‘I Have the Streets: A Kutti Cricket Story’ by R Ashwin & Sidharth Monga is a fascinating narrative of the making of a cricketer

Ravichandran Ashwin, intelligent and articulate, has produced an honest, deeply engaging book. The story of how a cricketer becomes a club cricketer — then a state and an India cricketer, a great match-winner — is never less than fascinating, and Ashwin, in collaboration with Sidharth Monga, has managed to tell it in a fascinating manner.

Ashwin is a very intelligent man — he’s also got the image of being a supercilious person, is not known to suffer fools, and is known to turn quite combative when questioned about his methods. That, most often, is the image most interlocutors come away with after meeting Ashwin.

Perhaps it’s just him being defensive —he’s clearly a reflective person who’s hurt by barbs thrown at him. Tellingly, he begins his story, in the Prologue, with an anecdote about a young man who came up to him on the street and berated him for his inability to score one run off two balls in an IPL match in 2010; and he ends this 173-page book with the reference to the same young man: “...I think of all the cricket we’ve played there, of all the time spent with my friends, of the young man who told me I should have just dropped and run.”

Through the book, there are clues that help the reader trace and interpret Ashwin’s argumentativeness. He writes of his father: “He has hardly ever hit me, but he talks and talks. He reasons and reasons. It’s impossible to get the better of him when he gets into arguments.” Rahul Dravid, in the Foreword, notes that Ashwin has “strong opinions on things and is willing to debate with you. He won’t back down from an argument or an issue”.

He’s deeply aware of the unconditional support he gets from his family — parents, grandfather. Incredibly, they manage to push him into the sport — he loves it, though — without ever becoming overbearing or mentally demanding. But incidents of his childhood suggest Ashwin was deeply aware of the sacrifices being made for him, or troubles the family got into because of his cricket: His father, a remarkable man, studying all his textbooks in order to teach him, and then going to his classmates’ homes to copy notes; Ashwin “splitting open” his father’s forehead by an accidental swing of his bat at home. His father’s response? “I shed blood this morning for your cricket, but you scored only a fifty. You should make it count and score hundreds.”

His mother, equally remarkable, tells him: “I want you to pursue your passion. I will earn as much as I can. So even if you become a failure in life, it will take care of you.” All this, surely, engendered great hopes and expectations, and Ashwin is aware of these.

He’s is a tough cookie in the book, but there’s the need to please, too — his parents, his coaches, WV Raman, MS Dhoni, Matthew Hayden, a man he reveres. “Amma, I haven’t let MS down,” he writes of the IPL final win of 2010. But, notwithstanding his need to please, he’s his own man — “quite comfortable in his own company”, says Dravid — and never one to back away from an argument or a contest.

His sensitive nature comes to the fore, too, when he’s treated as a nobody as a nets bowler by West Indian and Indian cricketers; and, more poignantly, when he’s laughed at for not knowing Hindi after being selected for India Under-17. “I felt left out, humiliated and intimidated,” he writes, upset at being called “Madrasi”.

This experience, perhaps, strengthened his Tamil identity — he uses the Tamil word “kutti” (small) in the book’s subhead, defiantly telling all those Hindiwallahs that he’s Tamil and is proud of his language and identity.

It’s a pity that this book ends with the 2011 World Cup win, months before his Test debut. He’s got 516 Test wickets — there would be another, equally engaging book, surely.