A city in perpetual motion
By Omar Kureishi
From DAWN
IN a sense, Bombay was an un-Indian city. Its cosmopolitanism and population-mix may have had something to do with it. There was, too, no defined historical reference point and no great mosques and temples and churches.
Bombay was a modern city in appearance and outlook. Perhaps, hidden in its bowels was the real India, intolerant, bigoted, superstitious and desperately poor. Bombay had Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Christians, Jews, Sikhs, Buddhists living in it, more or less on equal terms and not at the sufferance of any one dominant community.
As a Muslim in Bombay, I did not feel disadvantaged, and as we traveled about in buses and trams and local trains, we sat among each other, religious taboos went by the window and the high- caste Hindus had no choice, but to mingle with the Untouchables without getting defiled. Bombay was a great levelers. What Bombay had was vitality. It was a city in perpetual motion. And by now, I was beginning to come to terms with it.
My life was not confined to going to school and coming home. I was now familiar with the sounds and smells, the flavour of the city and ventured forth far and wide, knew my way around. This gave me a sense of independence and without in any way loosening family bonds, I was becoming my own person.
So long as the War was confined to Europe, it created neither any hardships nor anxiety. It did create shortages of some products and rationing was introduced. When demand exceeds supply, it provides a great business opportunity and there was the emergence of a blackmarket. It was the first time I had heard the word and wondered where this blackmarket was located.
The only market I was familiar with was the Crawford’s Market where my mother would go for her household shopping. Its main section was a covered market where vegetables, fruit, fish, meat and poultry, flowers and provisions were sold. The market was in the centre of a whole network of lanes where one could buy anything from a pin to an elephant. I was also familiar with Chor Bazaar which was in the vicinity of Bhendi Bazaar. But blackmarket? Someone wised me to it and as the War progressed - an unfortunate word for something as deadly as war - the blackmarket flourished and fortunes were made. The War, in fact, would prove to be a big boost for business, proving, perhaps, that behind every great fortune is a human calamity.
But there was an unexpected boost for Indian cricket as well. All international cricket had been suspended, but, because there was little likelihood of India becoming a theatre of War or a battle-field, domestic cricket in the way of the Ranji Trophy and the Bombay Pentangular really took off. We already knew of Vijay Merchant as a run-getting machine, but there was a new kid on the block and his name was Vijay Hazare and he would dominate Indian cricket beyond the War years.
He was not altogether unknown, but now he was to come into full bloom. Hazare was a Christian, but unlike most Indian Christians who were Roman Catholic, Hazare was a Protestant. Although he represented Mahahrashtra originally, like many Indian cricketers, he took the princely shilling. Let Mihir Bose in his A History of Indian Cricket take up the story: "His (Hazare’s) employer was the Maharaja of Dewas, Senior, the ruler of a princely state with a fifteen-gun salute and a population of 83,000. Dewas was the subject of E.M. Forster’s The Hill of Devi. Hazare’s employer, Vikram Singh, narrowly escaped being poisoned by his own father. It seems that the father who was then the ruler, wanted to seduce Vikram’s wife, his own daughter-in-law. He failed, she was driven out of the state, and he then denounced his son Vikram as an illegitimate child.
“In the end, the father, having run the Treasury dry, decamped to Pondicherry which being a French possession was outside British control. Vikram Singh became ruler and one of his first acts was take on Hazare on his staff.”
I am not sure whether Hazare was aware of this exotic background. But his luck certainly changed. Although I had heard a lot about Hazare, I had not actually seen him play. When I finally did, not only would I not forget it, but it would have a pronounced influence on the way I thought about the game of cricket. Not Wazir Ali Nissar or Mushtaq Ali nor C.K. Nayadu, Amarsingh or Amarnath turned my passion for the game into a love of it in a deeper meaning of the word.
My brothers and I had gone to the Brabourne Stadium to see the Muslims play The Rest in the Bombay Pentangular. As usual, we were seated in the Islam Gymkhana enclosure and there were not many people at the ground. The match, for all intents and purposes, was a formality, a sort of warm-up for the expected final against The Hindus. The Muslims batted first and made 350 which seemed more than enough. The Rest lost four quick wickets, but not Hazare. He was still there and found a partner in his brother Vivek, whose job was to keep his wicket intact.
Hazare made 250 in a score of 395, and The Rest won by virtue of a first innings lead. I thought I would never see a better innings, but Hazare was not done as yet. In the final against The Hindus, Hazare did a lot of bowling as The Hindus piled on 518 for 8 with Vijay Merchant making 250. The Rest found themselves at 60 for 5 when Hazare was again joined by his brother Vivek. Hazare made 309 out of a total of 395, nearly eighty per cent of his side’s score. Though The Rest lost the match, a large crowd gathered in front of the pavilion and demanded to see Hazare.
An Indian crowd can be like a rejected lover and can turn nasty when it does not have its way. It was Vijay Merchant who persuaded Hazare to make an appearance, and he was given a thunderous ovation. Among the crowd were my brothers and I. If I was asked which was the best innings I had ever seen, it would be this one. There was a certain nobility about it. Perhaps, it was the very nature of the man, a shy and undemonstrative Indian Christian who came from a modest, if not deprived, background, a professional cricketer in the employ of a princely ruler, unlike Vijay Merchant who was a business tycon, a Gujarati mill-owner.
This innings gave me a new perspective on cricket. It was a game that needed, preeminently, character. One could play cricket just for the joy of it or one could play it with a serious purpose (without diminishing the joy) and this required a certain selflessness, as Vivek Hazare surely showed, but also a mastery, discipline, courage and self-belief. I had started to play chess which was a mind game. Cricket, no less, was a mind game and I decided to pursue it more earnestly and more ambitiously.
In those days there used to be a cricket season. The game was not played all the year round. In Bombay, for reasons I was never able to fathom out, the cricket season began with the start of the monsoon. Many a match was washed out and many an afternoon spent in scrutinizing the leaden skies to see if there was a tent of blue so that we could expect the rain to stay away. Cathedral School played its cricket on the Bombay Provincial Hockey Association (BPHA) ground, which was near the Churchgate railway station, and not from the Brabourne Stadium. It was a beautiful ground, fringed by coconut palms on one side, and at one corner of the ground was a small well which seemed to have some religious significance, Hindu or Parsi, I cannot remember, but there would be worshippers around the well.
The ground had a hard, firm turf wicket and a lush green outfield, smooth as a billiard table top. After all, top class hockey was played there in the winter and spring months. For reasons of snobbery, that is how I saw it, we did not play against other schools, something I corrected when I became captain, but against commercial firms and thus invariably stronger opposition. There was an annual fixture against Bombay Gymkhana on their ground which was the equivalent of playing at Lords as far as we were concerned.
We approached the game with great solemnity. Mr Pharoah, the cricket master, would put us through a dress-drill, making sure that our whites had been freshly laundered and our cricket boots had been cleaned with blanco. Bombay Gymkhana being a For Europeans Only club, it was a great honour for us Indians to be allowed in its hallowed premises, and for the Anglo-Indians, it was early Christmas. We were, of course, not expected to win. This, too, was changed, as I will write by and by.
By my second year in school, I was playing for the First X1, but the star of the team was my brother Rafiushan (Shanoo). He was not only a fine batsman, but had developed into a highly promising leg-spinner. In one match he took eight wickets and The Evening News, a sister publication of The Times of India did a feature on him with the headline ‘School Boy Who Bowls Googlies’ and Shanoo’s smiling photograph to go with the feature. In this match he had bowled a batsman with a googly and when the batsman was asked what had happened he said the ground shook. I have heard many explanations from batsmen when they have got out, but this remains the most original.
Bombay was a cricket mad city and most of the cricket was played on maidans where dozens of matches would be going on simultaneously and it was not uncommon for a ball to stray into another game where it would be dutifully fielded and returned. There was The Oval, the Azad Maidan, the Esplanade, all close to one another and near my school. Tents would be pitched and these would serve as pavilions. But there were many other maidans, Shivaji Park (where Sachin Tendulkar learnt his cricket) and in the suburbs. Considering that Bombay, like New York, was an island and cramped for space, it was incredible that there should have been so many playing fields and no one would have dared to have converted them into commercial plots. It certainly was a different world, a simpler one and less greedy.