The extraordinary cricketing tales of Purvarth Maddhyanakumar - II

It is only fair that you, sweet reader get to know how Purvarth learned his cricket; learned how to bowl; learned to bat; learned to have heart when some batsman carted him for four sixes in an over and still run to the popping crease into the jaws of the waiting monster with a bat; learned how to catch, albeit not very well. And also how it became that he played his first ever game of cricket in school, and earned much fame and lost it too later, and gain some of it back.

Here is what my practice ground looked like. A quiet peaceful colony, around 28 yards of paved lane, neighbor’s gate across the road at one end and a proud coconut tree at the other, just after the road curved away at a right angle. Houses on either side: potential window pane accidents at every swing of the bat! A line drawn on the tree trunk with a brick, about three feet from the ground; the popping crease drawn in brick again, with the afore mentioned brick being the stump at the bowling end; empty plots of land, festooned with coconut trees on all other sides of the batting tree. Now we know why they call it a tree stump. Haha. Ok.

Many a game have I played here, with the neighbors, all of whom were one to six years elder to me. You can imagine what would happen when a primary school kid tried bowling pace to a seasoned senior high school stud. That's right. This is where I learned to have heart. Well, I won't brag; there were times I ran away from all the humiliation to hurl abuses at that guy into my pillow, but yes, I eventually came around.

In the hallowed school grounds, much after the phase where we used to play with cardboards and paper balls and kochengas and chalk pieces, some of my classmates had taken to playing with real rubber balls and anything that could pass for a bat: pieces of plywood or a cut out portion of the versatile coconut leaf. Real stumps and creases weren't necessary. These were compensated for by trees by the playground, or sapling grills. The popping crease stumps were usually a couple of bricks, couple of pairs of shoes from some football playing kids, a schoolbag, or anything which formed some kind of mark. Sometimes even pencil boxes. In a couple of months into the fourth standard, the real cricketers soon identified themselves and would set up the afore mentioned kind of environment and battle it out like real men. I was too shy to go in and start bowling like Merv, so I would watch from the sidelines, like that chap who throws the ball back when hit for a boundary.

I eventually got over my shyness, and came out of the shell during an idle games period. The established fourth grade cricketers were out playing tough competitive cricket on the big stage, which is to say, against one of the casuarina trees lining the main hallowed football ground. A tree on that ground meant that you were playing serious cricket. Otherwise you were playing time-pass cricket. I approached the latter kind of match; a bunch of us were playing with a rubber ball, a stiff cutting from a tree trunk someone found, a sapling grill, and a couple of bricks. Time-pass game meant anyone could walk in a join a team while the game was still on.

"Do you bowl?” AA asked of me.
"Yes".

What followed was that wonderful feeling of first love that you must have felt at some point of time in life. In a class of mostly fragile 9 year-olds, I covered an admirable run up and bowled the first over of my life in school. From the reactions of my mates around, I gathered it was an impressive one. The over included a couple of bat-beats and a full throated appeal for LBW to the batsman himself, as there was no umpire. RP, who was batting, dismissed the appeal saying the ball had hit his ankle so it could not be out. (I learned many years later that it the ball hitting any part of the batsman's body excluding his forearm and fist was eligible for LBW, but whatever). After the over, AA exchanged a running high five with me as he ran past, leaving me exhilarated, beaming with unblemished happiness and all that.

It was only a matter of time before word spread to the bigger cricketing circles and I joined the group of few fast bowlers in class. And I couldn't wait for the experiences to follow.