The We of sport

Written after the first flush of victory had dissolved into a dazed dense inward high. Hence the slightly drunk quality.

To be a pixel in a picture, stardust in a galaxy, synapse in a body, one of a billion cricket fans!

Not the banding arms of jingoists scavenging the ephemeral dust of human joy and despair, seeking to raise the spectre of a forced national identity, propped against a manufactured enemy – No, not that! Nor even material for the heart-high fences raised by the parasitic media in a bid to create more consumable identities. It is not to establish, or know, but to sense through the ether of sublimated emotion, that for the space of some moments there is more out there being exactly like me.

These individual lives we live, each of us born to life in an apparently unique point in a time-space, forging our way through a million milestones of resistance straining for independence from the blackhole of universality, for an identity, for a voice, for separation – to me always a little puzzling; on days like these, unfathomable.

Too much drama about a trivial thing, do you think? Should I be saving the rhetoric for a large tragedy or a private one? For societal revolution?

But only the most sublime artistic temperament can find in great grief the detachment required to truly find the quivering life of it. The lesser people need a device of distance, the obvious ploy of playacting to help be both within and without a moment. To us – the ordinary people – give us sport. In sport, through the ardency, the anguish, the allurement, the elation, there is always a subliminal cognition of its fantastical nature, of its being removed from the real and the core. This luxury of distance affords us the opportunity to vibrate at a comfortable pitch. Sport can make a world resonate in fine-tuned orchestra of a million minds; it is altogether breathtaking music.

Whew! That wasn’t so bad!

This morning before the start of play, in the lead-up session, Harsha Bhogle was taking us down for the pitch report when he said, “Is it a pitch? Is it a trampoline? Will the keeper have to stand near the ropes?” Something queer happened to me just then. I think I tried to laugh but it came out like a shudder. Ten days of nervous anticipation had left my system somewhat battered.

Really, there has been so much said about the Perth pitch, I had begun to supplant it in my fevered dreams with the moon’s surface. The darned pitch was more talked about than Gopal’s hilsa. Plays, concerts, readings, home, hearth and Hyderabad... no place was safe from assault. You could be talking of Jazz, infants, modernism or aurekaal sambar the conversation would veer in the most eerie fashion to the pitch. And move forward in almost choreographed lines:

First somebody would express regret that Sydney was our one real chance.

Then the group would sigh.

Then somebody (quite often me) would open and close their mouth in a frustrated show of naïve optimism.

At which somebody would waggle their eyebrows and say ‘Perth’ in wan tones of wisdom.

This would be the cue for the most statistically inclined of the lot to tell us in traumatizing detail why a score of 78 for 8 would be cause to cheer.

There would then be a moment of silence.

Followed by a half hopeful half petulant, “yes, but on a good day… “

Embarrassed laughter by all concerned would put paid to that particular segment of the conversation.

As a result, such horrific visions had I drawn up of whizzing missiles and bouncing bludgeons that I woke up in a cold sweat one night wondering if they made the helmets sturdy enough and if increment tonics could possibly work on thirty four year old men; this, despite the fact that I had been assiduously practicing my hooks and cuts with nightly regularity before dropping off to sleep.

So I can’t express to you what a relief it is to find that the Perth pitch is not in fact a missile launcher but a nice regular, if somewhat bouncy, cricket pitch. 297 for 6 may not be the best first day score in test cricket, but stap me if I complain.