We lived in the same apartment, went to the same school, same college, played Cricket for the same team, partied (in whatever way teetotalers could) on April 24th of every year, and even took many of the Agassi-Sampras debates too personally to affect our everyday lives. We don’t wish each other on birthdays, we don’t even shake hands when we meet, and invariably took the opposite side on any debate where Sachin was not the topic of discussion. But we were doing fine - in the most awkward way. Thank God, he married one of my best friends. If not for that and Cricket, we wouldn’t have been in touch for at least 3 years now.
Many of the ups and downs of our personal lives were highly correlated with the performance of Indian Cricket team. We threw the cue sticks and walked out of that dingy snooker parlor in some corner of the goddamned Virugambakkam, when Punter took a blinder to dismiss Sachin in the Mumbai test. Our Cricket watching careers were plunging new depths. No sooner had it plunged the depths that it touched new heights. Kolkata happened. Then our board exams er…the Madras test. This was the beginning of an era. From then on, we started winning more than we lost.
For a generation overfed on the imagery of Kapil Dev running back to catch his place in history, we wanted to move beyond that. Going into the 2003 World Cup, we knew we had a team to help us do that, despite the horrible results in NZ preceding the WC. All the hopes came tumbling down after our first match against a non-minnow. Effigy-makers had a field day. Stone-pelters made it to the front page of national dailies. Then Sachin came out and made a statement, assured us of better performance, and strangely, normalcy returned. Sachin personally took it upon himself to guide the team through to Super 6, one match at a time. On the first day of March 2003, he sent the entire country into a collective delirium. March 1st must have been the longest day of our lives till then, because it lasted till March 23.
And then March 23 surpassed it. We read every word of all the previews of the match written on the internet. A few of my friends gathered at my place to watch the match. JR went back to his house after the Zaheer horror in the first over. That pretty much set the tone for the rest of the day, only we were naïve enough not to see it coming. For once, I hated watching Gilly bat. After 20 overs, it was too suffocating to watch. It was a torture. The accumulated good work of the past 2 years was going in vain, one boundary at a time. It was humiliating. So we decided not to watch any further. We wanted to go out somewhere, to a place where no one talks cricket. JR didn’t join us. The entire city of Madras was deserted. But for once, we couldn’t enjoy biking on empty roads. We went to an internet center, and that damn guy had hired a TV specifically for that day. #Fail. We went to Marina, but beach has this extraordinary power to exacerbate whatever mood you are in. Didn’t help, #Fail. The sandwich shop at 'Alsa Mall' was open, that 'lvdkbl' was listening to commentary on the radio, Sandwich cancelled, #Fail.
We returned to JR’s home when the Indian innings resumed. We knew he went to the temple to pray! And he admitted just as much. I am sure if he had known the ‘stars’ of all Indian players, he would have even done an ‘archanai’ in their names. On another day, I would have ridiculed him, but not this day. But his prayers went unanswered. The probability of miracle went from minuscule to negligible at the end of the first over. Sehwag finally found some form. Ponting bowled his spinners to complete the 25 overs soon for there was a threat of rain. The move backfired. Sehwag launched Brad Hogg out of the park for a couple of sixes. Someone did the wise thing of bursting firecrackers then, for it was the only time we even had an outside chance of winning the match. It left a deep scar on us. We couldn’t even talk ourselves up. We could have hated Australia, but we didn’t want to. They were clearly superior.
The next day, I woke up. My pavlovian instincts picked up the newspaper and opened the second last page almost by reflex. God, it was painful to see, even for those 2 seconds before throwing away the paper in disgust, after which I was on a mental diet of not reading anything related to Cricket for a few days. I went down to JR’s place. We sat in his room. We sat there for nearly 2 hours. Spoke a few words in between – ‘did you call Rama?’ …’hmmm. No’. That was it. It was painful. We didn’t want to move on. We wanted to live the pain, for moving away is for unfaithfuls. His mom came into the room a couple of times. She wanted to say something, but she knew it would be stupid, so she didn’t. It was awkward, but comfortably awkward.
When Dhoni immortalized himself by launching Kulasekara over long on, and followed it up with that wonderful twirl of the bat, I was watching it with seven other people in Chembur. It was perhaps the most ecstatic moment of my life. I knew at least one other person who would have felt exactly the same way as I did, probably sneaking into a room to wipe his tears off. Maybe, I should have called him up. But we wouldn’t know what to speak. Maybe after a couple of minutes, he would have given the phone to V (his wife). It would have been awkward.
