Playing Cricket in India and America
Admittedly, this is a niche book, for those who read cricket books - not to be confused with the crowds to whom cricket is part spectacle and part national flag-waving, or celebrity sports stars and outsized contracts, but definitely not books. Cricket magazines perhaps, or the sports pages of the dailies, or nowadays, blogs with their coffee-fueled wisdom and instant insight, but not books. Like the long form of cricket, hardly anybody really reads cricket books anymore - both take up too much time. It's a shame, for good cricket books (and not the formula ones on bestseller lists), can be savoured like Test matches where a whole day can go by with an arcane, fascinating battle being fought by a wily spinner against a class bat. Again, admittedly, the title is hopelessly a borrowed one, and yes, this book will not particularly appeal to those who have never played cricket (at an ordinary or club level), who have never been a part of a team in desperate straits in the second innings, and who don't have vivid boyhood memories of being unable to sleep the night before a match. But to those who have, this one's a keeper. Sports writing by Bengalis is a rare thing, and rarer still in English. And in Bangladesh, what passes for sports writing (naturally, since we are Bengalis) is actually on the politics of the sport, on association elections and selector choices, and hollow cheer or empty gibes at the national team, but never on the techniques and the beauty of it, and never in prose that lilts and sways with the side batting or fielding on the field. This context makes Sujit Mukherjee's (1930 -2003) account of his cricketing life quite novel. The author had another whole identity as Dr. Sujit Mukherjee, distinguished academic, literary critic (a well-known work of his is Translation As Discovery and Other Essays) and later long-time editor at Orient Longman, India - his wife is the equally distinguished academic and critic Meenakshee Mukherjee. But as Sujit Mukherjee, he also penned a number of cricketing books. A Bengali born and brought up in Patna, Bihar, it was there that he started playing cricket, starting with St. Xavier's school and moving on to college and club cricket, then for Bihar at the state level, including a few Ranji Trophy matches. Along the way he met and played with some of the star names of Indian cricket of yesteryears, including C K Naidu, Mushtaq Ali and H R Adhikari (who toured Australia with the national side and was India's vice captain during their tour of England in the early 1950s), as well as "the lesser luminaries but still famous names such as C T Sarwate, BB Nimbalkar, Hiralal Gaikwad." The book is memorable for its portrait of cricket playing in small towns of India of the 1940s to the 1960s. Descriptions of the Bengal-Bihar matches are electric, where Bengal's team would include Pankaj Roy, Shute Banerjee, D G Phadkar and B P Gupte. His cricketing yarns are hilarious, such as the accounts of games with pucca English sahibs during the last decade of the Raj with one "Priyo Babu, who invariably played in a dhoti but wore white socks with tennis shoes, his dark calves showing between dhoti-border and sock-tops and seemed to suffer no handicap as he bowled offbreaks quite effectively." One notable feature of the book is that, as far as I know, Sumit gives us the first extended account of how it felt to play cricket in America when he went to Pennsylvania University on a Fulbright scholarship and played with teams patched from largely West Indians students. At one such match "against Paterson (College), we were confidently bowling out the opposition when a black man in a blue safari suit and dark glasses who had obviously stopped by to watch the proceedings was prevailed upon to bat for the home side. This he proceeded to with murderous effect, hitting everything out of sight for about half an hour or so. He stopped only when his dark glasses slipped off and he happened to tread on them." Could have been Clive Lloyd in shades! Which reminds me, in the grand tradition of cricketing adda, of a little tale of my own. In the mid-eighties, when I was at the Fletcher School in Boston, the library security guard was Nigel, a stocky, cheerful West Indian. He was always trying to explain cricket to mystified Yanks, while we, Fletcher's South Asian student bloc, would advise him, give up, Nigel, it's hopeless. But Nigel was a leg spinner, somebody used to working all day. One day he announced that he would bring a West Indian team over the weekend to play cricket with a Fletcher School team - no better way to learn than by playing, as Nigel put it. The match was to take place on the ground at the side of the school. We rounded up a scratch team, half of whom were Indians and one Bangladeshi, and half were hastily-coached Americans. Came the morning of the match - I couldn't sleep the night before, with nightmare visions of 6'4" Guyanese guys bounding in to hurl bouncers that would take our heads off - and everybody turned up in whites. The American women watched in amazement as the Indian wives commandeered the dorm kitchen and began to cook up a biryani storm for the team lunch. "You ******* Indian men," they said to us, "are unbelievable!" "Hey, back off," we replied. "Ours is a matriarchy." However, 9 o'clock, coin-toss time, came and went. So did 10 o'clock. 10:30, then 11:00. The Yanks broke out their beers, throwing caution six sheets to the wind. Nigel finally called around noon to say that their team microbus had met with an accident en route, and while nobody was hurt, match cancelled. More beer followed this announcement - followed by a gargantuan lunch. In the afternoon we played softball (the gentler version of baseball), where we South Asians performed badly, unable to truly lay into a ball whose trajectory was all in the air, that didn't slant down and bounce off a surface, handed a rounded bat whose 'swing' felt weird. The day ended in a happy haze, though. Especially in these days of The Ashes, with books on it coming out, one is in want of a proper Bangladeshi cricket book, perhaps a Bangladeshi team Test tour book. Of, say, England, or Pakistan. Readers would be surprised to see how absorbing it can get, as they come face to face, via a game, with their deepest selves. After all, what do they know of cricket who only cricket know? * Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star.
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