Rain and cricket have a special charm

Rain and cricket are like quarrelling lovers… Like half-brothers, like childhood friends who meet at too-frequent reunions; Like errant schoolboys and a favourite teacher; Like fire and smoke, and tea and milk which have gone cold. [caption id=“attachment_34568” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Glyn Kirk/AFP PHOTO”] [/caption] Cricket and rain in the hills – add that element of unique location, and you have paradise – except, that it is paradise lost. To wake on a late October morning in the hills, with a match ready to be played – kit is already laid out, whites clean and pressed – your friend is going to arrive on his motorbike at about nine, to take you up hill and down dale, and finally to the ground across the valley. You have set the alarm for seven, but by 6:45 you are wide-awake, not only because your body is taut and ready, not only because you have slept deep and well, dreaming of Sobers and Gavaskar – but also because the thunder is growling its warning over the hill, and the light easing through the window is moist with the message of rain. You make your tea, in that time before cellphones and internet, even as the first drops caress the red-tin roof above your head. No way to contact your friend, so you bath and limber up and have more tea, and now the clock-tower across the valley in another direction from the field where you are headed is a grey smudge against a greyer sky. You put on Mukesh on your cassette-player, and it is almost eight now… BS Chandrashekar loves Mukesh, and you love them both, and you have actually seen the limber-armed spinner make monkey and mince-meant out of the great Keith Fletcher, not once, but twice, at the Kotla… The field outside your window is now pock-marked on its dust and gravel face with dancing rain-drops – Mukesh is singing songs from Anand… The clock-tower, now almost totally a ghost, strikes the half-hour – You could die with joy and sensual ease… But – cricket and rain – half-brothers, quarrelling lovers, a brother and sister who seldom speak, but cannot live without each other. Do you want to snuggle back into bed, and let the rain begin to lash the roof, the curtains, the very room itself? Or do you pray for a break, and the sound of your friend’s bike on the road above you through the woods, and a day of cricket under cloud and wind and wonder…? Do you wish to sit back on the balcony above the field – under the clock – and sip tea, weary feet up on the railing, as you wait for your turn to bat? Even as the clouds gather again, and ‘the sun grew round that very day’? This the dilemma – this is rain and cricket… And what did happen, that day too many days ago? Aaah – my friend did arrive, right on time, drenched with rain – but smiling and fit. We discussed over yet another cup of tea, Mukesh listening now in the background. Since there was no way to call the school where the match was being played, we decided to just ‘go for it’. Which we did – a soggy 45 minutes later, we were there. To find the school captain and the headmaster and half the population of Mussoorie inspecting what should have been a pitch. We join the inspection – to much back-slapping and jest… And even as we do so, the sun thinly smiles through the grey to the east, and we know, as we always did, that cricket would happen – shorter, yes – wetter, yes – with puddles on the giggling gravel, yes – with mud on our whites, yes – but cricket, glorious cricket – yes… Meanwhile, in the Windies, rain and cricket jostle – but the Test will go on, and we will win, and the Windies will give us a fight – and in the Third Test, it will be even more exciting… Just heard my friend’s bike on the road above in the woods of my memory – so I am off.