for the man in the green shirt and open my arms. His head barely reaches my shoulder, but he lifts me below the waist and whirls me in the air — round and round and round.