Cricket between the covers

How I wish I could separate sex and cricket, and avert the messiness that ensues when the twain meet. That way, I could turn my back on Chris Gayle and the stripper pole installed in his basement. I could also pretend that he didn’t really try to pick up that Aussie anchor on live television. Trevor Bayliss, the Team England coach, would be similarly obscured from view: I would happily erase that press conference where he absolutely had to use a homophobic slur to describe his team’s performance (“At one point, we played like pretty boys out there”). But, as Navjot Sidhu, the source of every third word spoken in India since 1998, once said, if my aunt had a moustache, she’d be my uncle (I’m not entirely sure whom exactly that offends: probably those advocates of reason, Sense & Sensibility).

Queering the pitch

Thanks to Aravind Adiga’s new novel, Selection Day, it will now be that much tougher for naysayers to pretend that nascent sexuality, sexual abuse and the stigma faced by homosexual cricketers are non-issues, as far as the 22 yards are concerned. Selection Day is the story of two cricketing prodigies, 16-year-old Radha and the almost-14 Manjunath (Manju), and their overbearing, abusive father, Mohan Kumar, known as the Chutney Raja. The sons eat only what he asks them to, and they squirm but keep quiet when he strips them on a weekly basis, touching their genitals, ostensibly for medical reasons. He thrashes one or both of them whenever he feels like it.

The Chutney Raja also wishes that cricket displaces sex in his adolescent boys’ lives. Just before he begins to get handsy with them, he subjects them to an extraordinary line of interrogation.

“‘Are you thinking of shaving? I can see in your eyes that you are thinking of shaving.’

‘No, Appa.’

‘A boy mustn’t shave until he’s ...’

‘Twenty-one.’

‘Why must a boy not shave until he’s ...?’

‘Hormones.’

‘Which are not good for ...’

‘Cricketers.’”

A lot of the scenes in the novel take their cue from real-life incidents and people in the Mumbai cricket circuit. As most Indian fans know, Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli together piled a record 664 unbeaten runs for their school, Shardashram Vidya Mandir, in the semi-finals of the 1988 inter-school Harris Shield. In Selection Day, too, a diminutive, dogged right-hander (Manju) and a free-flowing left-hander easy on the eye (his rival-turned-ally Javed Ansari) stack up a monstrous 400-plus runs. At one point during the partnership, Ansari even refers to the legendary Tendulkar-Kambli run-feast, before gifting his wicket to a hapless, recently orphaned friend.

At the heart of the novel lies Manju and his attempts to understand his emerging sexuality. He is attracted to Ansari, but knows what this entails in the hyper-masculine world of schoolboy cricket. Indeed, before Manju’s epic partnership and subsequent bonding with Ansari, the boys meet in less-than-ideal circumstances: Radha and Manju scribble an unspecified (homophobic) insult in large letters on Ansari’s chest-guard.

Now, Ansari comes from a fairly privileged background and is sophisticated for his age, not to mention extremely secure in his sexual identity (Adiga plays with the question of his privilege quite brilliantly: his favourite book is Orwell’s Animal Farm; in the real world, Ansari, a rich gay Muslim kid, can sail through life despite the rampant homophobia, because some animals remain more equal than others). Cigarette in hand, he calmly tells Manju that, in all probability, the two brothers did not even understand the words they used to insult him. Eventually, Manju and Ansari do become the best of friends, and the former’s physical and intellectual growth lets him express himself freely, even standing up to his once-bogeyman father.

In a hilarious scene, Manju picks up a photograph of Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi — one of India’s greatest cricket captains and a famously handsome man — and, in full view of his father, goes to the bathroom to masturbate.

“And his father put his hands on the toilet door and whimpered like a dog. ‘Manju, this is immoral, he was our greatest captain, don’t ... don’t ... do immoral things in there, Manju, with the Nawab of Pataudi. What will the neighbours think of your father?’

‘Shut up!’ the boy shouted from inside. ‘It’s like batting. I need to concentrate. Don’t disturb me for the next three minutes.’”

The masters at play

Selection Day works at several levels, and is a trailblazer among Indian novels, but fiction-writing is no stranger to memorable cricketing scenes. James Joyce, literary trickster and maker of multilingual puns, wrote an entire sex scene littered with cricketing metaphors, jokes and allusions to the famous cricketers of the time. This was in Finnegans Wake, the literary equivalent of batting against four spinners on a crumbling Indian pitch, an old ball jumping and spitting at you.

“(...) Her lamp was all askew and a trumbly wick-in-her, ringeysingey. She had to spofforth, she had to kicker, too thick of the wick of her pixy’s loomph, wide lickering jessup the smooky shiminey. And her duffed coverpoint of a wickedy batter, whenever she druv behind her stumps for a tyddlesly wink through his tunnilclefft bagslops after the rising bounder’s yorkers, as he studd and stoddard and trutted and trumpered, to see had lordherry’s blackham’s red bobby abbels, it tickled her innings to consort pitch at kicksolock in the morm. Tipatonguing him on in her pigeony linguish, with a flick at the bails for lubrication, to scorch her faster, faster.”

Gilbert Jessop (one of the most feared hitters of the pre-War years), Victor Trumper (the best Australian batsman before Bradman) and legendary fast bowler Fred “The Demon” Spofforth have all turned verbs in this passage. ‘Ringeysingey’ refers to Ranjitsinhji, the Nawab of Nawanagar, who played Test cricket for England and revolutionised the art of batting with his aggressive leg-side strokeplay — he was one of the first international players to employ the leg glance (the Ranji Trophy, India’s premier first-class tournament, is named after him). Later in the novel, cricket again surfaces in tongue-in-cheek neologisms like “leg-before-wicked”.

The sounds associated with the game (the familiar thwack of leather against willow, the scuffing up of the pitch every time the bowler lands his front foot) are especially fascinating to Joyce. His Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has a lovely little passage describing the beginning of an English cricketing summer. “But there was no play on the football grounds for cricket was coming... And all over the playgrounds they were playing rounders and bowling twisters and lobs. And from here and from there came the sounds of the cricket bats through the soft grey air. They said: pick, pack, pock, puck: little drops of water in a fountain slowly falling in the brimming bowl.”

PG Wodehouse’s boarding school novels often featured cricketing scenes at crucial junctures: The Head of Kay’s is a prime example, with its protagonist Fenn, a domineering all-rounder who, true to schoolboy cricketing ethos, carries his team in both the batting and bowling departments. EM Forster’s Maurice was notably ahead of its time — written in 1914, it was only published in 1971 because the author feared the public’s prejudice against homosexuality.

In the novel, the titular Maurice Hall has an affair with his friend’s gamekeeper, Alec Scudder. At one point, Scudder, a naturally skilled cricketer, reluctantly captains a team that includes Maurice, grumbling “Things go better with a gentleman in charge.” Cricket thus reinforces the stifling English class-system (which was gratefully embraced by India: the remarkably talentless Maharaja of Vizianagaram once captained us), while also offering a vision of a classless society. After all, Scudder’s skills on the field are, by themselves, an advertisement for egalitarianism: a thunderbolt hurled at ninety miles an hour can scarcely curtsy before shattering your stumps.

And if his Lordship looked a little silly trying to protect his wicket and his equally fragile ego, well, tough luck.

1, 2 and 3 in the batting order

Before Selection Day, there have been three exceptional 21st-century novels involving cricket, beginning with Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, published in 2008 and desperately unlucky to miss out on a Booker nod after being longlisted (Adiga’s debut, The White Tiger, went on to win). Netherland is a Gatsbyian fable about Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian entrepreneur who wants to bring international cricket to the US. The narrator of the novel, a Dutch financial analyst called Hans van der Broek, finds his marriage suffering in the post-9/11 paranoia, around the same time he befriends Ramkissoon and starts playing cricket with his mates at the Staten Island Cricket Club.

Although Ramkissoon’s is very much the American Dream, its success depends on the enthusiasm and the pockets of wealthy immigrants, mostly Asian or Caribbean. In the pages of Netherland, cricket is the brown immigrant’s ladder to an imperialist, white-bright-tycoon triumph, but all along, we are keenly aware of the post-colonial irony at play.

The second and third novels in our trinity come from Sri Lanka (an honourable mention goes to The Sly Company of People Who Care by Rahul Bhattacharya). Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman bagged two major awards in 2012: the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and the Commonwealth Book Prize. It’s a classic search-for-an-unfulfilled-genius novel, wherein a terminally-ill sports journalist is desperately looking for Pradeep Mathew, a bewildering left-arm wrist spinner (called a “chinaman” in cricketing parlance, after Ellis Achong, the pioneer of this brand of bowling and the first person of Chinese descent to play Test matches; not the most politically correct moment for cricket, but we’ve seen worse). In the world of this novel, Mathew was the most dangerous bowler of his era, but was constantly foiled by the wildly inconsistent Lankan team of the ’80s.

Karunatilaka amply demonstrated the scope that the five-day game provides novelists with. When I interviewed the author shortly after his DSC victory in 2012, he had said: “I do believe the way a Test series unfolds can have an epic narrativ e feel, like the arc of a TV series. At least the good ones do. Not India playing Sri Lanka every Tuesday.”

War minus the shooting

Karunatilaka had a point about the India-Sri Lanka matches, which were taking place with alarming regularity then. But in general, the intensity, the emotional agency and the militaristic fervour associated with cricket in this part of the world is best summed up by Mike Marqusee’s phrase “war minus the shooting”, also the name of his excellent book about the 1996 World Cup jointly organised by India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

This phrase was on my mind throughout the first 50 pages of Chhimi Tenduf-La’s Panther, published last year: the last great cricket novel before Manju and his Popeye forearms entered the field. Panther has a memorable protagonist in Prabu, a Sri Lankan Tamil child soldier, whose outrageous talents with the bat catch the eye of the Panther (a breakaway guerrilla separatist faction) commander. Soon, Prabu is sent to an upscale high school, Mother Nelson Mahatma International, where he is enrolled under a scheme to rehabilitate IDPs (internally displaced person).

The genius of Panther lies not merely in Prabu’s inimitable voice, reflecting his valiant attempts at figuring out English grammar (“My name is called the Prabu”), or the wonderfully fleshed out foil he has in Indika, star batsman and all-round golden Sinhalese boy, whose family adopts Prabu. It is in its precarious balancing act, wherein Tenduf-La alternates chapters of Wodehousian schoolboy bonhomie with terrifying — and also remarkably funny — sections with details of Prabu’s life under Colonel Thisara, Tarzan and the rest of the extraordinary Panther line-up.

Tenduf-La, born to a British mother and a Tibetan father, grew up in Delhi, London, Colombo and Hong Kong. He currently lives in Sri Lanka with his family. Three very distinct cricketing cultures, then: India, Sri Lanka and England. When I spoke to him last week, he told me about growing up with cricket in these different places.

“I was at Eton myself, so boarding school played a large part in how I grew up. I remember cricket matches where, when I was batting, I would see my friends who were already out sneaking off into the bushes for a cigarette and I wanted to join them but didn’t want to get out. I have also played matches here in Sri Lanka where the opposing school’s supporters started singing, ‘we have a dog named Chhimi’, after I had taken a few wickets. When I went back to the boundary I said, ‘Thanks, I love dogs’. The next over they sang, ‘we have a cat named Chhimi’.”

Tenduf-La’s writing is funny, but never immature or trivialising. Some of the most comical of Prabu’s mutilations of the English language happen smack in the middle of scenes juggling big, weighty themes artfully and with great compassion. Tenduf-La’s characters may be called Shock Ice or Tarzan, and the places dubbed something like “No Moustache Land”, but in this world, you will never quite separate the lad jokes from the landmines. It helps, also, that Tenduf-La is affectionately knowledgeable about cricket, and the worrying polarisation of the cricketing world, along racial lines, in several cases.

At several points in the novel, Prabu is sledged by opposition fielders and captains, with “Tamil scum” and “that black bastard” generously tossed around. For cricket fans, it is impossible to not compare and contrast with what’s happening in South Africa at the moment, with strict racial quotas imposed in national team selection. Former cricketers and fans alike have criticised this move, with Daryl Cullinan noting that “Cricket is not a black man’s game (of choice) in South Africa” (conveniently ignoring the fact that cricketing gear is expensive, several times more so than football’s, for example).

Tenduf-La’s writing is as subtle as a late cut when he wants it to be, which is why we also realise, slowly, that Prabu’s rapid integration into Mahatma Nelson is not entirely innocent: the patronising school authorities are more than happy to have a PR goldmine on their hands; the poor, hungry Tamil genius they rescued from the belly of the war machine. It’s no surprise, then, that his response to the South African dilemma is a delicate, considered one.

According to Tenduf-La, while the apartheid boycott imposed on South African cricket was justified, the current situation presents a uniquely discomfiting scenario.

He said: “I wouldn’t like to be the coloured player who gets selected because of the quota, knowing other members of the team believe you would not have been selected if not for your colour. It can seriously affect the balance of the side, plus you are denying another cricketer who has worked incredibly hard to play for their country.”

The far pavilions

Although Adiga and Tenduf-La’s are entirely different schools of writing, there is common ground to be found in their teenaged batting prodigies. The class dynamics between Ansari and Manju are more prominent than the sombre, Buster Keaton-like hilarity of Prabu’s encounters with Indika’s family. But both come from a place of great restlessness and the acknowledgement of deep-seated prejudices. Both Selection Day and Panther, moreover, are critical of toxic masculinity, what Adiga accurately locates as Mumbai cricket’s khadoos (hardboiled) culture.

Years ago, pursuing a story about Mahendra Singh Dhoni (and Ranchi, the hometown we share), I was watching a local tennis-ball tournament. Fluorescent balls were being dispatched to parts of the ground that rose and dipped in obedience to the Jharkhandi plateau’s whims.

One particularly venomous shot caught the scorer, an earnest young man, on the leg with considerable force. The boy, making an effort to hold back the cry of pain, ground his teeth and attempted a grievously unconvincing kind of laughter. In the distance, I could hear some of the fielders sniggering on cue. Years after this incident, Philip Hughes, a precocious young man just nine days older than me, died after a bouncer hit him on the head.

When I read about Manju scoring a century with a recently broken thumb (courtesy his father), or Prabu battling on after copping a bouncer in the face, I remembered that boy. Before we retire to the far pavilions, so to speak, I would like the two of us to experience a world where cricket and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Books like Selection Day and Panther will help get us there.

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