The Legend of Pradeep Mathew (25 page)

‘Tell Uncle his ground is Asia’s biggest disgrace. My grandmother could bat on it.’

The midget turns around. ‘Mokek? Kiwwa?’

She tells him that I said Mathew was a crook.

Pradeep had walked for caught behind, even though the umpire had not given him out. He took a catch off Rameez Raja and then confessed to taking it on the bounce. Rameez went on to score 122.

The midget points the umbrella at me and bellows. The woman translates. ‘Uncle says if Mathew had batted on, we would have scored 400. If he shut up, Rameez would have been out for 3.’

I get up. The scoreboard gleams in the morning sun. Arjuna 0 not out. Guru 4 not out. How long would they survive? I spy some of our players in cricket whites approaching the nearby nets.

The woman and the midget walk to the entrance, picking plastic bags out of puddles. The sun is now visible and it looks like there is no more rain to save us.

I pass the nets by the stadium entrance. The batsmen are Uvais Amalean and one of the Ratnayakes. Nervous tail-enders likely to be sent in early. The bowlers are medium pacer Kosala Kurupparachchi, hero of the last game, and Pradeep Mathew, zero of this one.

It takes me a while to realise something is amiss. Mathew, left-arm chinaman bowler, is bowling with his right arm, in the style of opposing spin wizard, Abdul Qadir. The mimicry is spot on. Amalean unsuccessfully tries to smother the ball with his pad.

I want to go closer, but I’m afraid they will mistake me for a beggar. In the distance the woman and the midget are removing leaves from the pitch. Mathew switches to left arm off a longer run-up. His shaggy hair is locked in a headband. He gallops in, a replica of Wasim Akram, turns his arm into a slingshot and bowls. Amalean succumbs to a yorker.

The batsmen change every fifteen minutes. Guy de Alwis, Duleep Mendis, Ravi de Mel, followed by the men of the hour, Ranatunga and Gurusinha. I stand behind the scoreboard, mesmerised as Pradeep Mathew, the honest cricketer who has not been asked to bowl in that game, imitates every Pakistani bowler including Imran and Zakir Khan. He even does the sideways delivery skip of Mudassar Nazar.

The Pakistan team arrives at the ground and the Sri Lankan skipper instructs Mathew to stop. While he walks away, I run up to him. He removes his headband and shuffles to the dressing room.

‘Excuse me. Is your name Mathews?’

He turns his head, avoids my eye and keeps walking.

‘Who taught you to bowl like that?’

His voice is deep and unsteady. ‘Enakku English theriyadu.’ I don’t know English, he says in Tamil.

‘Sinhala dannavada?’ Do you know Sinhala? I ask in Sinhala.

But he has disappeared through a doorway that I cannot enter. The security guards are having their morning tea and eyeballing me. I begin the long walk to the press box. Below the scoreboard, the midget and the woman appear to be burying something in the outfield. I look their way and they stare daggers.

I fall asleep for the first session and wake up after lunch to the applause for Guru getting his 50. Some of the Sinhala journos take off to a nearby tavern, but I am unable to tear myself from the game. By the end of the day, Guru is unbeaten on 116 and Arjuna is 135 not out. The match is well and truly saved and the series remains drawn 1–1.

I arrive home shortly after nine, bringing Sheila her favourite, pittu and baabath curry. I had switched to beer after tea and am not fully drunk. Sheila sees none of these silver linings and locks me out to spend the night on the veranda’s reclining chair.

I am watching a teledrama with my wife and Kusuma, our servant girl. Every scene is interrupted by twelve commercials. Each scene consists of characters staring in opposite directions and crying. My medicine makes me drowsy and the evening’s entertainment does not stay the drooping of my lids.

I am aware of visitors and of Sheila saying that I am asleep.

‘Aney Sheila, is it OK if I move the spool player here?’ says a familiar voice.

I open my eyes during the news break. Israel and Palestine are not getting on. What a surprise. Wonder how their cricket team is doing.

‘Was that Ari?’

‘Go to bed, Gamini. Instead of snoring here.’

‘Not sleeping.’

She snorts and cleans her TV-watching glasses with the sleeve of her housecoat. I close my eyes and don’t sleep as more teledramas roll by. The voice returns.

‘Thank you, Sheila. Do you mind if I use the spool player. Just five minutes.’

‘You stole ITL’s spool player,’ I murmur without opening my eyes.

Ari tugs at my arm. ‘Come, come, Wije, you must hear this.’

The walking stick has become my permanent accessory. The swelling on my feet has all but vanished and I no longer need one. But I like how it looks on me. I now have the air of a colonial planter or a Victorian detective, or so I believe. Jabir is also there with a grin from eyebrow to eyebrow, cradling a cardboard box in his skinny arms. Ari helps him carry it into my office. In the distance, the same commercial is repeated thrice in the same ad break.

‘Ari. Only half an hour, ah?’ calls out Sheila. ‘Gamini has to rest.’

‘Hamu wants tea?’ asks Kusuma.

‘No need.’ The creature is still asleep.

My room is neat and dust-free. ‘You’re not writing, are you?’ says Ari, untangling wire.

‘I will soon,’ I say, trying to believe myself.

Jabir flicks the cobwebs from the casing he is holding.

‘Eh!’ shrieks Ari. ‘Don’t touch the spool!’

They exchange roles. Jabir plugs in the machine while Ari extracts the spool and I lie on my haansi putuwa.

‘Ari sir, only for this weekend, OK ah? Uncle Abey is holiday. After Monday must give.’

‘Jabir. If you can’t speak English, stick to Sinhala.’

My gaze falls from the wall I no longer stare at, to the morning’s papers on the desk.
Coup to oust SLBCC boss.
The recently appointed president, Jayantha Punchipala, is already unpopular with his employers. Punchipala’s dirty betting links are getting another airing in the
Sunday Leader.
There is no mention of illegal cricket betting behind the Neptune Casino in Colombo 3. Meanwhile our cricketers are losing. We have suffered a series defeat to South Africa. The team of ’96 is unchanged and unsteady.

The spool clicks into place. The room fills with static, bird sounds, cuts, blips, clips, taps, raised voices, long hisses, distant clapping.

And so on. And so on.

‘You came all this way to give me a headache?’

Ari is consulting his notepad and tweaking knobs.

‘Shouldn’t you return this contraption to ITL?’

‘End bit. End bit, I think,’ says Jabir, evidently not to me.

‘Thanks, Jabir,’ says Ari. ‘Very helpful.’

‘Look, I’m tired,’ I say, rising to leave.

‘Wait, wait, here.’

The spool stops fast-forwarding. Ari flicks a switch and I stop and listen. Footsteps … clip … blip … woodhittingstone … footsteps … doorslam … silence.

And then two voices, barely audible but somewhat familiar:

Poised between doorway and chair, I look at the cover of the spool. Pasted is a piece of paper, browned by time with shaky black writing: ‘PaksTan Test, 86.’

Ari calls out, ‘Kusuma, aney make us some of that wonderful tea.’

He sits on the stool before me. ‘Wije boy. You better sit down.’

This is the story. It begins in the 1760s, when the Dutch dug tunnels and canals below Colombo to transport their plundered loot around the city and towards the harbour. It shifts to the 1830s, when the British closed the tunnels and shut the canals and began building roads and banks and cricket grounds.

It then shifts to 1941. After Nanking. Before Pearl Harbor. The Japanese had held ground against Russia, colonised Manchuria and believed they could take over Asia. The Allies had lost parts of Burma and the Philippines. If they lost Colombo and Trincomalee, the Japs would have access to India, the jewel in the melting crown.

So the Brits decommissioned one of Colombo’s cricket grounds and turned it into a fully equipped aerodrome. It was a timely move. The Japs sent a fleet of bombers to disable Colombo harbour on 4 April 1942. The aerodrome at the cricket ground served its purpose. Her Majesty’s Thirty Squadron shot down fourteen enemy planes and expelled the intruders.

The fight was not without casualties. Pilot Officer Don McDonald watched two of his comrades sink in trails of smoke over the Indian Ocean. When he exceeded his quota of hits to his tail, he aimed his plane at the sea swell. He missed the waves by 100 feet and crash-landed on the green grass of Galle Face.

He then climbed from the wreckage and staggered towards the Galle Face Hotel, wiping his brow with his gentleman’s hanky, aviator cap blowing in the wind. He stumbled to the bar, watched his plane explode in the distance and turned to the bewildered barman. ‘Mind pouring me a gin and tonic, chum?’

I repeat this story because I believe in the glory of Britannia.
The Stories for Boys
version. The empire that protected us from evil. The empire that no longer exists and probably never did. I repeat it because if you believe that story, you may believe the one that came out of Ari and Jabir’s box.

The box contained half a dozen spools in various states of wear and tear. It also contained a logbook with neat scribblings in fountain pen. It was marked ‘Property of the RAF’.

The aerodrome meant that the Royal–Thomian match, played at this ground in the 1930s, had to find itself a new venue. The world’s longest running match, Eton vs Harrow, had already been cancelled as Britain exchanged bats for rifles. But in Sri Lanka, the match would go on even as the world crumbled, a fact duly noted by today’s politicians.

The ground’s scoreboard was demolished to make way for a landing strip. The pavilion was turned into a hangar, the dressing rooms into mess halls, and the Dutch tunnels under the cricket ground into bunkers. Two of these bunkers served as radio rooms, providing support for makeshift towers on makeshift runways.

Meanwhile more dogfights followed, but then came D-Day and then Nagasaki. Then Hitler committed suicide, Japan surrendered and the Royal–Thomian was shifted to the P. Sara Stadium. The British took away their equipment and their planes, the Canadians helped rebuild the scoreboard and the pitch. The tunnels were blockaded by rubble.

In 1948, Ari Byrd played for STC and forced a draw. On 4 February that year, a month before the game, the British took their bats, their balls and their viceroys back to Blighty, leaving behind the roads, the railways, the cricket grounds, the bureaucracies and, of course, the race divisions. In their haste they also left a bunker below a cricket ground fully equipped with radio equipment.

Harold de Kretser became curator in 1949 and supervised the restoration. The ground became the venue for school matches, the clubhouse was rebuilt, tennis courts followed. De Kretser hired Tamil labourers to clear rubble from the tunnels and stumbled across a hidden room. Not only was he surprised to find the equipment in working order, he also found transmitters rigged to the mess halls and the runways. The British had been spying on their own.

De Kretser knew more about electronics than he did about groundskeeping. Those duties he entrusted to Hewman Neiris Abeytunge, the midget servant boy who cleaned the mess hall during the aerodrome days and who stayed on to become gardener at the newly named …

‘Wije. You promised …’

‘People are going to guess anyway. We might as well tell.’

De Kretser first attempted taping the audio of live matches in 1956, with the arrival of the Indian national side. De Kretser’s logbooks note that ‘the mic positioning prevented clear transmission of onfield action’. He does, however, mention picking up ‘a dressing room argument in Urdu between Nari Contractor and Polly Umrigar’.

The first spool is an inaudible mess of static. It is titled ‘1956–1967 Early Recordings, India, Pakistan, Gopalan Trophy, MCC XI, West Indies, Commonwealth’. The writing is neat, precise and identical to that of the journal.

Over the next decade, de Kretser, aided by his diminutive gardener, redirected the wires from the outfield and experimented with different mic positions. He tried under the turf, behind the umpire, before finally settling on the drinks hatch at silly mid-off for storing balls and beverages. The wires to the mess hall were easily redirected through the light fittings.