You Must Like Cricket? (16 page)

One after another, the buses crawl to a halt at Chowringhee, the busiest intersection in the heart of Kolkata's central business district. I have always wanted to catch the first Chowringhee-bound bus on a match day. (When
do
the first spectators start coming in?
Just when
? I've rolled up two hours before start of play, three hours, and still seen thousands walking up to the stadium.)

Half a step at a time. That's as much of a stride as you can take. The crowd presses in on you from all sides. No traffic is allowed on the roads leading to the ground; the police reroute all the vehicles. They cordon off the pavements; spectators are penned inside rough bamboo partitions. No one is allowed to spill over on to the road.

The first time I walked through this crowd –
along
with this crowd – I was scared. I was nine years old and I had never seen so many people. The tight columns made me feel claustrophobic; I feared a stampede. Over the years, though, I have realised that this is not the danger period. It's too early in the morning for the crowd to be drunk. (Often, it's only seven o'clock.) And since there has been no play we've not yet been disappointed. Tempers have not yet been frayed; no one is actually spoiling for a fight.

These days I get off the bus and plunge right in, taking my place behind the last man in the long queue. It is a good couple of kilometres to the ground. Hard work, when there's no place to put your feet, when all you see in front of you is a sweat-stained shirt and all you can feel is the guy behind you steadying himself in the crush. Just occasionally, to your right you can see the vacant road. There are so many police – on foot, on motorbikes, in jeeps, chattering agitatedly into their walkie-talkies. The emptiness of the road only draws attention to how crushed we are.

Groups – friends, colleagues, family, lovers – try to stick together in the swarm. Some of them carry today's newspapers. They're not for reading. They'll be spread out on the ground's dusty concrete benches. Seats are luxuries.

As I approach the Eden I examine my fellow spectators. The crowd seems so much more, well,
internationalised
, than it used to be. The last time I was here, a year ago, among the shuffling feet, I saw hundreds and hundreds of trainers: Nike, Adidas, Reebok. Shorts, fashionably long for men, and T-shirts, fashionably short for women, covered in swooshes or leaping pumas; jeans (Levi's, Pepe, Wrangler, you name it, you got it); baseball caps turned backwards; shades (Ray-Bans, Gucci); satchels, knapsacks. If you want a snapshot of global sartorial kitsch, here's the place to come.

Unless you look at the faces – these days often emblazoned with the Indian tricolour (a decade-and-a-half-old habit, picked up from watching international football on satellite TV) – you could be in any city in the world. It is a far cry from the days when my mother insisted I wear my darkest pair of shorts and a terry cotton shirt stitched at the local tailors. (‘These are best for the Eden Gardens, the grime won't show.')

Like tributaries into a river, the roads finally open out into the green of the maidan at the stadium's edge. Most fans keep on walking when they reach the grass, happy to let their strides lengthen, relieved to find the extra space. Some, though, huddle together in knots. For we've reached the monstrous statue of Goshto Pal (one of Bengal's legendary footballers; his arms are flung out at a painful, almost absurd angle), the most popular prematch meeting ground.

As the crowd pauses for breath and looks up at the upper tiers of the stands, the street vendors approach: chewing gum, chocolates and, in the last few years, Coke, Pepsi, bottled mineral water.

The street vendors are only the first wave. Next come the walking billboards. Big corporations have hired them for the day. They're distributing cardboard sunshades, tacky, pathetic things, with the name of the company in bold letters across the visor. Not many fans have any use for them. It's ironic: the crowd won't take them, even though they're free; but they're happy to shell out for branded baseball caps. They've been educated by the TV spots, the glossy magazines. They know what is
appropriate
to the occasion. Would you rather be seen with a sunshade that says ‘ACC Cement' or a cap which says ‘Adidas'?

‘Extra ticket? Extra? Any price, brother, any price. Which block?' The next tribe has arrived. These are the guys who have not planned in advance, who have left it too late and are prepared to risk the disappointment of standing by the gates all morning only to leave empty-handed – back to the sofa at home with a beer because they have taken the day off work anyway and wouldn't, for any price, go to the office and admit to not having had a ticket in the first place. Or else they're really desperate, crazy enough to have stood in line all night for the day seats. They're back again this morning: fate is bound to reward fans as persistent as themselves, they hope. How could it not?

We're on to the last bunch. Those who want to exchange tickets. They walk up to you, brandishing their stubs.

‘B for L.'

‘J for D.'

‘C for K'.

Like all codes, it's simple enough to crack if you know the key.

‘What on earth are they talking about?' an ex-girlfriend (the only girlfriend I have ever taken to a cricket match) once asked me.

The way it works is this: say you have a ticket in Block B, to the right of the pavilion, and your friend has one in Block L, to the left. You wave your (or your friend's) ticket above your head and scream, as hard as you can, in the hope of finding someone who wants to swap; someone sitting on the left of the pavilion with a friend on the right.

No money changes hands during these encounters. But sometimes one of the parties will emerge distinctly better off.

‘B for J? Come on, that is no deal.'

Block J is square of the wicket, nowhere near as good a place to watch the cricket as Block B, which is behind third man or long on, depending on which end the bowler is bowling from.

‘Well, take it or leave it. I'll find someone else. Thirty minutes for the toss, brother. Remember.'

The hustling won't make any difference. What matters is how badly you want to sit with your friend. On occasion, I have made a bad swap myself. It just depends.

Inside the stadium things look very different these days. I've been coming here for twenty-seven years now. Everything changed in 1987, with the World Cup. They rebuilt the stadium for the final: they added more tiers to the stands; a fibreglass roof, essential now that they were playing cricket in what used to be the off-season; a giant scoreboard square of the wicket. The new scoreboard was a bit like the Indian batting: it had enormous potential (more details than anyone could ever want); it was also scandalously fickle. It still is, after fifteen years. It's infuriating when it goes on the blink at the death in a one-day game.

Opposite the pavilion, above the sightscreen, they built a new stand. It's the only stand in the ground with individual seats, white plastic bucket chairs that shimmer in the sun; the rest of us, squeezed on the concrete benches, look on in envy. The new stand was built for foreign fans travelling to the World Cup – their pounds and dollars went further than the humble rupee, justifying the high ticket prices. These days, the stand's occupants can spend more on watching a day's cricket than the average income in Bengal.

There are corporate boxes too, again spin-offs from the World Cup. For once the Cricket Association of Bengal were a little ahead of the curve. (They must have taken their cue from Sharjah.) In 1987, air-conditioned, glass-fronted boxes were unheard of in India. Their inhabitants, with their televisions and minibars, are insulated from the rest of the ground, deliberately so. (Ironically none of the minibars stock any alcohol. You used to be able to drink at the Eden, but it was a purely nudge-nudge-wink-wink thing. Some spectators spiked their giant bottles of cola with rum, or their soda water with whisky.
Real
men in Kolkata drink only rum or whisky. It stinks. But that's all gone now – you're not allowed to bring bottles of any description into the ground. Water is sold in small, plastic pouches which you tear open with your teeth, water dribbling down your front. The hawkers selling bottles of mineral water outside the stadium have less business these days, although many still buy and down the water in a single gulp before entering the stadium.) The spectators in the insulated boxes sit there in their splendid isolation. The rest of the ground treats them with the kind of scorn that one reserves for rich but stingy relatives who neither bring us nice gifts when they arrive nor leave us generous pocket money when they go.

The stadium has its own class system, which may or may not correspond to the real world. Visitors to the Eden fall into one of three camps: the aristocracy, the bourgeois and the workers. You'll find the aristocracy in the life-members' stands on either side of the pavilion and in the annual and associate-members' stands adjacent to them. For these are reserved for the
members
, those who are here by right (God-given, they assume). Once you are a member there's no more queuing for tickets, no doubt as to whether you'll get in. Just pick up your ticket and go to your seat.

The bucket seats and air-conditioned boxes are the preserve of the bourgeois (nouveau riche usurpers, the members call them): company men enjoying a day at the cricket as compensation for their eighty-hour weeks, businessmen who don't care how much money they spend because the annual turnover will take care of it.

The rest of the ground belongs to the working class: the stands at widish mid-off and mid-on of the pavilion end, and the Ranji stand – perhaps the most raucous and vibrant in the whole ground.

Each of these groups is convinced that it is the only
authentic
presence in the stadium; the others are mere impostors.

Those in the cheap seats claim that they're the true fans – after all, they've queued for hours to buy tickets, they've had to show resolve, determination, indomitable will just to be here, and now they're fighting for space on the bum-numbing concrete benches.

The members know that they are the Eden's real, rightful owners. Those who have bought day tickets (cheap or expensive) are interlopers, here today, gone when the next match is played. They will be here for ever. They and the Eden share a history. They
are
the Eden's history – many of them have been coming here for generations. It's a family thing, and Eden is part of the family.

The monied elite who pack the expensive seats and corporate boxes think that everybody else is shit. Because they have more money than everybody else. They are perhaps the least self-conscious and most confident people in the place. They couldn't care less about being members; they wouldn't dream of queuing all night. Money buys privileges and after a while (so long as your wallet remains comfortably full) those privileges become rights. Who cares about history, who cares about what other people think of them? Their wealth inures them to others' scorn.

At various points in my life, I have watched cricket with all three sections of the crowd. These rivalries are rubbish, of course, a joke we can all share. Like all good jokes it works because there's some truth to it. But only one thing matters when India's eleven men take to the field: 100,000 people are united in their support.

* * *

For some the rhythm of a day's cricket is incomprehensible. Why so slow? Why isn't anything happening? The game of cricket lends itself to a protracted drawing out, a suspension of the spectator across a high-voltage wire of tension and anticipation. Long periods when ostensibly nothing happens (a new-ball spell, say, when the bowler beats the outside edge four times in a row and still does not manage to get a nick – when, for the uninitiated, the game doesn't seem to be moving
forward
) can mean plenty is happening. But there comes a time when nothing really is happening, when play has indeed stopped. In fact, that time comes at least twice each day – during lunch and tea.

As Bill Bryson so wryly observes in his book
Down Under
, cricket is the only sport to incorporate meal breaks. They are not there, as Bryson has it, because that's the only way one can be sure that ‘activity on the field has gone from very slight to non-existent'. Breaks (for lunch, for tea, even for drinks) are integral to the game. They offer scope for contemplation and reflection, time to review the events of the past couple of hours, time to take stock and to look forward to what is to come. They also have a significance beyond the game itself. You are what you eat, they say. It's a thought that strikes me each time I have my lunch at the Eden Gardens. For every food hamper has its own story. They mirror the people who bring them as much as the ground to which they are brought. In their contents you can sniff the way the game and the ground has changed, and the way their owners have been transformed.

I have never been to a cricket ground with my mother. (This seems strangely inappropriate: it was she who first taught me to be passionate about the game; I have watched and listened to more cricket with her – on the TV and the radio – than with any other single person in my life.) But in a way she has always been by my side. From the day I first went to the Eden until the day that I finally stopped taking lunch, I always sensed her presence. She was there every time I opened my lunch hamper. She always prepared them for me herself – carefully, lovingly, and unfailingly with an eye to the time of the year and the kind of nourishment that would get me through crying myself hoarse for a full day in the sun.

I remember how she fidgeted and fussed over the meal I took with me that first day. The evening before I set off (‘Early, you need to leave very early in the morning or else you will miss the players practising,' she told me), she busied herself with a mound of flour, patting it, sprinkling it with water, rolling it into small, thin, flat circular shapes and then frying them into that most Bengali of delicacies, the
luchi
. I neglected my homework to be near her in the kitchen, leaving her side only to check on my ticket, just to make sure that it had not, for some inexplicable reason, been stolen, flushed down the toilet, or grown wings and flown away.