Rest in peace, Shahid Akbar

Over the years, I have lost many of my cricket mates from Hyderabad to a variety of causes of death—some of them lifestyle-related. I was heart-broken when a few of my closest friends and seniors died way before their time: CR Chandran, P Krishnamurti, Mumtaz Hussain, Meher Baba, Nagesh Hamand, Habib Ahmed, Jaisimha, Pataudi … a ruthless list.

Now comes the devastating news that boyish, innocent (that’s how I’ll always remember him, not having met him for over 30 years), hugely talented left-handed opening batsman Shahid Akbar is no more. I learnt a couple of months ago through Ali, a Hyderabadi friend I met on Facebook, that he was seriously ill, that this time around he might not make it, but immersed in this dreadful business of life that allows no time for old friendships and memories, I moved on to other life-and-death matters. When the news came, I felt this was perhaps the cruellest blow, even though Shahid was never a part of my intimate circle.

Shahid was a very talented left-handed opening batsman and brilliant fielder of the second half of the 1970s, a young man many expected to play for India. Tall and strongly built, Shahid had everything—a sound defence, a fine range of good cricket shots, a keen eye, and courage against fast bowling. He was fiercely focused and determined to do well, perhaps too much so, and he did not know how to unwind. He analysed cricket to paralysis, and he was unreasonably hard on himself when he failed.

Shahid might have had an easier time growing up in first class cricket had he not been joined in the Hyderabad team by another wonderful, precocious talent in right-handed Saad-bin-Jung. I think Shahid began to feel insecure as soon as Saad made a grand entry into the Hyderabad XI after scoring a thrilling hundred against West Indies opening the innings for South Zone. He was barely 16.  

Shahid did not help matters when he appealed against Saad for a handled the ball decision—if I remember right—or did something equally unsporting in a Moin-ud-Dowlah match. Instead of putting it down to an impulsive act of youthful over-competitiveness, some of Hyderabad cricket’s wise old men reprimanded him strongly. I wonder if Shahid ever recovered from all the negative backlash of that single error of judgement on his part.

I was Shahid’s senior teammate during some of his best knocks for Hyderabad, including his 97 run out against Tamil Nadu at Chepauk. That day, he batted like the real champion that his pedigree promised he would be. His grandfather SM Hadi scored an unbeaten 132 against Madras on his Ranji Trophy debut back in November 1934.

Shahid’s first class career never blossomed to its full potential; it was cut short by invisible ghosts that seemed to haunt him when he should really have been peaking. The first signs of abnormal mental strain were first visible when he played truant at an important game and actually showed apparent disrespect to cricketers to whom his earlier attitude had bordered on the reverential.  The crack seemed to widen with time, and soon he had to take a long break from the game. Many of us were delighted when he seemed to have made a complete recovery in 1981: his double century for State Bank of India versus Andhra Bank at the Osmania University ground that year was one of the finest innings I have ever seen. Fresh from a string of successes in local tournaments, I was one of the bowlers at the receiving end in that match.

At his best, Shahid was a most lovable young man—shy, courteous, soft-spoken, enormously polite. He was a particularly good-looking lad. In all mixed gatherings of cricketers’ families, he was invariably the favourite of the ladies. For, in the charm department, he had no peer—which of course did not need much doing, the rest of us being the ruffians we were. In our more rowdy moments, some of us tended to burst into song—a euphemism for the unholy racket we made—and Shahid’s standard contribution was a plaintive “Where’s your mama gone?”

Shahid had great respect for my younger brother Sivaramakrishnan, whom he was hoping to replace in the South Zone team. A couple of years ago, he wrote Siva a warmly affectionate letter out of the blue.

Death has snatched away one of the finest cricketers Hyderabad has produced—never mind that he did not reach the great heights we all wanted him to attain.

Tall stories and short memories

The bridegroom's father was beaming. Naturally. His son had not only done exceedingly well academically and found gainful employment in Europe, he had married a beautiful and accomplished girl. To fill Radhakrishnan's cup of joy, all his friends had attended the wedding and blessed the young couple, all his friends from cricket and all his former Parry colleagues were there in full attendance. Radhakrishnan or Ambi as he is known in family circles was a good club cricketer in his time, a batsman of good temperament and capable off spinner, who had served Parry's Sports and Recreation Club well for many years. Among those present at the wedding was MR Sreedhar, a fine all rounder from Bangalore, who bowled his off spinners with guile and accuracy, and played many a crucial innings in the seventies, good enough to play for Karnataka and Tamil Nadu in the Ranji Trophy.  

Sreedhar was delighted to renew contact with his old cricket mates from the Madras of yore. Asked if he had anything to do with cricket administration or coaching, he answered in the negative. He was actively involved in tennis coaching, his academy spreading far and wide in Karnataka, already successful in conducting ATP tournaments at a number of venues. Soon, I ran into the daughter of another former Parry player and captain, Chander, who lived not far from the kalyana mandapam on Dr S Radhakrishnan Salai. I asked her if she had verified the story I had told her at our last meeting of a six I had hit off her father's bowling at Arts College ground on Mount Road back in the sixties. "Must have been a cross-batted slog," he told her. It had been on a ridiculously small ground and the ball had landed in the nearby Buckingham Canal. "Appa has a selective memory," Chander's daughter assured me, "all the shots he played were classic beauties, those made off his bowling were always slogs."

Ambi, Sreeedhar and Chander had been members of a powerful Parry line-up, often led by the redoubtable AG Kripal Singh. Can you imagine a Test cricketer playing in the lower division of the TNCA league today? That is precisely what Kripal did while leading Parry from the lower divisions towards the First. There were a number of other champion players like wicket keeper DL Chakravarthi, left arm spinner MK Murugesh, all rounder MK Iqbal, demon fast bowler BR Mohan Rai, and in later years such youngsters as Sreedhar and opener Mohan Das, who was later involved successfully in Charminar Challenge, the first sponsorship of the Ranji Trophy by his employers VST Ltd. Test off spinner S Venkataraghavan turned up for them when they earned promotion to the senior division.

Going back to the league match in which I hit that "cross batted" six off Chander, I was playing for Jai Hind CC, a struggling team led by our extremely clever but eccentric captain S Raman, the eldest of three brothers who all played state level table tennis. Under his imaginative captaincy, my bowling blossomed, and I averaged about four wickets per innings that year, my first full season in the league. I was barely 17, and when Raman promoted me from No. 11 to No. 3 in the batting order, I gleefully accepted, not realising that I owed my promotion to the reluctance of our so-called specialist batsmen to face the fire and fury of Mohan Rai, at the time arguably the fastest bowler in India. On the Arts College matting wicket, he was quite deadly, but I didn't know enough to know that. I played some daring drives in front of the wicket and Mohan Rai came in for much ribbing from his slip fielders for the treatment he was receiving from this beardless stripling.

Soon, intentionally or otherwise, Mohan let slip a short one, which I went to hook, only top edging it to my chin which started bleeding like a fountain. Stunned but reluctant to forego my rare gaji, I retired hurt, ran across Mount Road to Sahib Singhs, the round the clock drugstore, had the wound cleaned, had some tincture of iodine applied to the gash, stuck a Bandaid on it and came back and waited for a wicket to fall.

When I resumed my innings, I had the audacity to drive for boundaries the friendly half volleys Mohan Rai was kind enough to offer out of sympathy for me, until Kripal decided to eliminate any risk of further injury by taking Mohan off the attack. I went on to make 41, my highest by a wide margin for the season and boasted about it forever. (I am still doing it!)

I don't remember if Ambi took part in that match, but I clearly remember another match that same season, in which he scored a century. The Indian Express headlined that performance, and the first paragraph read: "S Radhakrishnan, son of Carnatic vocalist Semmangudi Srinivasier, scored a century for Parrys RC in the I division B zone today." Of course that report was factually accurate, for that is who Ambi is, but I wonder if he ever lived that report down among his cricket colleagues!

Cricket on the brain

Looking back, it had to be divine intervention or a completely benign arrangement of the stars in my favour that must have helped my cricket along, when there was no conscious effort to make a career of it, on the part of my parents or self. The first time I held a bat was around 1952, in the backyard of our Quilon (now Kollam) home, in the company of my brother Nagan, a left handed, more talented and stylish novitiate into the game at which so many in the family were good. I was barely five and for the next three years, the only cricket action we saw was provided by my father’s exploits in the game.

PN Venkatraman, Ramani to his siblings, cousins, and cricket mates, was Appa to us, his children—by  then four of us, with the latest adddition Krishnan arriving on 13 May 1952. Appa had been a stalwart of Mylapore Recreation Club, albeit a reclusive, even reluctant one, mainly because he was a bit of a hypochondriac and feared he would collapse on the cricket field, thanks to an imaginary heart condition a mischievous uncle or elder cousin had led him to believe afflicted him. (When I saw the Adoor Gopalakrishnan film Anantaram in the 1980s, a scene in it reminded me of my father’s unhappy experiences with elders in the extended family, who casually planted in him fears and anxieties with far reaching consequences, preventing the full flowering of this gentle, shy, unusually talented young lad). 

We must have come back to Madras during 1955 or 1956, for I clearly remember listening to the radio commentary in our first floor house on Murrays Gate Road when Jim Laker took 19 for 137 against the Australians at Old Trafford, the second time the off spinner claimed all ten wickets in an innings that season, having performed the feat for Surrey against the touring Aussies. I remember twiddling the knobs of our old Murphy valve radio to find the exact spot where the BBC commentary was at least half way audible. I was not yet ten and went to a Tamil medium school, so much of the commentary must have gone way above my head, even if I did manage to hear the voices of Swanton and Co. amidst all the static. I don't think John Arlott was as yet a member of the team, nor Brian Johnston or Christopher Martin Jenkins. It wasn't much later that I began to recognize these much beloved voices as I did Rex Alston and Trevor Bailey. Still, there wasn't a single cricketing point that I—or my teeming army of brothers and cousins—missed. The explanation is simple: we belonged to a completely cricket-crazy extended family.

We lived on Murrays Gate Road, a quiet enough street then, extending east-west from Alwarpet Corner to Teynampet, the whole stretch a long straight line from the Santhome Church, via Luz Church Road, almost all the way to Mount Road. 'Suprabha' was our home, a two-storeyed bungalow facing north. We lived on the first floor, my father now the agent of the Mylapore branch of Indian Overseas Bank, and downstairs lived my father's elder brother PN Sundaresan, Raja to family and friends, at the time a struggling reporter in the Indian Express, but soon to join the Hindu.

Raja was an attacking batsman who opened the innings for Mylapore Recreation Club 'A', one of the top sides in the Madras cricket league, whose clashes with arch rival Triplicane Cricket Club starring MJ Gopalan, CR Rangachari and the like, were known as the War of the Roses. MRC had many of its own stars, with most of Buchi Babu Nayudu's sons, nephews and grandsons turning out for the club at one time or another. The well known diplomat G Parthasarathi or GP, an aggressive leg spinner-batsman, CR Pattabhiraman, son of Sir CP Ramaswami Ayyar and the founder of the club, and opening batsman M Swaminathan were some of the MRC regulars.

My father's uncle PS Ramachandran or 'Pattu', the tall, wiry fast bowler who took 10 for 18 for MRC vs. TCC, was overlooked by the selectors who met the same evening to pick the 'Indians' for that season's Presidency Match. Pattu, like quite a few other cricketers of his time, was an orthodox brahmin, whose hairstyle consisted of a shaven head with a tuft of hair tied in a kudumi or chignon at the back. As he ran up to bowl his fast medium seamers, his knotted hair came off and fluttered in the breeze, and he almost instinctively reached for it to tie it back in place even as he was completing his follow through. In group photographs, he is seen wearing a black cap more like a Gandhi topi than a cricket cap.

Though he missed out on the Pongal match after that splendid burst in the Roses battle, he managed to impress the selectors enough to be included in a tour game for Madras against the visiting MCC team under the captaincy of Douglas Jardine. Pattu bowled well in both innings, picking up a couple of wickets. He was probably in his late forties when I first heard him describe the cricket he played in his youth. “Jardine said ‘Well bowled’ to me at the end of the match. He even patted me on my back.” When Pattu came home that evening, his mother, whose word was law in family circles, told him to wash even harder than usual, as he had made physical contact with a mlechha or outcaste!

Pattu lived and practised law in a gracious old bungalow in a sprawling compound on Eldams Road, parallel to and behind Murrays Gate Road, and his elder brother PS Venkatraman, a building contractor and leading tennis player of his time, was his next door neighbour. Their two houses were named Sundar (after my great grandfather Justice PR Sundara Iyer) and Parvati (after my great grandmother). Pattu's three sons Kalyanam, Dorai and Thambi took after their father and became more than useful medium pace bowlers, two of them making it to the Ranji Trophy team and Dorai almost getting there. My uncle Raja's sons Kannan and Raman were both fine all rounders. While Kannan played Ranji Trophy, Raman again just failed to make it. Add to these five, my brothers Nagan and Krishnan (V Sivaramakrishnan) and yours truly and we needed just three more for a complete eleven, though Kalyanam was far too senior to play with all of us.

Kaka



In an earlier chapter I mentioned my first match in Bombay back in 1964, when I had the honour of playing against Vinoo Mankad, captain of the Cricket Club of India team, and the fact his two sons Ashok and Atul were in the eleven he led. Little did I know that day that I would one day not only compete with the elder of the two sons on the field of play but also enjoy his friendship.

Kaka, as the late Ashok Mankad was known to one and all, was a cricketer I greatly admired for his phenomenal feats as a batsman in domestic cricket and his astute leadership. (I never knew when he was alive that his nickname was because of his fondness for the film actor Rajesh Khanna, also known as Kaka to friends). For a few years, we enjoyed a great rapport whenever we met as foes on the cricket field or friends off the field--for example, during a conditioning camp for India's Test probables of 1977-78 at Chepauk. That is when we shared a dressing room, and he kept me and the rest of the boys constantly entertained with his mostly apocryphal cricket stories. One particular anecdote involving 'Nana of Poona', P G Joshi, the late Indian wicket keeper, had us convulsed.

Nana Joshi was according to Kaka in the habit of introducing himself with a flourish as “I’m Nana of Poona.” Kaka was telling us the story of a friendly match he played at Poona against the redoubtable leadership of Joshi. It was a celebration of some kind and I don’t remember the occasion, but it was Mankad’s turn to open the innings after an interval in which a large number of shandies—a cocktail of beer and lemonade for the uninitiated—had figured prominently. Nana, leading the side from behind the stumps had perhaps not imbibed, and was full of enthusiasm in the hot sun. Mankad was so far gone that he was seeing not just two cricket balls but two bowlers altogether. He turned round and saw four slips and a gully eagerly eyeing the outer edge of his bat. Hurriedly looking the other way, he spotted forward short-leg breathing down his neck. The bowler, with a reputation for genuine pace, short-pitched bowling and a short temper, was a distant speck half way to the straight boundary.

Alarmed at this prospect of physical danger, Kaka turned to the wicket-keeper-captain and said to him in his most pleading voice: “Yeh kya ho raha hai bhai? This is only a friendly match, and after all those beers, you don’t want to kill me on the field, do you?”

Joshi was unmoved. He summoned his best professional manner and said sternly: “Ashok, you do the batting, and I’ll do the captaincy. After all, you are a Test batsman. Don’t tell me you are scared.”

Ashok had no choice but to steel his nerves and try to get out at the earliest and thus escape injury. He literally closed his eyes and flashed at the first delivery. It went screaming past gully for four. Nana, who had an impressive talent for whistling, whistled at the gully fielder and waving his arms furiously and regally, despatched him to deep third man.

Kaka said to himself: That was lucky; now let me try harder to get out this time. Another express delivery, and Kaka followed the same routine. Close eyes. Say prayer. Slash hard. This time the ball went like a bullet to point boundary. Nana whistled again, and waving his arms in a slightly different direction, banished fourth slip to point boundary. The fast bowler was not pleased at Kaka’s wild abandon.

The next ball was a vicious bouncer and Mankad’s flailing bat sent the ball over fineleg off a top edge for six. Predictably, Nana’s whistle-wave-arms routine followed as surely as Hawkeye follows the ball.

By now the paceman—I can’t swear to it, but I half-remember it to be the express tearaway Pandurang Salgaonkar—was livid with rage. He sent down a vicious toe-crusher and by the sheer power of his self-protection instincts, Mankad dug it out to send it past midwicket for four.

This time around, there was a slight change in the sequence of events. In trying to deport second slip to midwicket, Nana Joshi got the whistling perfectly right but the arm waving, for the fourth successive time, obviously proved a bit of a challenge. “Cramp! Cramp!” he shouted, and turning towards the pavilion, screamed, ”Paani, paani! Jaldi paani aur Electral lao.”

It was during that camp that I first heard the typically Mumbaiyya expression 'leg n' leg' that Kaka repeatedly used to describe our condition after our coach Darshan Tandon put us through the wringer day after day. The Indian skipper Bishan Bedi, away playing county cricket in England, joined the camp only for the last three days or so. Kaka's impersonation of how Bishan would come into the stadium for training on his first morning in the camp and find noone there was a brilliant act of mimicry. Imitating the captain, and giving wild vent to his imagination, Mankad went through the whole gamut of emotions—surprise, bewilderment, anxiety, and finally anger—peaking with the dawning of realisation in a sterling show of the adbhuta rasa, when Bishan finds the entire team jogging on the roof of the stadium.

Bishan was part of the audience that stood around Mankad at M L Jaisimha's Marredpally, Secunderabad, residence one evening during Jai's benefit match, in which the Indian team led by Bedi played against an 'international' eleven captained by Jai. Asif Iqbal, Sarfraz Nawaz, Imran Khan, Zaheer Abbas and Mushtaq Mohammed formed the strong Pakistani contingent at the match. Most of them gathered around Kaka, who told story after story, embellishing fact with fiction, slowly building up suspense in each tale, like the master raconteur he was.

Mankad was growing redder and redder in the face as the beer kept flowing after a long day in the sun, and the rest of us were struggling to stay on our feet as he kept us all in rollicking good humour.

That morning, Sunil Gavaskar had pulled a long hop from me straight into Mankad's hands at deep square leg, and one of the guests, a police official, who was generally inflicting his company on the celebrity cricketers at the party, now reminded Kaka about that. “Mr Mankad,” he said, wagging a naughty finger at Kaka, “is there an old rivalry between you and Mr Gavaskar?” Not satisfied with Kaka's firm reply in the negative, he said, “Then why did he fling his bat in the dressing room after getting out and mutter, 'Sala, drops catches in Test matches, holds mine in a benefit match'?”

Mankad's riposte was a classic, but one he was quick to stress was just a joke. He said, “Reddy Saab, catch me dropping Sunil Gavaskar! Wake me up at midnight and I will hold his catches!"

Wondering if he had perhaps gone too far, Kaka immediately tried to play it down. “Reddy saab, you know of course that I am saying all this in good humour.”

It was Bishan’s turn now to bring the roof down. “Kaka says it in good humour all right, but he means it.”

(Disclaimer: Sunil Gavaskar was not amused when he heard this story, failing perhaps to see the humour in it. He vehemently denied there was any rivalry between Kaka and himself. I hope he will see it as no more than a funny story, not meant to cast aspersions on anyone—if he reads this again. Mankad himself thoroughly enjoyed it).

Players and other characters

‘Curdrice cricketers’ was the epithet reserved for Madras cricketers of my time, the 1960s, especially of the Brahmin variety (the upper castes formed a substantial percentage of the cricket playing population of the city well into the last decade). It was a sarcastic reference to the soporific effect of the staple diet of the majority back then. We were said to lack the steel for stern battle, our artistry and skills no match to the aggression of cricketers elsewhere. The demographics of the game was however gradually changing, with many of the Anglo-Indians leaving India, and more and more of the ‘backward communities’ taking to the game with each succeeding generation.

 Let’s join the action in the first ball of a limited-overs match back in the 1960s. The new ball bowler KSS Mani is known for movement and intelligent variation rather than speed. The batsman is R. Vijayaraghavan, an entertaining stroke-maker. To ‘Viji’, if a ball is there to be hit, it is meant to be hit, even if it is the first ball of a match. Mani’s first delivery is an inswinging half volley, and Viji flicks it imperiously over square leg for six. The crowd is on its feet, but look at Mani’s reaction. He runs to the batsman and pats him on his back, shouting, ‘Great shot da, Viji.’ Though such extreme acts of sportsmanship were not a daily occurrence, most of the cricket of the time was played in a spirit of friendly combat.

Brilliant strokemakers and spin bowlers in local cricket, we were considered no-hopers when it came to locking horns with the more robust if less stylish combatants from Delhi or Bombay. Fielding was at best an unavoidable nuisance and the slips the preserve of seniors, with the babies of the team banished to the distant outposts of long leg and third man. Fast bowling was too close to real work, left best in the hands of those endowed with more brawn than brain.

The local league then was relatively informal. No registration of players by the clubs was required, and you could walk in a few minutes before the toss and join the eleven. There was much banter and fielders and batsmen often traded jokes or gossip, with the umpires sometimes joining in. The action rarely approached the frenetic and the accent was invariably on style rather than substance. The spinner who did not turn the ball and the batsman of dour defence or crude power were treated with contempt by all these different constituents of the game in my youth.

 On most grounds, the shade of a large tree served as the dressing room and facilities were generally primitive. Lunch involved a hurried dash to Ratna Café, Udipi Sukha Nivas, Shanti Vihar, Udipi Home or Dasprakash and back, depending on the venue of the match. The effects of the blazing sun were countered by glasses of unboiled, unfiltered and often multihued water stored in mud pots or brought in buckets that resembled relics dug out by archaeological expeditions.

Most Madras cricketers were unable to afford high quality gear. In fact, you needed contacts abroad or access to visiting Test cricketers to buy bats and other gear from them at fancy prices. A Gunn and Moore, Gray Nicolls or Autograph bat could cost upwards of a hundred rupees and that was a lot of money for the average cricketer. The gloves, leg guards and shoes worn by most of us often performed a psychological rather than protective role. At the lower levels of cricket it was not unusual for batsmen to wear a single leg guard rather than a pair because that was all the team could afford. The bats could be handcrafted things of beauty, but they did not possess the carry of contemporary bats that can send a top edge out of the ground.

 Despite these constraints or possibly because of them – for they served to make playing cricket seem an adventure, a privilege earned by the worthy, not something handed to you on a platter as it is today – the enthusiasm for the game was plentiful and infectious among players and spectators alike, not to mention the men behind the scenes like club secretaries, scorers and markers. Of humour, there was never any shortage and the spirit of competition was always softened by a sense of camaraderie that went beyond team loyalties.

  There were countless private grounds which the young cricketers simply entered one day and occupied, so to speak, until the Rip Van Winkle who owned the plot woke up suddenly to build his dream house, in the process shattering the dreams of many prospective Prasannas and Venkataraghavans, Pataudis and Bordes—only for the dreams to be resumed in technicolour as soon as the intrepid young cricket warriors conquered their next new territory.

Cricket did not stop even in the classroom, where boys played ‘book cricket’, by opening pages at random and affixing runs or dismissals to the two imaginary batsmen – they could be Mankad and Roy in one generation and Gavaskar and Viswanath the next. If for example you opened page 54, the second digit was the reference point for the scorekeeping, and the batsman got four runs (or two, under a different set of rules), if the page number ended in a zero, the batsman was declared out and so on.

In my extended family, we invented our own brand of home cricket, an ingenious adaptation of the bagatelle board in which we gave cricket values to the various points on the board. 150 was six runs, 125 was four, LTP was bowled, 75 was two runs, 90 three, and we had different positions for different kinds of dismissals, caught, lbw, stumped, run out, even hit wicket. A skilful player, experienced in steering the little steel ball bearings we used for marbles, could make his team score 300-400 runs if he held his nerve, and score those runs pretty rapidly. It provided perverse pleasure to make Laker and Lock or Desai and Surendranath score centuries after the top order had failed.

 Madras cricket of those days had its share of characters. P.R. Sundaram, a first rate fast medium bowler and an entertaining wielder of the long handle, was also one of the funniest men seen on a cricket field. He kept up a fairly constant chatter on the field, and was not above laughing at an umpire after he had given a dubious decision. He once informed an official after he had lifted his finger in response to his own loud appeal, that the poor batsman had not played the ball on its way to the wicketkeeper. On another occasion, he bowled a googly as his opening delivery of the match and laughed with his arms akimbo at the batsman who had been bowled shouldering arms.

Some others raised a laugh without intending to. There was ‘Kulla Kitta’ Krishnamurthy, who opened the innings for Crom-Best Recreation Club, one of numerous short statured players known by that nickname over the years, who, dismissed off the first ball of a match once, told the incoming batsman as they crossed: ‘Be careful. He moves the ball both ways.’ ‘Dochu’ Duraiswami bowled a series of full tosses in a junior match at the Central College ground in Bangalore and later declared to his teammates: ‘I have never bowled on a turf wicket before.’

 Opening batsman Balu sat up all night reading Don Bradman’s ‘The Art of Cricket’ with every intention of putting precept into practice, only to be run out first ball next morning, his partner’s straight drive brushing the bowler’s fingers on the way to the stumps, and catching him out of the crease! ‘Clubby’ Clubwalla was another popular character whom the crowds loved to boo, for his slow batting and fascinating contortions whether batting at the top of the order or bowling his alleged off spin with a most complicated action. He was a stonewaller par excellence who once made 37 runs in a whole day of batting.

On my first cricket tour, I came across some entertaining characters. It was a ten-day visit to Bombay with the Madras Cricket Association Colts, during December 1964. I was one of the two babies of the team, Rajkumar Manradiar being the other one. Some of our teammates were colts only by a liberal interpretation of the word whose dictionary meaning is a young male horse. Of course every member of the team was young, in that he was below 30! The uncharitable instead called us the Kezha Bolts, the rhyming slang for long freely used in Madras to describe seriously old cricketers. The captain SV Narayanan was a pleasant, well-mannered bank officer, but though he had a sense of humour, he was not one of the funny men of the team. Leg spinner all rounder KC Krishnamurthi led the gang of comedians who kept up our spirits throughout the trip. Chandramouli of Salem was another rather voluble member of the team, but he chose his moments of light-hearted badinage while KCK was constantly frisky, with a fund of jokes and anecdotes. Neither, is alas, with us now. Young Srikanth of Chengalpattu was my buddy on the trip and he offered his share of mirth as well. Much of the humour was directed at S Annadorai, our redoubtable manager, with his quixotic ways and absolute devotion to cricket. 

The high point of the tour was when Perumal, our gentle, emaciated marker, got high on Christmas night, and declared to the manager: “Annadorai, I the manager, you the marker!” He was severely reprimanded, but responded with a beatific smile even as he was locked up behind a grille door for the night. He was shame-faced the next morning, but he gave us all some wonderful entertainment as he questioned the manager’s parentage several times through the night in a loud, high-pitched voice.

There were other unforgettable characters in Madras cricket. Probably the best known was K.S. Kannan, the veteran all-rounder who became one of the best-loved coaches of the state, more famous for his original English than his undeniable cricket skills. Fluent in Tamil, his mother tongue, he could barely pass muster in English, yet he loved to express himself in the Queen’s language, with invariably hilarious results. ‘Give me the ball to him,’ he would tell one of his wards, and ‘ask me to pad up one batsman.’ ‘Thanking you, yours faithfully, K.S. Kannan,’ were the famous last words of a speech he made at a school function.

\In more recent years, the stylish right hand batsman T.E. Srinivasan was famous for his wit and eccentric behaviour. On an Australian tour, his only one, T.E. allegedly told a local press reporter, ‘Tell Dennis Lillee T.E. has arrived.’ On the same tour he persuaded a security official at a Test match to warn innocent Yashpal Sharma that he would be arrested if he continued to stare at the ladies through his binoculars. Yashpal’s panic and the resultant roar of laughter from the Indian dressing room caused a stoppage in the middle as the batsman Gavaskar drew away annoyed by the disturbance.

League matches often attracted crowds in excess of a thousand and the 30-overs a side Sport & Pastime (later The Hindu) Trophy final invariably drew five or six thousand spectators. Many finals were played at the Marina ground on the Beach Road, now Kamarajar Salai, which wore a festive appearance on such occasions, with every seat in the gallery taken, every treeshade occupied and dozens of cars and scooters parked on Beach Road, providing a vantage view of the match from just beyond a low wall. If you were patrolling the boundary line, you could eavesdrop on the most knowledgeable cricket conversations among spectators who knew not only the finer points of the game but also the relative merits of all the league teams and their players backwards. You could even receive some useful advice gratis, but God save you if you misfielded or dropped a catch!

 Devoted spectators sometimes went from ground to ground watching more than one match in a single day. ‘IOB 73 for 4 at Viveka, State Bank 100 for no loss at Marina, Jolly Rovers 82 for 2 at Pachaiyappa’s,’ one of them, a league cricket fanatic of many years’ standing, would announce even before parking his scooter. Quickly collecting the scores at this new venue, he would troop off to provide similar information to players at another ground anxious to learn how the competition was faring elsewhere. Today, coaches and managers carry cell phones and information is exchanged instantly and effortlessly by all the protagonists involved in the chase for match points. I recently ran into another old faithful, a slim, bearded man always neatly turned out in white shirt and a dhoti he wore tucked up at knee level, who was a silent spectator at every one of Alwarpet Cricket Club’s matches. He told me he had stopped watching cricket, which was “no longer worth watching, eventhough the players were much better looked after now.”

A Ranji trophy match between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka or Hyderabad could draw a crowd of 20,000-30,000 paying spectators. A match at Chepauk, with all its historic association with the ‘Pongal’ match of yore, was a most enjoyable spectacle, watched by somnolent vacationers seated under the trees surrounding the ground. That was before the concrete cauldron of the 1970s came up, effectively reducing cricketers to dehydrated invalids in a matter of hours came to dominate the landscape.

 It was an occasion to pack your puliyodarai and thair sadam and set out on a day-long excursion to catch up with old friends, and in their company, dissect the doings of the protagonists of the drama being enacted before you, to applaud or barrack bowlers, batsmen and fielders.

Madras crowds are not only knowledgeable but generally hard-to-please as well. They will never accept Anil Kumble as a better bowler than their own V.V. Kumar, a wrist spinner in the orthodox mould unlike the Karnataka express googly specialist. Gundappa Viswanath of the steely wrists and the nonchalant artistry ranks higher with them than Sunil Gavaskar, for all the Little Master’s achievements and peerless technique.

Oldtimers even today experience goosebumps when they recall a magnificent innings of 215 played at Chepauk by the Ceylon stylist Sathasivam in 1940. According to many, no better innings has ever been played at Chepauk. But post-War cricket enthusiasts rate G.R. Viswanath’s unbeaten 97 against West Indies in January 1975 as the greatest innings in living memory, better than the best Gavaskar and Tendulkar knocks played at the same venue – and there have been plenty of those at Chepauk. The Triplicane crowds still wax lyrical about E.A.S. Prasanna’s deadly spell in 1969, when he had Australia reeling at 24 for 6, and will be the first to admit that their own local hero Venkataraghavan could not have hoped to equal the magic of that afternoon.

 That is the one feature of the Madras crowd that you will rarely find elsewhere in India – the ability to transcend regional, even national bias to appreciate true sporting endeavour and artistry. This sportsmanship was never more in evidence than when the Pakistanis under Wasim Akram did a victory lap at the end of a pulsating match India almost won in 1999. I remember the drama of that afternoon as though it happened yesterday. The crowd had been roaring its approval all morning as Tendulkar led an incredible assault on the rival bowling, supported by the gallant Nayan Mongia. Unfortunately, with victory seemingly within easy reach, Sachin succumbed to the strain of the painful back injury he had been carrying throughout the innings, and soon it was all over for India.

There was a stunned silence, as if the huge crowd was still waiting for a signal from the small but significant saffron brigade in the stands that had been shouting anti-Pakistan slogans on the last day of the match (Bal Thackeray had earlier called for a ban on the tour). Like many others in the pavilion terrace, I looked back anxiously at the leader of the group, who, after what seemed like an interminable wait, gave the thumbs up to his followers. They burst into applause and the rest of the stadium joined in thunderous ovation as the victors did their triumphant march around the ground. It was a moment to make every Indian proud.

Missed opportunities

There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

These words of Brutus in Shakepeare’s Julius Caesar are probably the wisest ever spoken in history. In my cricket career, I did not pay heed to the tide at more than one crucial juncture, though the first time around, I was more to be pitied than censured, when well-meaning but incompetent seniors saw the tide in my affairs and neatly deflected it.

The first hint that I was perhaps capable of competing with professional cricketers came on a tour of Bombay a month after my 17^th birthday. I was in the midst of a successful 1963-64 season as an off-spinner for Jai Hind Cricket Club in the First division B zone of the Madras league.  My performances led to my inclusion in the Madras Cricket Association Colts team selected from the B and C zones of the First Division. It was then customary for the Colts team to undertake a ten-day tour of Bombay where it played some strong teams. It was a wonderful experience for players who otherwise never had any exposure to cricket outside Madras.

The tour was off to a memorable start, with our opening match against Cricket Club of India at the famous Brabourne Stadium, the venue of many a stirring international contest. The excitement of playing at the historic ground was enhanced by the personnel that did duty for CCI. The team was led by Vinoo Mankad—now retired from first class cricket—and had a few Ranji Trophy players and at least one India cap in Arvind Apte. It was a proud moment for all of us when our manager asked Mankad to hand us our Colts caps. Unfortunately, to our great disappointment, the former India captain neither bowled nor batted in the match, though two of his sons, Ashok and Atul, played in the eleven. Ashok went on to captain Bombay and pile up runs at an average of over 70 in the Ranji Trophy, and though less successful as a Test batsman, had his moments in international cricket.

Winning the toss, CCI batted first. I came on to bowl before the new ball was ten overs old, as was often the practice those days. With the ball still shiny, I was getting quite a bit of bounce and frequent away movement while bowling my off spin at a slightly quicker pace than I would with an older ball. With my brisk run-up, high arm action and attempt to impart sharp finger spin, I was proving quite a handful to the batsmen. Arvind Apte was one of them, and he was all at sea, not knowing which of my deliveries would turn and which would go the other way. I was finding the edge and hitting him on the pads frequently, and feeling quite on top of the world. It was so exciting to know that a Test batsman was struggling against my yet unproven spin bowling. I was thrilled I seemed to belong at that level.

It was too good to last. My captain SV Narayanan, an amiable chap who could bat a bit, did not seem to know much about spin bowling, unlike my Jai Hind captain Raman. “Toss it up, toss it up,” he kept pestering me, when he should have let me continue bowling the way I was bowling. The batsmen were sooner or later bound to make a fatal mistake, the way I was dominating them. I had frequently come across such ignorance in collegiate cricket, but also knew how to ignore gratuitous advice and do my own thing as far as bowling was concerned. This time, unfortunately, I succumbed to pressure from the skipper, who was ten years older and more experienced. I sent down a couple of lollipops, which were duly despatched to the boundary. The same captain who had exhorted me to squander my advantage away, now took me off. I never bowled again in the match, in fact almost never again on the tour.

You don’t show your disappointment on a cricket tour, and I had wonderful company in some of my teammates, but I realised that every passing day without an opportunity to bowl against the high quality batsmen the Bombay teams had lined up for us was seriously hampering my progress. I was still playing in the second division (First Division B Zone those days) of the Madras league and would never have such chances back at home. The indifference of the team management really hurt me. The manager of the team, Mr S Annadorai, was an eccentric old man, who, because he was distantly related to me—I guessed—decided he must be sternly impartial towards me. He decided to find fault with me constantly and even made fun of me in public more than once.

I must hand it to him, though. Mr Annadurai was an excellent manager of a young team, when it came to looking after our comforts on the tour. The dormitory of the South Indian Education Society’s school at King’s Circle, Matunga, where we stayed, was spacious, clean, and cool. We slept on mattresses spread on the floor in the assembly hall, and as the school was closed for Christmas holidays, we had the whole school to ourselves. The bathrooms were spotlessly clean and that really helped our morale. Breakfast and dinner were usually at a nearby cafe or South Indian Concerns, a popular hostelry catering to people from our part of the world as the name suggests. Lunch was at the ground where we were playing and the manager also treated us to icecream, movies, or even dinner at some relatively posh joint. In this, he was generous to a fault, often spending his own money on us.

The problem started, I think, with my smoking cigarettes. The habit was a few months old, and I probably smoked two or three cigarettes a day, but I hated doing it in the sly. The manager saw me light up a couple of times, and was duly shocked. He made it a point to declare in the team bus what an unworthy member of what a worthy family I was. I did not realise that a case was being built up against me, and it was exciting to be seen as a rebel— though one without a cause, for sure.

The second nail in my coffin was struck by a girl my family knew back in Madras, when she joined me—and the whole team, manager and marker—at the movies the one afternoon we were free on the tour. The last straw for the manager was when I returned from my teammate Lakhi’s cousin’s flat on Marine Drive and vomited violently. The villain was a particularly greasy peas masala we ate that evening, but my manager refused to believe I was as yet a teetotaller. “He smokes, he drinks, and he womanises!”  he announced to a tittering group of irresponsible young rascals, who loved my discomfiture rather than rise to a man in support of me.

Annadurai—bless his departed soul, for I hold no grudge against him—haunted me throughout the short tour with sarcastic remarks. “Ramnarayan’s top spin is as erratic as his off spin”, he declared at the table tennis table one evening. I had hardly any chance to prove my ability on that tour. In hindsight, I realise I was one of the few players in the squad who could have gone on to higher levels of cricket. As events turned out in the long run, I was, in fact, the only one to do so, but I had to endure a very long wait, as this was my last opportunity for the next five years. Annadurai’s tour-end assessment of my performance saw to it.

The highlight of the tour was the opportunity to rub shoulders with some of the greats of the game. And, when I landed at Madras and found that my father had been hospitalised, it was a rude wake-up call. He recovered soon enough, but it was my first hint of some of the hard times to come.