India's 2004 Cricket Tour of Pakistan: 'Basically, mate, my life is all about speed.'

Pundits From Pakistan: on tour with India 2003-04 by Rahul Bhattacharya; Picador India; 2005; pp. 344; Rs. 275.

Which is what prompted me to go to the Bangladesh 'book launching' in March at Et Cetera bookshop of Rahul Bhattacharya's Pundits in Pakistan. Rahul (surprisingly boyish) sat facing a small group consisting of a few sports journalists, a couple of other men, some bemused ladies, and male teens restlessly shifting on their haunches in the back seats. The question-answer session was dismal. There was no real contact between author and the journalists, with the latter, at a terrific disadvantage in not knowing English, not knowing what to ask, how to ask. It speaks volumes about their insularity, of a basic separation from English-language cricket literature that till today, as far as I know, this fine cricket book was not reviewed by any Bangladeshi sports journalist, on a sports page or otherwise, and that this review is forced to make its belated appearance on a literature page. The book sank without a trace. And so after five disconsolate minutes where Rahul mumbled gentle, polite replies to halting banalities, to everybody's relief tea was announced. I left soon after, not even buying the book, slightly embarrassed: What must he think of us?

But my itch remained: A book by an Indian on the Indian tour of Pakistan in 2004? An honest-to-goodness tour book? As Mark Marqusee had noted, the cricket tour book lately is a genre in decay. Like ODIs, cricket books are also slam-bam quickies. So a week later I went back to Et Cetera and picked it up.

Pundits from Pakistan, being a book about the Indian cricket team's 2004 tour of Pakistan, is automatically therefore also a book about India and Pakistan, about their fractured, fraught psyches and history. This is easy to say, but Rahul's art lies in how he blended the two, in that the cricket itself, the passages about the game and the players, never stand glumly isolated, but are grounded in lucid context, in the people, cities, the land. Where on one Karachi afternoon an editorial writer for Dawn newspaper named Sonny tells Rahul 'his story from Partition. When the time came, his grandfather, an army canteen contractor, made preparations to move the family to Lahore from Sahranpur. They were to be transported with tier belongings in a military truck to the airfield. The driver was Sikh, born and raised in the house. Our of a foreboding, the grandmother warned her husband, who shushed her: 'Ghar ka larka hai' (He is one of us). The truck was ambushed, looted. The grandfather was slain. The grandmother's fingers were broken as rings were taken off them. The four children survived, but not the servants who thrown themselves on the children to protect them. The grandmother stayed behind, until the man was tried and hung.' Or of the 'elderly Indian sharing our vehicle till the Gadaffi (stadium) suddenly looked confused. "All this," he pointed around, "there was nothing here. It was jungle." He wiped a tear from his eye, and continued looking out the window in silence.'

It is this context that makes the book compulsively readable. Each separate innings and almost every stroke seems to be pendulously freighted with this weight, resonantly hard-wired into this history, which is why the book reads so much more denser than it looks or feels, is so interlocking in its parts. Pakistan is covered exhaustively, No subject is seemingly left untouched, from martial law to the vagaries of Pakistan cricket politics, from the mysteries of reverse swing to vivid descriptions of Karachi, Peshawar and Lahore to the chilling military ceremonies at the Wagah Joint Check Post. To even about bouts of the tour journo's ennui, the loneliness of the long-distance reporter. Just about the only thing left unaccounted for is the number of moustaches in Pakistan.

And so the book teems with people. Not just the 'seething cauldron' of stadiums and the crowds in the streets, the acquaintances and fellow sports journalists Rahul meets and makes friends with and the Sindhi Hindu family of Danish Kaneria (Sindhi Hindus have been playing cricket in Karachi ever since the Brits Karachi Gymkhana back in the days of the Raj) but also the cricketing folksthe 'pundits' of the title--that Rahul (also stringing for The Wisden Cricketer and The Guardian), engages with. From Arif Abbas, ex-head of Pakistan Cricket Board through a host of others down to Andy Atkinson, the Englishman hired by Pakistan as pitch consultant and whose reflections on grassy wickets are a marvel to read. Cricket opens doors for Rahul, makes a normally taciturn people locquacious. For me, though, the man of the match award ought to go to Aqeeb Javed, former Pakistan Test cricketer and fast bowler, who is asked the question that smolders in every Indian cricketing fan's soul: 'How has Pakistan been able to produce the world's most feared fast bowlers for the past quarter century? (In India)...not a single express paceman. Whereas in Pakistan the impression was that you could reach out and, lo, in your grasp was a tearaway.'

And Aqeeb's answer is worth reproducing at least in part here, not only because in its rawness is it funny as hell, but because it is something much more. In its utterly un-selfconscious utterance, in its volatile mix of belligerence, crudity and openness, in its tribal swagger and jagged edges, in its shock-proof words, an essential aspect of the rough-and-ready Pakistani national character is laid bare, revealing in its own way not only the Pakistani approach to cricket but its politics, sectarian violence, Kashmir, the Pakistani version of Islam, its army, its psychic grid and manners and mores, its gunrunners and its, to use an old Karachi alley slang, faddaybaazi (rough translation: street brawling). More than fifty years after independence this is a country still half-formed, with a still-molten center. As Rahul wonders: How do they do it? How do they do it despite themselves?

Very fast bowling, says Aqeeb, a Muslim, to Rahul, a Hindu, springs from four things, one of which is '...eating habits, the diet. See, you can get protein from dal and eggs but that is incomplete protein. The aggression, you get that from beef. It's not that you need to have beef only from cow. Here we use a lot of buffalo meat also. I believe that the red meat of these animals promotes aggression, and I think fast bowling is all about aggression. Your Srinath, his speed was 90 miles an hour, but he never created terror. His body language was so soft. My speed was less than his. But the pressure I could exert, because of my body language, was much more. Agarkar can bowl up to 140-145 kmph, but there is no aggression, no body language. Pathan, he has aggression, although he is not very fast. He may be eating beef. I'm telling you it makes a difference.'

And what is aggression? '...(it) is an emotion, a feeling. And where do these feelings come from? They come from the mahoul, the atmosphere. From our childhood it has been drummed into us, "don't lose to India, don't lose to India."'

What else, Aqeeb? 'Willpower. Fast bowling is for nut cases... Especially here, to run in and bowl in 50-degree heat you have to be a madman. You get hit, you don't perform, but you still have to try...Selectors have not selected me--aisi ki taisi, I'll come back. No wickets today, aisi ki taisi, I'll get them tomorrow...'

Mashrafe Mortaza, put the slogan up on your wall: If not today, aisi ki taisi, then tomorrow I'll blast Trescothick's stumps out of the ground! Aisi ki taisi!

And so, it is no wonder that amid all the inimitably-etched pen portraits of cricketers--Inzamam, Abdul Qadir, Sami, Ashish Nehra, Anil Kumble ('hitching his pants even higher...') Aftab Gul, Yaseer Hameed, the silky VVS Laxman, Sehwag, the haughty Saurav (underlying whose brief talk with Rahul are whole subtexts why Indians dislike their most successful captain)the most unforgettable is of 'The Express,' aka Shoaib Akjtar: '...caricatured endlessly, endlessly pleased to fulfil such caricatures. "Basically, mate," he has declared, running a wet finger through his hair as dozens of women lean out of his sports convertible, "my life is all about speed," and which then slides several pages later into a perfect diminuendo when Rahul surveys Shoaib's modest beginnings in Morgah, outside Rawalpindi: 'The sun had descended upon the fields and the last of the cricket matches for the day had finished. There was a certain poignancy to the picture before us. It reminded me of the sugarcane wastelands in Berbician Guyana, where the plantations housed bare pitches on which Rohan Kanhai and Basil Butcher and Joe Solomon and Alvin Kallicharan and others would lash their coconut fronds against cork projectiles encased in rags and twine. Port Mourant, the tiniest of sugarcane villages, produced seven Test cricketers. It was tempting to think that there were still a few Expresses to come out of Morgah.'

So you tell me, reading it on a Dhaka kalboishaki day, this writing isn't as good as anything by Alan Ross?

The weakest part of the book is in the beginning, in Rahul's almost obligatory tussling (once more, unto the breach!) with that old nemesis of India-Pakistan cricket: the game as proxy war, of cricket-baiting and communalism, with Orwell's famous formulation of modern-day sports as 'war minus the shooting,' of the bigotry and hatred these matches could, and have in the past, unleash. His contention, that sport reveals the human condition by containing within it human aspiration as well as prejudice, that it can narrow the mind as well as broaden it is perhaps not wholly convincing: a specific disquiet remains. But the reader will go ahead and read, the fan will go to the matches, with the same hope with which Rahul decided to be 'pro tour...that the magnifying glass (of sport) would be able to show something, something...something basically good. How frozen could we remain by fear? Could we so easily stop playing? Could we so easily stop living?

In the author's bio, it says that 'Rahul Bhattacharya...was a part of a St. Xavier's College team that comfortably failed to carry forward the legacy of Gavaskar and Ashok Mankad.' He should rest assured that he has indeed carried forward their legacy, albeit in a different métier and medium, but no less honorably.

Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star.