Emergency Games

The sports pages are euphoric. The drubbing has been avenged. The mighty Australians are heading home empty-handed.

For close to a month now we’ve been witness to engrossing, at times brilliant, Test cricket. The players have found the going tough, no doubt; many are injured, most exhausted. That said, not once have they viewed it as office work – somehow no one associates passion with a day job – but the fact is they’ve been out nine-to-five every day for 18 of the available 30 days in the past month!

Odd, then, that it is only now, with the longer form of cricket about to make way for some IPL slap-dash-wallop – that I find the placid sounds of Test commentary doing for me what cupcakes did for Proust: Remembrances of Things Past.

Sunday afternoon. I pick up and put down my book, trying to nudge and elbow constantly the midday nap and keep it at arm’s length. Maidens come and go as they please. A “leave” is appreciated. On another occasion, the commentator is in awe of how still the batsman’s head is.

The score is immaterial, so is the ultimate outcome of the match – 3-1 or 4-0, doesn’t matter. All that matters to me right now is that a lifelong lost is being recalled. I zip up Warney with my magic wand and close my eyes. What do I see? Yes, a game of cricket, but not as you’d imagine it…

The fundamentals of cricket I learnt from Fundamentals of Chemical Engineering. Second edition. I was five years old and it was January 1977, a month of power-cuts and unbearable cold and 15-minute-a-day water supply and overflowing sewage drains, and, from the rooftops, a splendid view of our crumbling Dilli cologne-y. No, I wouldn’t say that that year was particularly harsh, given all the peculiarities with which I now remember it by: the power-cuts, the erratic water, sewage – these I can remember most years with since 1977. And so it must be my introduction to the game of cricket that takes me back to that time in our country’s history when Dictatorship earned a more affable synonym: Emergency. As if we cared!

As I recall now some of my earliest memories, it is bizarre that of the two I am able to evoke clearly, the first is of how our neighbours would inform anyone they could ambush – in the street outside, at the sabzi mandi – that Emergency was a good thing as “the trains are running on time”. Curse the genius who started this rumour – perhaps it was Khushwant Singh – but it was so successful in its wacky logic that millions were prepared to forgive Mrs Gandhi all her misdeeds because of it. I wouldn’t be surprised if millions forgive her still because of it.

Back then that was all we heard as kids: trains running on time, trains running on time. Our neighbours travelled rarely, and hardly ever on the train, but that was ancillary to the magical argument. Because they were so impressed by trains running on time, they were first in the voter queue to vote Mrs Gandhi back to power in 1980, flaunting their stained fingernails and dismissing the small matter that trains would never again run on time, now that the iron lady had chosen democracy over dictatorship (Soon she would choose dynasty over democracy, delaying the trains further).

The second thing that I remember vividly is a thick leather-bound book. But I don’t remember it as just a book, one that has pages with words on them that must be read and understood. I remember it as a wondrous means to our daily capsule of thrill and delight.

Fundamentals of Chemical Engineering. My uncle, who was a chemical engineer and whose book it was, swore by it. He used it as a notepad, a scribble-slate, a doodle diary, and in this he was just like millions of Indian students who footnote and mark-up their books so much they end up annotating it with double the number of words printed originally in the tome. And although I always suspected that the book also served my uncle other more esoteric applications, I never saw lyophilised roses and see-through Peepul leaves tumbling out when I held it upside down and shook it with all my might. Nothing fell, and all of us – me, my cousins, and neighbourhood kids who had also become prisoners of this book – we displayed the kind of disappointment that shows up so naturally on a kid’s face but has to be deduced in an adult’s.

We waited for my uncle in the evenings more expectantly than my aunt did. He would return from work, teeth all chattering, now rubbing forcefully his two hands, now cupping them and exhaling loudly into the chink – distressed not with the denial of constitutional rights but rather by the bitter cold. Still, he would manage a smile for us – he knew what we were waiting for – and just to rack up our already unbearable excitement further, he would head straight for a bath.

We would wait outside the bathroom, listening to the periodic sounds of the splashes, counting how many mugs of water he was stealing from the crude-oil barrel in the bathroom that stored the day’s water. Seven, eight, nine, we would count. Nineteen! He’s going to finish it all! Soon, he would emerge rubbing his head furiously with a towel and walk past us as if we didn’t exist. But we knew he was playing a game and we waited patiently – as patiently as children can wait – for a grunt or a throat-clearing that’d be heard before long from the open veranda next to the kitchen. We’d hop and skip over in unshackled delight, finding him sitting cross-legged on a divan with that enormous book in front of him. He would look at us poker-faced, like he was engaging with adults, about to distribute playing cards. We loved that.

“West Indies”, one of us would shout; “India!” would cry the next; “England!” “Australia!” and so on, depending upon how many of us were present. We knew the names of at least four or five players from each of these teams. My uncle would help out with the rest. I always took West Indies because they were the world champions. Once the players’ names were jotted down, and a five paisa coin tossed to decide who got to bat first, the book entered the care of the lucky one’s tiny hands. Uncle provided the running commentary even as the “opening batsman” closed his eyes and prepared to force open the book randomly.

“…And here is Lillee walking up slowly to his mark, and now he turns, all the while rubbing the ball on his trousers…” Suddenly he would switch to Hindi: “…Agli gaynd, middle aur off-stump par parti hui…” and I – if I was batting – would force open the book at this point.

All eyes would rush to read the page number of the left page, the last digit of it. “And Greenidge has flicked it over midwicket for two”, would mumble my uncle if the page number was 42; “An exquisite cover drive for four!” if it was 324; and “Batsman aage aayay, gaynd ko samajh nahin paaye, aur ye out!” if the page number turned out to be 60 or 250 or 900.

I would flap the book shut in disgust while my uncle would carry on: “Lloyd’s poor form continues as he tucks his bat under his arm and walks back to the pavilion”. Tears would start to well up in my little eyes but he would tease and smile at me and slowly I would accept that it was all part of the game. Only much later did it dawn on me that because we chose only even numbers, a batsman could never be out on 99. How many of this blade-wielding tribe would’ve wished for this to be true in real life, I wonder!

And so it continued, the game of cricket, till there were angry grandmotherly shouts of “Enough!” from the living room or the kitchen.

“…Defended nicely”, my uncle would address the protesting lot of us, “and there it is – the third day ends with Australia having the upper hand in this intriguing battle, but no one can tell what will happen day after tomorrow, when the teams return after the rest day”.

A momentary silence would descend – a grudging acceptance of ‘bad light stopped play’ – and the book would be taken possession of by him as though it was some religious scripture. Clutched with both hands, with a dozen eyes following its course, the book would be placed on top of the Allwyn refrigerator, to be taken out the next day.

This is how we spent our evenings during Emergency, playing book-cricket, imagining the whole game like it was happening right in front of our eyes, with the fate of Richards and Gavaskar and Chapell and Bedi decided by the page number of a book that only chemical engineers ever opened – chemical engineers and us.

Now I am a father, of an impressionable eight-year-old, but his first memories are of democracy and X-box. A book to him is something that is only to be read and understood, and Test cricket to him is hopelessly boring.

As someone said, change is necessary for nostalgia.

Image By: Swarnabha Banerjee