Free You Must Like Cricket? by Soumya Bhattacharya

moments have arrived, we know we are there.
    In sport, our heroes are these moments. They provide an intensity in the heart of a game we are already intense about. These are the players we most look forward to watching in the game we can’t live without.
    But the analogy doesn’t hold all the way. Sometimes, heroes are bigger than the game they play. In fact, they seem bigger than anything else, ever. And that’s what holds the key to our devotion.
    * * *
    I started playing cricket by myself soon after I arrived in Kolkata from Bankura. The idea must have come from the story I had heard about Bradman: belting the ball at a garage wall all day on his own in Bowral. I took that bit of lore, refined the system and modified it to suit my purposes.
    There was a small strip of wall adjoining the front door of our house in Kolkata. To get to that door – and the wall – you had to pass through a large iron gate gnawed at by rust, and a small cement courtyard. On either side of the cement courtyard, there were two sections of overgrown mini-lawns and trees. The courtyard was my pitch; the lawns my outfield; and the wall my bowler. With my left hand on the grip of my bat, I would throw the ball at the wall with my right and, by the time the ball had rebounded, get into position to play it.
    This wasn’t just practice. These were proper Test matches. I batted for both sides; I played the role of a full-house audience (clapping and roaring within a stadium can be convincingly simulated by curling your tongue inwards till it touches your palate, gathering a fair bit of spittle and rolling it around rapidly inside your mouth and blowing out very hard through a narrowed mouth. It isn’t as difficult as it sounds. And it really works: try it); and I was scorer and radio commentator. I was utterly unselfconscious about the bizarre sight I presented until one day I caught sight of an old woman who lived next door looking at me through the window with a mixture of amazement and alarm. The match was particularly exciting, and as India, with only a wicket in hand, needed ten runs to beat the West Indies, I’d become a little overwrought in my commentary. The old lady must have thought that I was demented. (I probably was. I certainly looked it.)
    I used to cheat a lot in those matches. (I admit it, ‘cheating’ must seem rather a strange way of putting it, given that it was my game, and my rules – but that’s how it felt to me.) Bowlers I had little time for ended up with pretty ragged figures by the time I had finished with them. Batsmen I was fond of almost always got big scores. India almost always won. I have never ever felt as omnipotent and powerful as when playing that game in the courtyard. I controlled not merely the pace of the match but held in my hands its fate, as well as the fates of all the players involved.
    There was a certain skewered integrity to the cheating. I never allowed the same batsman too many big scores on the trot, and I tried to make India suffer the agony of an occasional defeat. In a way, this made sense. The bedrock of this entire elaborate charade was verisimilitude. I had to maintain a semblance of actuality for the game to seem
authentic
– and therefore, the victories to seem plausible and, most importantly, pleasurable – to myself. I had to be careful not to let fantasy and desire throw that completely out of the window. Not completely.
    One Indian batsman used to score consistently heavily in my fixed matches – far more consistently than his record suggested. In real life, Gundappa Viswanath was one of Indian cricket’s nearly men: he averaged 41.93, never a loser, no way, but never as much of a star as, say, Gavaskar or Kapil. He never really fulfilled the enormous talent that he so obviously had.
    I thought I saw myself in him. Whenever we can’t become achievers, we love to flatter ourselves with the delusion that we are at