Sultans of Swing

This one is going to be a shamelessly nostalgic post. What triggered this off was a recent email from my cousin, S. The title of his email read “gnyabakam varudhe” (I’m reminded). And it had just one picture in it: that of an Arun ice cream ball.

Cut to any summer vacation night in the eighties. We’d (me and my brother C) be camping at our perippa's (father's elder brother) place. The temperature would be hovering around the 35C mark despite the late hour. Chennai’s signature humidity would be playing its part in making the weather that much more unpleasant.

Our perippa would be enthralling us – 3 well fed cousins, with his homemade brand of James Bond stories. The stories would start off the exact same way every single night: a real badass James leaving his London apartment with a pistol in his briefcase, nattily attired in a hat, dark glasses and a pair of gloves. The family-safe, no-women, no-alcohol plots would see Mr. Bond pull off high value heists, knock off bad men, get involved in dramatic, high speed chases night after night.

After about half an hour of spinning a tight yarn, loud snoring would prompt us to leave perippa alone to carry on with that night’s exploits  in his dreams. For us kids, the night was still very young and there was more fun to be had.

We would shift our camp to the living room and start going over the day’s events that may or may not have included a few sporting injuries, a couple of cycling accidents, some property damaged around the neighborhood, a few acts of animal cruelties biological studies and a few scoldings received from a very hassled perimma (Mrs. Perippa, of course) if we were caught while immersed in any of the above activities.

Our perimma would be closing shop in the kitchen, looking forward to retiring to her favorite corner of the living room (under the fan, in front of the TV set) in her favorite position (lying sprawled on the floor with a single pillow for support) ready to flip through the pages of the latest edition of Thuglak to concur with Mr. Cho Ramaswamy on what the political future held for Tamil Nadu. With everyone well fed, the kitchen taken care of and our cricketing gear confiscated, she could be forgiven for looking forward to a peaceful night, perhaps even aspiring to go through the Ananda Vikatan too before being overcome by sleep.

Although physically tired, each one of us would be secretly looking forward to the fourth cousin, AP, the eldest of us all, finishing his dinner and joining us. And each one of us knew just exactly what that meant: indoor cricket.

Because of the yawning age gap between him and the rest of us (5-8 years), we always looked up to him to lead our mutiny against the elders and stage a game of cricket under lights at odd hours in the night. He was truly the Kerry Packer of our family. Lest you be wondering about his cricketing abilities, he was our clan’s very own Kapil Dev.  Imagine a right-handed Wasim Akram with a poonal across his shoulders. Or a fair-skinned, Tamil speaking, vegetarian Curtly Ambrose. (Let’s pretend you never read the previous sentence.) Although he has abandoned his cricketing aspirations in favor of more laid back avocations, and hence resembling Arjuna Ranatunga these days, he still remains Saligramam’s answer to Dale Steyn. A sambhar-slurping, sandhyavandhanam performing Brahmin Botham, if there ever existed one.

But more pertinently, he was able to match our perimma word for word, daringly retrieve our confiscated cricketing gear from her custody and firmly silence muted protests from our perippa. All the while serving up toe crushing yorkers to us to negotiate. A true leader and an example for us to emulate both on and off the field.

By now, perimma would have yelled herself hoarse and retired back to her favorite corner of the living room, seeking solace from either a late night Hindi program on DD (this was the pre-cable/DTH era) or continue to decipher Tamil Nadu’s political future with Mr. Cho’s aid. Perippa, now wide awake from all the ruckus and in a futile effort to get us to keep quiet, would make a bouquet of tempting offers: a bottle of Thumbs Up, double the daily quota of rental bicycles to two hours and an assortment of goodies from McRennet. The man, I must admit, had his ways with kids. Yet, we would politely turn him down in favor of answering our true inner calling: raising hell under the pretext of playing cricket. Honestly, independent of whether we heeded his requests, we knew we would end up getting everything that he had offered. We kids had our ways with perippa.  

Having sorted out the family problems, the teams would be drawn up: AP and C, S and I – the usual configuration based on age and cricketing skills. The weapons of choice would be a battle weary Pioneer bat that had clearly seen better days and a shiny Arun ice cream ball with a pink lid (Strawberry flavor?). On special occasions, we would even use the roughed up one with a faded blue lid (Vanilla?), capable of producing deadly reverse swing. I don’t know what reverse swing exactly is, but let’s pretend that I’m smart enough to use it in any random sentence and get along with the story, shall we?

Given how the house was laid out and the space restrictions thereof, batting was restricted to only the Puthu Koil End. AP would begin operating from the thatha kadai End (not far from our perippa’s resting head), hurling the ice cream ball at us at mach speeds. The projectile would disobey a half-a-dozen laws of Physics as it danced down the corridor of uncertainty before homing in on either the stumps (an oversized painter’s stool) or our bodies, but rarely the bat.

The peace of the night would then periodically be broken by

a. the loud ring of the plastic ball striking either the mosaic floor or the steel bureau that also doubled up as long-off

b. our howls of pain when plastic met tender, sweaty skin or

c. the choice epithets from AP for dropped catches.

After having put up with the cricketing mafia silently, perippa would gather enough courage, say around 12:30AM, and request that we stop playing and that the lights be turned off. Taking into consideration that he was generally a friend of the youth camp, we would heed his request partly. We would turn off the lights but continue to play.  Friends, say hello to cricket in the dark.

With the thatha kadai end now enveloped in complete darkness, AP’s inswinging yorkers would only become even more lethal. We would be staring into darkness one moment and the ball would be whistling past us to disturb the stumps the next. In the rare event that the ball did meet bat, AP would come tearing through the darkness and complete the catch in any of the permissible forms: one pitch, one pitch one hand or two pitch, to dismiss us.  When it comes to ingenious training routines, Gary Kirsten got nothing on us.

And after having made us duck, dance, weave, cry and wail at the wicket, AP would proceed to wield the bat like a mace to get his share of gaji (Chennai street-speak for batting). That meant only one thing: the thatha (old man, in this context) of the thatha kadai (old man’s shop) would go laughing all the way to the bank. In his case, MCC Bank, Dasarathapuram branch. We would have easily broken, at a conservative estimate, a dozen light bulbs every summer throughout the eighties and early nineties. Not to mention an assortment of other items around the house, including the blue screen of the ancient Dyanora B&W TV. Said differently, by the time we mastered the dark arts of nighttime cricket under the tutelage of AP, the thatha had managed to marry off his three daughters, educate his sons and turn his ramshackle shed selling sundry items into a proper general store.

Our nocturnal sporting carnival would come to a grand close around 1:00 AM when a very annoyed and sleep deprived perimma (not perippa) with blood shot eyes would stagger down the corridor of uncertainty and make us an offer we couldn’t refuse: we either stop playing right then or Mr. Pioneer Bat ends up as firewood for the water boiler the next morning.

The players would then head into the bedroom, pile up on the bed (pushing perippa to the very edge) and continue to go over the day’s events that may or may not have included…

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P.S. 1: Although reading this may lead you to think that our perimma was perhaps a strict person, let me assure you that she was anything but. Granted, she could raise her decibel levels at will. But she was a real darling that had deep reservoirs of patience and has put up with four kids for many many years. [Parenting a single kid has given me a lot of perspective in quick time.]

P.S.2: The march of time robs us of so many things close to the heart. One such recent loss is the house that was the altar for countless rites of passage for us four kids. With the sale of our real ancestral property on South Usman Road in T Nagar, a piece of earth that had remained in our family for six decades, the one other house that could qualify as ancestral was our perippa’s in Saligramam, Chennai. Built in the early seventies, this house was the theater for most, if not all, of the youthful adventures of four guys, yours truly included. I still have a picture taken years ago of four skinny, gawky kids woken up from an afternoon nap, posing in that front yard. Kids that learned to ride cycles, honed cricketing skills, made and flew kites, dissected frogs, raised fish (or tadpoles?), made a kid visiting from New Delhi dig a decent sized pit in the backyard in search of hidden treasures, conducted many thermo-chemical experiments that may be considered illegal in many countries and generally had fun while preparing to face the world.

That house may not exist anymore in its old form. We may have grown up, conned girls into getting married to us and also got kids of our own. But fond memories from our good times there will linger on.