You Must Like Cricket? (17 page)

While she fried the
luchis
and prepared the
alur dam –
peeled potatoes seasoned with green chillies, garlic and onions and smeared in gravy – my mother kept up a constant conversation. Her cricket-ground recipes, she told me, had been handed down to her by her mother, who had ensured that she would not go hungry or thirsty at the field. (That was the edge my mother had over her own: she'd actually been to the Eden herself, many times. She knew what made the best lunch, how parched you felt at the end of the day, which things were best for sharing – as sure a way as any to win friends and influence people at a cricket ground.)

Along with the
luchis
and the potatoes, she loaded my cloth bag (this was before the days of the knapsack or satchel; like most other spectators, I carried an unattractive cloth bag slung across my shoulder) with an astonishingly large number of oranges and lozenges, and a large flask of cold water. (‘You're crazy,' I said. ‘Who in his right mind would want so many
oranges
?' ‘Well, you will and then there will be the people next to you. You have no idea how oranges and lozenges vanish during a day of cricket.' When I left the stadium at the end of the day, the cloth bag had been folded and stuffed in my pocket. It was empty; everything had disappeared, thanks to myself and my neighbours, half an hour after tea.)

I never knew why, but in the days when I first went to the Eden, I was not allowed to drink tea at home. For the tea break, my mother packed me jam tarts and Swiss rolls, and an assortment of my favourite pastries that she had bought from Flury's, my favourite cake shop. On the morning of my big day, frantic the players would take the field without me, I tore from toilet to breakfast table. Then, as I was about to leave, my mother closed my fist over a ten-rupee note and said: ‘You won't have tea. Get yourself an ice cream if the water runs out.' It did (run out) and I didn't (buy myself an ice cream). Instead, I put the cash in my piggy bank. Whoever thought that you could actually earn
money
by going to the cricket?

Within a few years, the
luchis
disappeared from my lunch hamper. They gave way to crumb-fried fillets of fish and long, fat chips; immaculately dressed salad in olive oil or vinaigrette dressing; ham and lettuce sandwiches; pasta with tomato and basil. Now that I think about it, these lunches, like the clothes spectators wear to the ground these days, were more appropriate to the Wanderers or the MCG than they were to the Eden.

A decade and a half after my first visit, eating had become a much less messy affair. Plastic cutlery accompanied the meals from home. My lunch no longer rolled around in its box like a corpse too small for its coffin; instead it was packed in shining aluminium foil and greaseproof paper. The flask was replaced by large bottles of mineral water. And the idea of taking so much food that there would be enough to offer strangers I wanted to make friends with had been knocked on the head because there weren't that many (by now,
any
) people with whom I wanted to share my lunch.

On one of my early visits (probably to see Kim Hughes's Australians in 1979), I listened in awe as a thirtysomething gentleman (he must have been as old then as I am now) explained to his small son the implications of dust flying from the pitch before lunch on the second day. I remember the reverential look on the little boy's face (he was scarcely older than my daughter is now) and feeling a twinge of self-pity because my father was not with me. (I have never been to a cricket match with him either.) Perhaps that was why I was so eager to make friends. We shared my lunch; I gave them most of my oranges.

During the India-Pakistan Test in February 1999 I sat next to a thirtysomething father who was teaching his son how best to make a racket with two empty plastic bottles. ‘No, you don't beat them against the seat. You hold a bottle in each hand and smash them against each other. Super fast. Like this,' he explained, drumming up a healthy clackety-clack. The son, the reverential look on his face identical to the one I had seen on that little boy's twenty years before, eagerly copied his father.

As the boy got overexcited, the bottles flew out of his hand, hitting a couple in the seats in front of us. The boy cried with frustration. The father said nothing. (I had a bizarre, unsettling vision: had that boy become this man?) I didn't even offer them a stick of gum. (It's silly, I know, but I feared they might stick it on my seat once they were done with it.)

Perhaps I'm being unfair. Perhaps my favourite drink is nostalgia on the rocks. Perhaps it was just bad luck. But it seems as though I was invariably lucky then and am unfailingly unlucky now. All I know for certain is that I do not share my lunch as I used to in the old days.

These days, I often don't take any food with me at all. (My mother has grown old and I want to save her – and myself and my wife – the bother of preparing it; and at my age it seems preposterous to be fussing over a packed lunch.) Instead I eat amid the mini-stampede at one of the many food counters in the bowels of the stadium – a dank, cavernous place which always smells of urine (the food stalls are as close as you can get to the toilets without actually being inside them) and sweat and cheap disinfectant. Here, I get myself an inauthentic biryani or almost inedible noodles (these are noodles you will find nowhere else in the world: pathetic strands swimming in a pool of tomato ketchup and soy sauce) and stand there balancing the plate on one hand as I steady myself against the onslaught of hundreds of people rushing to and from the loo. There's only tap water to wash it down with. Most of my friends say it is about as safe as stuff from a ditch but I have never once fallen ill from drinking it. (It is my ineffectual – and some maintain self-destructive – protest against fizzy drinks.)

Now, as I stand beneath the tiers, in the half-light, trying to finish eating as soon as I can (it is a long, slow walk back to my seat), I feel a stab of longing for the old boyhood lunches. I try to recapture the languid rhythm of those childhood winter afternoons, but it's impossible. Perhaps we always pine for what is lost. Perhaps I miss my mum's cooking. Perhaps I miss being nine.

* * *

Ashis Nandy, one of India's leading sociologists, once told me in an interview that you need to be either wealthy or well connected to get into the Eden these days. Only a small fraction of the tickets are for sale. On the eve of the India-Sri Lanka 1996 World Cup semi-final, the Kolkata
Telegraph
put the figure at a mere 4,000, and things haven't got any easier since. (Given how hard these tickets are to get hold of, it's little wonder that the crowd in the day seats feel that they're the only true fans.) The rest are, to use a word popular with the Cricket Association of Bengal, ‘distributed'. Which is to say that they go to CAB members and the Association's numerous affiliates. As a rule of thumb, if you're not a member of the CAB your chances of emerging successfully from the ‘distribution' process will depend on how much influence you have.

My father was neither wealthy nor well connected. He was, as he often liked to say, a ‘self-made man'. The eldest of three brothers, he grew up in a long, narrow two-room flat in north Kolkata. The flat was so small that there was no room for a desk – he studied for medical school sitting on the floor. Once he had qualified he was given a fellowship to train abroad. After returning to India, he built up from scratch a practice successful enough to afford me a comfortable childhood and affluent adolescence. He never asked for any favours; he never received any.

My father worked hard to give his family the best of everything (though, he says now, the best that he could give then was not necessarily the best that he wanted for us). As my obsession with cricket grew and grew, it put him in a difficult position. Tickets to the Eden Gardens were hard to come by, even in those days. My uncle had been kind enough to take me to my first game, but that was to see the West Indians. The Australians were due to visit the next year; the Pakistanis, the year after that. It would not be easy.

In the run-up to the Kolkata Test, those who have spare tickets for the Eden (or sources to ensure that they will have tickets) become the most important people in town. You can tell them by their haunted expressions, by the way they'll run away from you on the street. Because anyone with spare tickets to the Test is a marked man. For anyone who has ever done you a favour, for anyone with a claim on you, it is payback time. And if you don't have tickets it's even worse. Even if you can find a benefactor to provide you with what you crave, the debt incurred will not be small. It may take some time to clear. It is a trying time for everyone, one that – even by Indian standards – involves much complicated role playing between the benefactor and the benefited.

My father discovered that getting me a passport to the Eden involved an inversion of roles: as a doctor he was used to being a benefactor; now he had to play the supplicant. He didn't like this one bit. He was forced to remind people of favours he had done them, or swallow his pride, put himself in debt and ask outright. It was contradictory to his nature, it made him awkward and uncertain, but he knew that if there was one thing in life I wanted (
really
wanted, perhaps more than I have ever wanted anything), it was to be inside the Eden Gardens when the Test match was on. Every year he went through with it – the wheedling, the self-abasement – and not once did he let me down.

On a couple of occasions my mother's side of the family, who were nearly all members of the CAB, obliged. Once my father got a ticket for me and then one of my maternal uncles swapped it outside the stadium so that I could sit with him. To my father, it seemed a little less like asking for a favour but it did not entirely assuage his conscience.

One evening in 1984 my father returned home from his clinic and called me in to his bedroom. With a hesitant, shy smile (as though he was embarrassed to witness my reaction), he produced a small piece of glossy card from a plastic jacket and held it out to me.

It took me a while to realise its significance. For in the top left-hand corner of the card was the crest of the CAB; and across the middle, in block capitals, the words ‘
life member
'. On the reverse, in blue ink, were my name and a number.

If only life allowed more such occasions.

A few months previously, the CAB had advertised for applications for life membership. (You need have no connection with cricket to become a member of the Cricket Association of Bengal, a criterion – or lack of it – that has doubtless contributed to the character and cricket knowledge of the crowd in the members' stands over recent years.) In essence, it was a fund-raising drive. Each selected applicant paid a sum of Rs10,000. In return, whenever there was a match at the Eden Gardens, he was assured of a seat – for as long as he lived. Rs10,000 was not an insignificant sum, but my father had applied. And had been successful.

I didn't drink in those days. If I had, I would have remained in a stupor for months – till the Englishmen came to tour in the winter.

* * *

It is twenty-seven years since I first visited the Eden. In that time I have fallen in and out of love with the place. I have endured some of my worst experiences on a cricket field there; I have been caught in riots, I have heard grown men hurl the vilest insults, I have had my faith in the game itself disturbed. I have vowed never to set foot inside its gates again – after 1999 – and I have returned almost immediately – in 2002.

It is not the look of the place that brings me back. There is nothing remotely pretty about the Eden Gardens these days. Hemmed in by high stands on every side, the suggestion of lurking, suppressed violence in every block, it looks more and more like a football stadium. And the changes have not simply been physical.

Once Kolkatan spectators prided themselves on being courteous and knowledgeable. (Living in a city which has had to accept its marginalisation from the national scene, most Kolkatans pride themselves on being courteous and knowledgeable – it's just about all they had left to cling on to for many years. The new century signalled a resurgence for Kolkata – better infrastructure, more foreign investment – and perhaps there is a new brashness about the city now, perhaps the old talk of courtesy and knowledge is a little muted.) Nowadays there are too many fans who care too little about cricket – and too much for flag-waving. Over the past few years they have sometimes proved a disgrace to the city, the stadium and the game: they have disrupted matches, even caused them to be abandoned.

The little things trouble me too. I know I risk sounding like an old fart, but I miss seeing the ground filled with radios. These days the mobile phone has taken over – it's easier to call home and get the verdict from the instant replays than it is to to use your imagination and work it out from the expert commentary. The food is different; the clothes have changed; there are fewer old people in the stands; the women all look like they want to be on TV; the Mexican wave (never done too well, always not so much a wave as a ripple) is inexplicably popular. But there are as many spectacular performances on the field as there ever were; and India loses far less often than they used to.

One thing, though, has not changed a bit since the day I first passed through the Eden's gates. Every time I go back, it reaffirms my faith; it shows me how, in very rare cases, time can appear to stand still.

It happens when I walk into the ground.

I'm past the police and I'm walking through the long, wide, musty corridor beneath, then between the stands. And suddenly, in one vivid and unforgettable moment, I see the field. There it is in front of me, framed by the stands, beneath a patch of open sky, bathed in a Turneresque light.

It is a delirious moment, an instant when the pulse quickens and the heart thumps. In anticipation. In nostalgia. In that moment, the mind goes into rewind and fast forward at the same time.