Why cricket brings out the beast in me
By Adil Jussawalla

CRICKET has inspired some fine quips, some great prose and some masterful ramblings from the commentary box. But will it inspire a great novel?

The question, as usual, is as foolish as it sounds, since I tend to ask foolish questions about things I’m foolish about, cricket being one of them. My responses to the game swing from being totally involved to being totally indifferent. There’s nothing between.

Writers I admire have described the game’s seductions but I remain unmoved. As I was when the ball came on to me off the school’s tarred cricket-pitch and cut open my lip. As I was when I was inducted into the class team as a replacement. I refused to leave the tent when it was my turn to go on and when I finally did, refused to leave the crease when I got out.

Such "stubbornness", as some people regarded it then, cost me my place in the team and to my great joy, I was never asked to play for it again. But I wasn’t being stubborn. I couldn’t move because I was frozen with terror.

It must be some residue of that terror, or a fear of resurrecting it, which compels me to try and be nonchalant about a game I could be passionate about. I’ve had the opportunity of lazing on a village green in England and to get hypnotised by the men in white. Drowsily to hear the clicks, the thuds, the muffled howzatts. But before the spell takes over I scream. (No I don’t do that. I chop someone’s head off and walk away.)

I’ve seen the Oxford team from a distance, being led by Abbas Ali Baig. From a distance only. For five minutes. I refuse to be seduced. A pint of beer is better value, a horse in a meadow a better sight. I leave the scene in search of both, killing an old lady on the way.

Yet there’s this:

"The fellows were practising long shies and bowling lobs and slow twisters. In the soft grey silence he could hear the bump of the balls: and from here and from there through the quiet air the sound of the cricket bats: pick, pack, pock, puck like drops of water in a fountain falling softly in a brimming bowl."

Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Jim, Jim, how could you do this to me, I who love your work so much and can’t love the game you describe? Must be that wretched experience in school that’s to blame.

When I finally wrote about cricket in a column called Jantar Mantar, I made the game place in a devastated landscape of the future, under a cricket dome, one of the few areas safe from nuclear radiation: the world’s been through a terrible war.

Because India is one of the countries that wins the war (perhaps the only country, I’ve forgotten). Cricket’s an international game. With innovations like killer balls which explode on impact, jet platforms which whiz disabled players between wickets and teams of disabled players.

Since leg-before-wicket decisions continued to be controversial, well past the year 2000, an international cricket board decided that it would be more practical if cricketers had no legs. Players whose legs were sawn in public got extra points for their teams.

Clearly cricket, ever the very thought of it, brings out the beast in me, not the best. Which is why, I supposed, I thought of swallowing all the pills available to me when, in one pestilential over, India fell to Zimbabwe. Which is why, perhaps, thousands of television sets were smashed, elsewhere, when Pakistan lost to India.

Which is why, I imagine, to answer my first foolish question, I never wrote that great novel about cricket. I love it too much. And you see what love’s done to me. — ANF