Opinion My own private Sachin

In the corridor,I had passed a window display where this hotel’s famous guests’ photographs were framed. Prime Minister Nehru,Queen Elizabeth,John Lennon,Barack Obama,the writer V.S. Naipaul looking dyspeptic. And a signed photo of a laughing Sachin Tendulkar,holding the World Cup.

When the players had finished having breakfast,at last Tendulkar stepped out of the elevator. He was headed for the team bus. Silver earphones clamped on his ears,a faint,slightly tense smile on his lips. His bat in a black case slung over his shoulder. The crowd had been relatively quiet so far,observing each player on their way to the bus. It now erupted. “Saa-chin,Saa-chin.” Clapping.

By the time a Test match starts in India,it is already night in America. Unlike my friends or family in India,I got to watch Sachin only in the quiet of the night. I am sitting alone in my study,the volume turned down low,my face lit by the glow of my computer screen. But this has been true only of the last few years. Of Sachin in his youth,my memories are of a different nature: I would read about him in the basement of a library in a university in the American Midwest. We now live in a different time,but I mention this because it is a way of reminding ourselves that that is how long Sachin has lasted!

This time,I was in Mumbai as a guest at the Tata Literature Festival. It was my good fortune that the first day of the festival was the first day of Tendulkar’s last Test. In the foyer of the hotel,just as I stepped in on Wednesday night,the first thing I saw was a giant cricket bat and flower-sculpture: the bat made of yellow petals,the ball of dark red roses.

But when I was being brought to my room,I was ushered into another memory. I saw the long corridor,its marble floor,the expensive art on the walls. At regular intervals,the stone sculptures and the green potted plants. This was a scene I had seen before. You had probably seen it too. It is on the CCTV footage from that savage night in November five years ago. Young men in t-shirts,baseball caps with visors turned back,assault rifles in their hands. On the grainy screen I had seen the bodies of guests and hotel workers slumped amid the smoke swirling from the fires lit by exploding grenades. The patterned marble of the floor: now it seemed etched in my memory.

Were you here that night,I asked the slender man carrying my luggage. Yes,he said. He had been in the same Palace Wing where we were standing. He told me that for the nights that followed,he would wake up at night with the sound of gunfire ringing in his ears. When I put on the TV in my hotel-room the first channel played a video showing all escape routes in case of a fire. “Your safety is important to us.” But in the corridor,the shouts were only “Saa-chin,Saa-chin.”

What Sachin is,and how we respond to him,have qualities that are characteristically Indian. On the first day of the match,Sachin’s mother came to watch her son. Rajni Tendulkar had never before been able to see her son play. She preferred to stay home and pray. But on the occasion of his 200th Test match,she had finally come. At the end of the day,she was shown on the giant TV in the stadium. An elderly woman on a wheelchair. Seeing her,30,000 spectators stood up to applaud. Spectators would never pay a tribute like this to a sportsperson’s parent in America or Europe.

When the time came to say goodbye after the last West Indies wicket had fallen,Sachin reverently touched the cricket pitch and then,in his speech,thanked his late father as the most important person in his life. I admit I shed a tear. Because it is Indian to cry. We learn it from our films and even our cricketers.

How did I respond to all this? Every Indian has a private Sachin. A Sachin on whom we project our desires,our fears,our fantasies. When I heard on TV that he had asked for a ramp to be built at the stadium so that his mother’s wheelchair could be brought,I thought he was the son I wanted to be.

As I said,I came to Mumbai as a guest at a literary festival but I’d return home to my family in the US without being able to visit Patna,where my parents are. Sachin is a better son than me. On the second day of play,I had watched him get out for the last time. I wish he had gone on to score a century. Just so that he could turn his eyes heavenwards and say a silent prayer to his father.

Kumar is the author,most recently,of ‘A Matter of Rats: A Short Biography of Patna’. He teaches English at Vassar College,US