You like bottom? Er8230; Botham

Now that England are out of the World Cup, it's pretty much other peoples carnival. Like someone having a party in your house and request...

Now that England are out of the World Cup, it8217;s pretty much other peoples carnival. Like someone having a party in your house and requesting you to butt out. Tootling out to the English countryside on Tuesday, I saw even less interest in the World Cup there than in the middling towns. Well, it was actually the Welsh countryside. Fatigued from the surfeit of cricket over the last three weeks, I beetled down to Hay-on-Wye, a charming village on the border of England and Wales that consists entirely of second-hand, used, and antiquarian bookshops. It is a bibliophile8217;s delight.

Wye has an annual literary festival which is going on right now 8212; and more about this next week 8212; so I landed there with perfect timing, just in time to hear William Dalyrymple peddling his latest book quot;Age of Kali,quot; quot;Kaliyugquot; to us.

Dalyrymple, for those not familiar with the name, was the New Delhi correspondent of The Independent of London in the 1980s. He went on to write quot;The City of Djinns,quot; a book about Delhi, after hisstint there, having already authored his first book quot;In Xanaduquot; when he was only 22.

So what8217;s all this got to do with cricket, you8217;re asking? Well not much really. Except for a small incident at the festival. Dalyrymple, as is the practice at these events, was reading passages from his books. He read one particularly delightful bit about an encounter with a Pakistan customs official who kept asking him Dalyrymple if he quot;like bottom?quot; After much ribald confusion, it turns out that the official was actually referring to the English cricketer Ian Botham.

The place was still ringing with laughter when I decided to have some fun and ruin it for them. quot;Er, excuse me, I don8217;t know about bottom, but in my time I rather fancied Kapil Dev,quot; I spoke up. The audience hooted. quot;And besides, after what happened in Edgbaston over the weekend, I8217;m not sure you guys should even be talking about cricket,quot; I continued. quot;Go ahead, mate, rub it in,quot; someone yelled. Things were just about getting exciting when Dalyrympleput a dampener on it by announcing that he had no interest in cricket and preferred soccer. As we were trickling out after the reading, a Welshman accosted me and asked: quot;How much did your side pay Javed Akhtar to give Graham Thorpe lbw? I swallowed hard, but the weather was so balmy and my mood so beatific that it was not worth sullying with a scrap.

The Welsh are otherwise charming people. They speak a language which is nothing like English. Somewhere along the way, they have swallowed all the vowels. Their towns have wonderful names like Ynnymddyfri and Tlachddu. Sometimes, they sound like some Indian vegetables 8212; I came across one called Methyr Tedfil. Cardiff is called Caerdydd in Welsh. But it doesn8217;t always work like this. Newport sounds something like Cshwnut.

I was chortling over these wonderful sounds as we drove back, when a friend told me the most delightful yarn. The story goes that it always irked Dylan Thomas when he was asked which Welsh town he came from, till one day he conjured up thename quot;Fforeggub.quot; No one had heard of Fforeggub till someone figured it out 8212; by spelling it backwards.