That Summer of Kapil's Devilry

Shifting house can by all accounts be a chaotic and rather demanding experience. I have been so caught up in the process that I almost forgot what day it was.

June 25.

Turn back the clock by twenty five years, to this day. And if you still can't remember what I am referring to, you ought to be shot for treason. It is the definitive sepia-tinged moment of our cricketing lives, the day we won the World Cup of cricket.

Please note the "we". It is significant, for on this day, and from this day onwards, an entire nation appropriated the successes achieved by eleven good men. And from this day on, we have (don't know about you, but at least I surely have) lived and died by the achievements of our cricket team.

All of us have indulged in countless discussions about who is the greatest cricketer India has ever produced. We all have our favourites. In my mind there is no doubt that it is Kapil Dev. Anil Kumble may have already taken more wickets than Kapil, and batsmen like Sunil Gavaskar and Sachin Tendulkar would walk into most world elevens of any period, but there is only one Kapil Dev. As Gavaskar once said: "He (Kapil) has scored half as many runs as I have, but more significantly has taken a lot more wickets than I have".

More than the runs he scored or wickets he took, it was the way he played his game, even where he came from. He bowled quick, used his bat like a broadsword, whacking the ball with awesome power, and fielded magnificently. Before Kapil, the bigger players always came from cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata or Chennai.

The arrival of Kapil Dev Nikhanj from Haryana changed all that. He spoke English with an endearing accent, often spoke his mind with the sort of fearlessness he waded into the opposition bowling, and sat on Indian cricket's high table with as much confidence as some of the Maharajas for whom the game was first devised in this land. And in the process, he, more than anyone else, turned the gentleman's game into a national obsession.

By the time the 1983 World Cup was played, I had been watching international cricket for about ten years. My Dad had taken me to Delhi's Feroze Shah Kotla in 1974 when Clive Lloyd's West Indians were touring India. It was a good time to get initiated into cricket for that series proved to be one of the most engrossing Test series of all times.

Until then, that is the summer of 1983, most of the cricket that I had ever watched or followed through newspapers, had a single dominant side -- the all-conquering West Indians. Ever since Lloyd decided in 1975 on a four-pronged pace attack, the West Indians had swept all opposition before them. By 1983, when the third edition of the World Cup began, the West Indians were at the peak of their powers and appeared well-nigh invincible in both forms of the game, Tests as well as one-dayers.

Fearsome as their pace attack was, with Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Joel Garner and Malcolm Marshall, four of the quickest and best fast bowlers to have ever played the game, the batsmen were no pushovers either. Gordon Grenidge and Desmond Haynes opened the batting, you could take your pick who was the more destructive of the two.

The middle order had Viv Richards and Clive Lloyd, two of the all-time greats, and in Jeff Dujon the West Indians had a wicket keeper-batsman whose twin capabilities were to be only bettered by the incomparable Adam Gilchrist. I use these names of the past, and their justifiable reputation, only to emphasize just how dominant the West Indian were at that point of time.

In the years that followed India's World Cup triumph in 1983, lot of people have used lot of words to describe that historical moment and what it meant for them.

For me, more than anything else, it meant the end of that aura of invincibility. It also meant we, we Indians, could do anything, it was a defiance of far greater odds than the 66:1 chance that London bookies had given the Indian side to win the World Cup.

As far as I am concerned, Kapil Dev and his men added a hint of a swagger to our steps, to the steps of an entire nation, me included. The magic wrought by eleven men in flannels had touched nearly a billion of us.

I was all of nineteen then, on June 25, 1983. Twenty five years on, pot bellied and bald, that swagger is still intact. All thanks to Kapil's Devils.

My Brother, My Friend!

Given the amount I usually put in relationships to make them work, I am amazed how easily, how without any effort, this one worked. Right from day one. I can't quite remember the first time we ever met or what we said to each other.

My earliest recollection of us is in Calcutta in our maternal grandpa's house, both of us lying on the bed, facing each other, with an open book in between. I couldn't have been more than eight, he was two years older. He was reading one page, and me another. The trick was we had to read at the same pace, so that one could turn the page without inconveniencing the other. The name of the book was 'Dubojahajer Urro Koyedi' (U Boat's Pilot Prisoner), a Bangla book, which was a translation from English.

It was a World War II story, about an Allied pilot who was a prisoner on a German U-boat. I have never been able to remember who was the author, or any other details about the book. But I remember very clearly, both of us read the book at a breathless pace, skipping baths, finishing meals quickly, not paying any attention to whatever was going around us, until we finished it.

From that day onwards, two things remained constant between us -- his bucktoothed smile and our passion for books. Both of us started out with Deb Sahitya Kutir's translations, and graduated to more exotic stuff. We were both voracious readers, and every summer vacation when I landed up in Calcutta, we would compare notes on what we had read over the year -- a habit that lasted both of us a lifetime.

When I was in Class XIth, I recommended him John Steinbeck's East of Eden. Next time when we met, we discussed the character of Cathy for hours. Until then she was quite the most fascinating woman character we had ever encountered, in fiction or in real life.

Next year, he introduced me to Drishti Prodip, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay's classic tale of two brothers and a sister. During our college years and later, I became his window to English literature, and he was my guide to everything good in Bengali -- from books to theatre to food.

He was always a man of few words. A smile here, a gesture there, would be all that was forthcoming to show he cared. One day he showed up in my house in Calcutta with two tickets for Jogonnath, one of the most memorable plays I have ever seen. Another day, as I packed my bags for Delhi, he casually handed over a book to me. "Got this one for you, I know you will like this." It was Shesher Kobita (The Last Poem) by Tagore. Till today I can't turn a page of that book without remembering him.

In 1975, he came to Delhi to visit me. We both were seriously into table tennis then. World Cup Table Tennis had just got over and a Hungarian had won it. We played our own World Cup -- me, him and few of my friends. We even made a cardboard cup. He took the cup to Calcutta after he beat all of us. The highlight of the stay was watching Sholaay. We were both most distressed by Jai's death, and over the years discussed several alternative endings. Now I can't ever think of him, without thinking about alternative endings.

One summer afternoon in Calcutta, I was in Class XIIth and he was in his first year of Engineering, we browsed books on College Street, had the mandatory coffee in Coffee House, then saw a movie (can't remember the name), but both of us wanted something more. After we had checked we had enough money between us, we decided to have some beer. The only hitch was what if someone we knew saw us. We knew we were in an area which was frequented by the elders in the family.

So, drawing upon our considerable combined wisdom, we decided to don sunglasses and walk confidently into a pub. The plan was breathtakingly simple -- even if someone saw us, we would be unrecognizable because of our dark glasses. We were already so charged with the task on hand, the beer hardly hit us, and we came back home, thrilled to bits, mission accomplished.

About a week later, we had just finished our evening smoke, when our youngest maternal uncle, Tomal Mama, materialized out of nowhere, put his hands on our shoulders, looked into our eyes and said in his deep gravelly voice : "Ki re, kalo choshma porey beer khele kauke aar chena jayena na? (If you wear dark glasses and drink beer, you think no one will recognize you?)"

We stood speechless, our bad karma having finally caught up with us. Then Tomal Mama's face creased into a huge grin, and he said : "Theek aachhe, ghlabrash na, etai to boyesh beer teer khabar (Don't worry, after all this is the age to drink beer)," and then the frozen blood in my veins thawed again.

That was the first of several more memorable binges over the years. None more funnier than the time I had landed in Calcutta after getting my first job with The Statesman. I had to meet a friend at the National Library at 11 a.m. who eventually didn't show up, and on a working day I was left with nothing to do. I phoned him up (a year ago he had joined as a junior engineer with a private sector company in the city), asked him if he could meet me. There was a moment of hesitation at the other end, and then he said: "Give me 30 minutes".

I waited on the curb across the National Library, in front of the Calcutta Zoo. He showed up exactly after 30 minutes, with his bucktoothed grin in place : "Tor jonney mone hoi amar chakri ta jabe (Because of you I think I am going to lose my job)." I asked him what was the Plan of Action. He lit a cigarette, smiled at me enigmatically and said : "Just wait patiently."

He had barely finished speaking when a taxi came to a halt right where we were standing, and the eldest of our cousin brothers got down. Another brother had produced another enterprising excuse to get out of office on a working day. What followed was some serious daytime drinking, of all the places, in Calcutta Zoo. The zoo had a bar on its premises and my brothers were in no mood to waste any time, going to a pub which was some distance away. Not that I was opposed to the idea.

I realise the futility of trying to capture a relationship of a lifetime in few hundred or even a few thousand words. Which is what I had been trying to do until now. To share with you all, my memories of someone very special, very dear to me. They are good memories, great memories of growing up together.

They are my own Wonder Years. I horde these memories, when I am alone I often count them as if it were a currency, and check and re-check the tally againt the last such count. You become like that, a little obsessive, when all you are left of an association of four decades are just memories.

I have been like that, a little obsessive, the past six years. For six years ago, on this day, the man, who was not just my brother but as close a friend as one is ever likely to have, died.

This blog is about someone who made my life great by just being part of it, and left an aching hole in my heart that time can't even come close to healing. If there was Internet in the sky, I would like him to read this piece and know just how much that bucktoothed grin is missed.

A Midsummer Day's Dream

Life in a hospital's Intensive Care Unit (ICU) can be pretty exciting. The care IS very intensive -- nurses poke you with all kinds of needles at periodic intervals, thermometers are stuck up different orifices, medicines of different colours, shapes and sizes fed to you during, before and after meals and doctors with smiles as fake as Pamela Anderson's breasts tell you not to worry about a thing and then cheerfully reel off some very worrisome facts about your body.

Why am I rambling?

It is a pleasant 40 degrees in the shade. Brave (and, I thought, a bit foolish too) young men are playing cricket in this lovely weather. And yet I can't string together a coherent thought, let alone a sentence. Heat gets to me. Always has. Among my several serious reservations about self, the biggest one undoubtedly is my inability to relocate myself from a city that I have hated with some passion over three decades now. At one point of time I used to gripe about the people of this city, but for a long time, a very long time now, I haven't enjoyed living in this city because of its terrible weather. Not that life in the decidedly more humid Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai will be any cooler.

But this, the Delhi heat, is a different sort of beast. It works on you from the beginning of February, gets its claws into you in March and April, overwhelms you in May and June, saps your energy in July and August and by October end, you are so beat you think the coolness of November, December and January is just a figment of your meteorologically deluded mind. And then its February once again, the beginning of the nine-month summer season. More than anything else, it is the length of the Delhi summer that gets to you.

I once read somewhere how the author, a political prisoner in an Indian jail, would tell stories to young children, who were staying in the jail premises along with their prisoner mothers, about dogs and cats. And then she would notice the blank look on their faces and realise most of them had never set foot out of the four walls of the jail and had never seen a cat or a dog.

Similarly I fear Ritwik would never know spring or autumn, easily the two most beautiful seasons of my childhood and adolescence, if he grows up in Delhi. In this city, one day you go to the laundry and hand your sweaters and coats for dry cleaning and then come back and don your bermudas. In Delhi, the transition from winter to summer is terribly abrupt.

On top of it, this is a city without a major waterbody in and around it. You call Yamuna a waterbody and the river itself would rise from the mire of silt and from under the city's refuse and sue you for defamation. The water in Yamuna is as much of a chimera as the mythical Saraswati is. You knew there was water there once.

Damn, I am rambling again.

Point is, I am spoilt, both in terms of plentiful water and good weather. I grew up in Andamans, in the towns of Port Blair and Diglipur, when the population was sparse and the forest cover, at a conservative estimate, anything between 90 and 97 per cent, and anytime of the day and anytime of the year, you could feel the sea breeze on your back. In Port Blair, the front of our house faced the road. But the back of the house opened into sand and you could walk straight on to the beach and then to the water. From every room in my house, I could see the sea. And now from every room in my apartment in Delhi... ohh nevermind!

Long after I left Andamans, the islands became a refuge from my physical and emotional troubles. I would transport my mind to Port Blair or Diglipur and shut myself off from everything else. These days when I get depressed, I think a lot about the ten days I spent last year in the ICU. Both, I guess, are clumsy attempts at coping.

Right now, even as I write this, beer is emerging as a serious option. That is, as an attempt at coping.

In my mind's eye, as I wipe the dust off the years, I can see a big tub with chunks of ice, and countless bottles of beer buried in between the ice. The air conditioning on at full blast killing the afternoon heat. A bunch of old friends who can communicate even by passing a cigarette butt, an old seventies movie (could be Angoor or Golmaal or Chupke Chupke, take your pick) on the DVD in a semi-dark room with blinds drawn. Someone almost unobtrusively passing on plates of non vegetarian snacks at regular intervals. Mmmmmm.

Gosh, more rambling.

But I like the train of thought ...