Free You Must Like Cricket? by Soumya Bhattacharya Page A

least
under
achievers; that, if nothing else, we have potential. It is so much better than being a
non-achiever
. His underachievement made Viswanath more human; at the same time, his achievements made him more of a hero.
    Viswanath was hardly the obvious choice for a kid growing up in the 1970s. Sunil Gavaskar, Viswanath’s brother-in-law and great friend, was the playground favourite. Picking Viswanath over Gavaskar was like choosing
The Queen is Dead
over
Sgt. Pepper’s
or
Revolver
as the best album ever. I was loath to be as reverential towards Gavaskar as most cricket followers were. Viswanath was flawed, fallible and fickle; he was also, on his day, as divine with a bat as anyone could ever be. He was our symbol of the counterculture.
    No one in India – and very few anywhere else in the world – has played the late cut as late or as fine as Viswanath. I can’t think of anyone who played the shot that Viswanath made his trademark – the half cut, half drive square of the wicket – with as much impetuosity or impish cheek. Against super-quick bowlers a foot taller than he was, this five-foot-three-inch man would leap,
with both feet
, a good six inches in the air, to flash between point and cover. Watching it made you want to genuflect in front of him.
    I unfailingly did.
    But for every breathtaking shot, there seemed to be a corresponding soft dismissal. And the more I cared, the more it amused my family. They took every opportunity to kid me about it. Whenever my mother made ice cream at home, she etched ‘G. R. Viswanath’ on top of the slab of vanilla before serving it to us, the name of my hero sitting there ready to be cut into bits and eaten. This elaborate ritual would usually take place after another innings in which Viswanath had flopped, another occasion on which he had failed to match the form which he showed in my courtyard matches. Since this happened rather often, my mother had more opportunities to tease me – and test my loyalty – than I would have liked. I would howl with a sense of outrage and humiliation and often refuse to eat my portion. (A noble sacrifice in my scheme of things, second only to offering to give up watching cricket.) Soon, I found a way out. I would smudge Viswanath’s name from the top of the slab before my mother could bring it to the table or, in a particularly black mood, replace it with ‘S. M. Gavaskar’ and scoop spoonfuls into my mouth. Everyone at home, of course, had decided to become a Gavaskar fan.
    When I was eight, the same uncle who took me to the Eden Gardens had a daughter. We all used to live together in the sort of joint family that is becoming increasingly rare in India these days. As soon as my cousin had learnt to speak, I taught her the names of all the players in the Indian Test team.
    I also taught her something else. In an endearing half lisp and without understanding a single word of what she was saying, she’d reel off a little chant I had made up. Roughly translated, it goes something like this: ‘Gavaskar makes a duck every time he goes out to bat, Viswanath a century.’ (This was patently untrue. Gavaskar made about three times as many Test hundreds in his career as Viswanath did.)
    My family, of course, found a way to counter this. At the end of January 1979, I came back from our annual holiday to find a sheet of A4 paper pinned to the door of my room. My uncle had left me a message: ‘Gavaskar: 0 + 120: makes a duck? Viswanath: 100 – 91: makes a century?’ The Delhi Test against the West Indies had just finished. Gavaskar – playing in the manner that he had in the rest of the series – had made 120. Viswanath had scored nine.
    I tore the paper off the door and ripped it up. The holiday had vanished in an instant. I knew I was back home.
    I never blamed Viswanath for all the humiliations that I suffered for his failures on the pitch. I never found much to blame