The extraordinary cricketing tales of Purvarth Maddhyanakumar - I

I didn’t really fit in with the regular crowd. There were over 40 like me, squealing and howling on our first day at school, asking for amma. I, bewildered, being the only bengali in a sea of wailing malayali toddlers, wondering what amma was, and confused as to whether I should be asking for it too looked outside the grilled windows, at the bunch of grownups peering in. I had a distinctive feeling of what the bunch of monkeys in the cage must feel like while the visitors to the Thiruvananthapuram zoo peered in through the grills, making funny noises, as though trying to be monkeys themselves. Hah. As if they didn’t know they used to be monkeys millions of years ago. Or so some chap called Darwin decided they were. The visitors here were anxious, no doubt, worried about their children’s first day at school.

On looking around, I noticed a handful of specimens whose eyes were dry, and who were not bawling for amma and appa and things like that. Probably their ammas and appas weren’t at the window. No amma and appa for me either; my elder brother had taken me to my new class and run off to his own. Brothers in the same school and all that, you know. Such were the beginning moments of my first day in school.

It would be several confusing days, months and a couple of years before I would officiate as umpire in my first ever cricket match in school. Much happened between my first day in school and the day I stood in front of a tree, all sagely and wise adjudging wides, no balls, stumpings and runouts. That, because I was too shy to enter the space between the two casuarinas as a player!

I was 8. That would be in the year 1991.The Christmas examinations were upon us. I of course had no clue about the seriousness of things. The junior school exams consisted of one exam a day; a two hour paper in the morning, after which lunch followed and most parents would turn up to pick up their children, so that they could go home and start revising for the next day’s examination. The remaining children used to live farther away from school, and would take the 3.30 bus back home, until which time they would indulge in all kinds of time pass, including cricket! Now what kind of full blooded cricket could a handful of screaming 8 year olds engage in while they waited for the bus?

Simple: a page from a notebook would be wrapped up into a tight ball (Some of us had the unique knack of making excellent paper balls), the cardboard used for writing the exams on would polymorph itself into a cricket bat, the two casuarinas would serve as the two sets of stumps. The rest of the school would be the cricket ground. It was on one such occasion, when mom was a little late picking me up that I stepped gracefully on to this field as the supreme decision maker. Amid the tossing of the paper ball, heaving of cardboards and squealing of the kids around, I stood sedately, raising my arms this way and that way accordingly, as I had seen Dicky Bird do on TV many a time. I was thoroughly enjoying myself when the mater descended upon the scene and scooped me away to the auto, despite the feeble protests of the junta around who evidently thought I was as fair and just an umpire as ever entered a cricket field.

Such was my introduction to cricket, as we knew it in school. Countless experiences would follow in the 9 years that followed: learning to bat, bowl, field, drop catches, experiences of joy, triumph, complete despair and other feelings I have not the words to describe.

My first ever cricket match took a while coming though, after a full year had passed and I was well into the 4th standard. That was when I had burst into the scene, the young fast bowling novice who took the cricketing lives of 80 fourth graders by storm, an era when most of this sample space would quake in their chuddies at the sight of Purvarth starting his run up to lethal deliveries!