You Must Like Cricket? (15 page)

The rioters didn't need the press to give them an excuse. They rioted because they wanted to. They revealed the side of them that is best kept hidden. They always do when India play Pakistan.

I was there. And being there is the worst thing.

* * *

I'm playing a little game with myself now. Join me.

I'm trying to imagine what an India versus Pakistan cricket match would look like to an outsider, to someone who, unlike me, is not steeped in the backstory. Were you living on Mars (or in the United States – as close to Mars as you can get when it comes to talking cricket), what would it look like, this meeting of two Asian neighbours on a cricket field? It should look like a game. It does not.

Here is a selection of extracts I've gathered from around the world. (Okay, that's the cricket-playing world, which, as my football-fan friends never tire of telling me, is not quite a representative sample of the globe.) Go on. Find out what you think. Watch out for the warlike language, the riffs about cross-border tension and terrorism, the chauvinism, the hard-edged nationalistic fervour.

When the Pakistan team returned home from the 1999 World Cup, Inzamam ul Haq found his home ransacked by angry fans. Captain Wasim Akram's mother made an appeal, with folded hands, to the fans for tolerance. Most newspapers concluded that the intense anger was not because Pakistan had lost the final (being the second best one-day side in the world can't be that bad, and losing to Australia was no disgrace) but because earlier in the tournament they had been beaten by India.

Now. Go on. What would you think if you knew nothing about India and Pakistan?

* * *

The story goes back to 1947. When India gained its independence it was not as one country but as two. It had seen off the British, but it could not overcome its internal divisions. The result was an imposed Partition and – to oversimplify – one Hindu-majority nation, India, and one Muslim-majority nation, Pakistan. Pakistan's founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, hoped that the creation of an independent Muslim homeland would bring lasting peace to the region. Things did not quite turn out that way.

Nearly one million people were killed in the Hindu–Muslim riots that followed Partition; millions more lost their homes; and the trauma of displacement and exile became encoded in the DNA of both nations. Within months of their births, India and Pakistan were at war. Before Partition, Kashmir's Hindu Maharajah had decided that his state should become part of India. But Kashmir was – and is still – predominantly Muslim. Pakistan believed it was rightfully hers. Kashmir has been a running sore ever since. It was the cause of renewed hostilities in 1965, and low-level border skirmishes have gone on for years. Heavy fighting in Kargil during the 1999 World Cup – just as India and Pakistan took to the field at Old Trafford – almost led to war again. Now that both India and Pakistan possess nuclear weapons, the results would be unthinkable.

The two countries may be at loggerheads politically, but culturally they have much so much in common: heritage, language, food, clothes. And of all that they share, cricket is the most pervasive, the most fervently supported and perhaps the most enduring. Which is why a win – or loss – at cricket is so important. Whenever India and Pakistan meet on a cricket field, it is not simply to play a game. As the social historian Ramachandra Guha says, ‘Within India, a loss to Pakistan at cricket is harder to bear than a loss on the battlefield.'

Since the Eden Test of 1999 things have changed for the better – at least on the face of it. In January 2004, India and Pakistan met at the negotiating table in an attempt to sort out their complex, acrimonious relationship. One of the cornerstones of the peace process was what diplomats and politicians like to call ‘people to people exchanges'. That March, the Indian cricket team embarked on its first fully fledged tour of Pakistan for fifteen years. It caused a frenzy of excitement. Thousands of Indians followed their team to Pakistan. Perhaps to their surprise, they received a warm welcome. They returned home full of glowing stories about the kindness they'd been shown, the hospitality they'd been offered. For me the most enduring image of that series was not to be found on the pitch, despite Sehwag's triple hundred at Multan. It was of an Indian and a Pakistani flag stitched together and inscribed with a line borrowed from Bollywood:
Pyar to hona hi tha
(Love had to happen between us).

Pakistan returned the compliment at the beginning of 2005. If the atmosphere was not quite as intense this time around, it was filled with a spirit of goodwill that not been seen before. When India disgraced themselves by losing by 168 runs in the final Test at Bangalore, shopkeepers did not need to barricade their stores against the inevitable rioters. There were no reports of players' houses being attacked or their families abused. The hysterical jingoism of previous India-Pakistan games was largely absent. As indeed it was when India toured Pakistan again in 2006. It may seem trivial in the scheme of things, but for many of us it was a benediction. Cricket seemed a little like cricket again.

Even so, I was edgy throughout these tours. The calm seemed fragile; I feared it could not last. Somewhere beneath that deceptive restraint, I thought, the old ugly emotions still stirred. It would not take much to provoke an eruption – perhaps just an ill-timed run-out, a bowler getting in a batsman's way.

* * *

I love to watch Pakistan on a cricket field. I love the way they bring on young talent. I love their audaciousness, their unpredictability, their guts, their tendency to scale heights or plumb depths that few other teams are capable of. Cricket
is
a game of glorious uncertainties, and Pakistan exemplifies the cliché better than any other side in the world.

My first memories of watching Pakistan are of the 1978 India-Pakistan Test series. (India and Pakistan did not play each other between 1961 and 1978.) I fell in love with Majid Khan's strokeplay; with the murderous elegance of Zaheer Abbas (another nearly man, like Viswanath, always in the shadow of Javed Miandad); with the gentlemanly Asif Iqbal (I almost cried when his rubber soles slipped and he was run out in his final Test at the Eden Gardens in 1980). And of course there was Imran. The feline grace, the flashing eyes, perpetually narrowed to slits so you wondered how he ever saw through them, the long hair flying behind him in the slipstream as he tore in, the shirt with its three buttons undone, the pre-delivery leap, and the women. Always the women. (A psychiatrist friend once told me that that was why I found Imran so fascinating. I hope it wasn't just that.)

I have often dreamt of the side we would have were Pakistan and India still one country: Sehwag and Afridi to open in the one-days; Sachin and Inzamam in a Test middle order; Wasim Akram and Anil Kumble bowling from either end; Imran the inspirational captain. Occasionally, I have to pinch myself.

For much of my lifetime, I have had to keep this to myself. Voicing my admiration for Pakistan would have been a treasonable offence, especially over recent years. It has not always been this way (and who knows, perhaps things really will be different from now on). It has not been the fault of the players. Flashpoints on the pitch arise not because of any personal antagonism but because of the pressure both sets of fans put their sides under to win. It is the fans' fault, our fault.

I have never burnt an effigy, never threatened a player, never demonstrated outside his home. I was not present at the 1999 World Cup game. But it makes little difference. In a sense one is always there – you don't have to be at the game, or even in the same country, to be implicated, however indirectly. It is our common shame. The fact that I was not one of the rioters at the Eden Gardens in February 1999 does not make things any better. As a matter of fact, it makes it worse. I did not do anything, but my failure to act implicates me equally.

When India play Pakistan I encounter a doppelgänger I would rather not acknowledge. It is like meeting an identical twin who has disgraced himself. I see men like me – men who on other days and in other circumstances could be my colleagues, my friends, even my family – behaving despicably. And I cannot escape the taint of this brotherhood. We, all of us, have allowed cricket to become more than a game. As a result, it has also become less.

I hate India-Pakistan matches not just because of the chauvinism, the religious bigotry. I hate them because they are an attack on something deeper, something we may not care to admit to: our idea of sport itself. In allowing politics, religion, even war, to hijack our game, we have given cricket a symbolic value it does not possess. We have convinced ourselves that the game is important because it stands for something else. But cricket isn't
like
anything else; it is only like cricket.

In their introduction to the
Picador Book of Sports Writing
, editors Nick Coleman and Nick Hornby make this point eloquently: ‘A common misapprehension about sport is that, in itself, it stands as a metaphor for real life; that we play, watch and read about sport because we want the rest of our lives to be illuminated by sport's special allegorical language, as if sport has something to tell us in the way that art does. The editors beg to suggest that this is tosh. Sport is not a metaphor for the rest of life, it is indivisible from the rest of life. That's its magic. It is not a description of something, it is, simply, what it is.'

And I resent any attempt to take my game away from me.

Y
ou can tell
from their faces. Shining with anticipation, a restlessness revealed by the darting eyes. Above all else, triumphant. On the buses heading towards the Eden Gardens on match day you can tell from the faces who is going to be inside the ground when play begins. And who is not. They're the ones who look vaguely resentful, who stare out of the window because they can't bear to look at their fellow passengers, who are eager to get off and get on with whatever else that they are supposed to be doing (because anything else is better than being on a bus crammed with fans going to the Eden). They don't fit in; they want out of this celebration.

The conductor, perhaps because he knows that proximity to the people going to the Eden Gardens is the closest that he will get to real action, is indulgent. He's happy to talk about the match. (A rare gesture. Conductors on Kolkata buses don't talk; unless it's to ask you for your fare. And sometimes not even that – they'll shuffle up and merely riffle their sheaf of tickets under your nose. A sharp, grating sound. Pay for the privilege of riding on one of the worst transport systems in the world.)

This is Kolkata's biggest annual picnic. For many, this is the most sought-after prize of the whole year: a plain rectangular stub of glazed paper that tells you your gate and seat numbers. It is a chance to be
there
. It really is. (At the time I first started going to the Eden Gardens in the late 1970s, even on the fourth day of a Test that is dead or dying, 100,000 people would fill the stadium.)