Century in the neighbourhood: Sachin reaches a mythic milestone

My friendly neighbourhood lock-and-key man, Abbas, is to blame. He’s in the crowd gathered outside Sachin Tendulkar’s house as the great man approaches his 100th hundred. I come down from my home, opposite Tendulkar’s, to run an errand. As soon as I walk through my gate, Abbas says loudly, “Ab Dilip-sir ka interview lenge!” (“Now they’ll take Dilip-sir’s interview!”). Before I can take another step, three different newsmen and their attached cameramen have converged on me. “As Sachin’s neighbour,” says the first into his red-topped mike before thrusting it at me, “you must be especially happy today! Please tell us how you feel!” Deja vu; another correspondent had once used nearly the same words. The day in late 2008 when the papers announced that Tendulkar had bought the crumbling bungalow opposite, a small crush of TV people showed up. One stopped me. “You’re going to be Sachin’s neighbour!” she said. “You must be especially happy today! Please tell us how you feel!” Today, I mumble some words, then mumble them twice more for the other networks. The third guy prompts me for some more: “But the monkey’s off his back now. Isn’t that a good thing?” Here’s my chance to say, finally, what I really feel about this hundredth hundred business: “But we’re the idiots who put the monkey on his back!” At that precise moment in far-off Dhaka, Tendulkar reaches his century. Someone shouts, “Mil gaya!” (“He’s got it!”), a loud cheer goes up, and a chant kicks off: “Sachin! Sachin!” In the uproar, my words of wisdom go nowhere fast; in any case, the guy is already turning and scanning the crowd for better fare. He finds it. Joining the crowd is a man in a distinguished steel-grey kurta, carrying a beautifully-crafted bouquet. From all over the scene, correspondents and their attached cameramen converge on him at a lumbering trot. [caption id=“attachment_253722” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Tendulkar has played plenty of superb innings in the year since his 99th century. They are hardly failures because they weren’t centuries. Reuters”] [/caption] Last December, there had been a similar media scrum. India vs West Indies, Test at the Wankhede. Tendulkar crossed 50 and was progressing serenely toward his century. Suddenly, OB vans mushroomed on our lane, crowds gathered, chants began and a local politician’s supporters began erecting poles to string up a banner. It was perfect: Tendulkar would get his long-awaited century in his hometown, a rapturous crowd would welcome him home, he’d be cheered by the banner… … and then, just like that, Tendulkar was out for 94. In our lane, silence descended like a swift dusk. The OB vans meandered out. The poles, though, were already up. What to do with them? Somebody got a rush job, because in a couple of hours, a huge banner went up, saying something innocuous about a signature campaign for Sachin. Three months later, Tendulkar gets it right. When he jogs through for the momentous single, the cheers and fireworks outside his Bandra home might even have reached him in that Dhaka stadium. And this time, an appropriate banner goes up even faster than last December. Complete with the politician’s face in the corner, it says “Shak” and “Shatak” in large Devanagari letters. You might translate it as “Doubtful Hundred” and furrow your brow, except that the politician is making a point about doubt before the hundred. Got that? An hour later, I thread my way back home through the happy crowd. The man in the steel-grey kurta stands beside a motorbike now, his bouquet on its seat, holding a colour portrait of Tendulkar. Photographers press in around him. In all the hoopla over Tendulkar’s feat, a small but vocal trickle of commentary has played devil’s advocate. Sample: It’s meaningless to add up hundreds from different formats of the game, to manufacture a record. The endless cycle of anticipation and disappointment is unfair, most of all, to Tendulkar himself. After all, he’s played plenty of superb innings in the year since his 99th century. They are hardly failures because they weren’t centuries. Cricket is a team sport, and the focus on individual records only detracts from that. The monkey is weighing the great man down. He reached a spectacular pinnacle on 2 April 2011 when India won the World Cup. What could possibly top that? If all this made some sense, it was offset by words from Kapil Dev. Tendulkar, he said, should have retired after the World Cup; no need to chase records. This from a man who clung to his spot in India’s Test team when he no longer deserved it, a pathetic shadow of the skilled cricketer he once was, solely to limp after Richard Hadlee’s Test wickets record. Nevertheless, Tendulkar ignored all this and went about his business. His several half-centuries over the last year should have been celebrated. Instead, a collective moan greeted each terminated innings: the man hasn’t scored that mythical hundred. But then he did. Dinner-time. I leave home to join friends at a nearby restaurant. The man in the steel-grey kurta is still there. His bouquet on the seat of another motorbike, he is speaking to a TV camera, the correspondent nodding his head rhythmically. Two hours later, we walk back home. It’s dark and in Dhaka, a match has been lost despite Tendulkar’s century. On our lane, a lone OB van remains, its crew sitting on the edge of Tendulkar’s flower beds, smoking. “Have you even had dinner?” we ask the cameraman. He smiles and asks: “How does that matter?”