Neatly sheathed in a file, alongside his academic certificates, is an old newspaper clipping in vernacular Gujarati, that Chintan Gaja treasures the most. The loosely transliterated headline reads thus: "Gujarat unearths a batting gem". Beneath the headline is Gaja's picture, willow raised, and a short description of his accomplishment. A day before, he has racked up the second-highest individual score in school cricket. The then 15-year-old struck exactly 300 for Asian School versus Prakash School, in only half as many deliveries, en route sharing a record partnership with Jashil Joshi, and missing the highest individual score by 49 runs, held by Priyank Panchal. While Gujarat's school-cricket isn't as competitive or as manically-followed as Mumbai's, the talents scouts of the state do keep a close watch on it, especially after the talent-spotting drive initiated by the new administrative regime in 2009. Soon came to the present state coach Vijay Patel's notice that there is a young Amdavadi batsman everybody is raving about and he sent some of his subordinates to watch him and give a feedback. They returned excited; only that it was his medium-pace bowling that impressed them more than his aggressive batting. In fact, consigned to the end of the write-up was a small sentence: "He also took five wickets in the match". The perception might have to do with a general dearth of medium pacers in Gujarat. The most frequently spotted cricketing-species in the state are either patient, resolute batsmen, or spinners, whose sole motif in life is to bore batsmen to getting themselves out. Maybe, it's with the innate nature of the pitches there. On the sluggish, sun-cracked surfaces, with a largely pond-clay base, being a fast bowler isn't an entirely viable or rewarding alternative. Apart from Munaf Patel and Jasprit Bumrah—even they were one-offs than a rule—Gujarat haven't churned out dime-a-dozen medium pacers.. So the Gujarat scouts get easily excited at the sighting of a medium pacer. Patel decided to have a closer look at his bowling, and he realised the scouts weren't entirely exaggerating. "I saw him and he had a nice action and was quite accurate. He might have been just 15 or 16 so there was enough time for him to develop into a nice bowler." he says. But Chintan had, hitherto, considered himself primarily a batsman. All his childhood heroes were batsmen. The posters that did his walls were of the usual suspects, the fab four of noughties. He values his first Kashmir willow bat as if it's a priced piece of artifact, and used to spent timeless hours in front of the mirror, shadow batting. The bowling was more of a second skin, warranted by the situation. But gradually he too began observing that he's contributing more with the ball. "I would occasionally bowl seam-up and somehow I managed to get a few wickets. So the coach started making me bowl more overs and finally I started taking the new ball. Initially I was hesitant because to get wickets on the surfaces is very difficult," he says. Changing mindset Soon the nature of his discussions with the coaches too changed. They would discuss more about swing and seam or length and line, than drives or flicks. His own concerns weren't about whether he was covering the line of the delivery when defending or his head falling over while flicking, but more about the uprightness of the seam or the correctness of the wrist at the point of delivery. "I realised I was thinking more like a bowler, and I'd spend more time at the nets bowling," he says, grinning. But he didn't mind it, for he was getting more wickets and scoring a lot of runs too, maybe not by truckloads but with a reasonably consistency. "I though I'm already a decent batsman, and now a decent bowler too. It also gave me a better understanding of what the bowler must be thinking when I was batting and vice versa," he says. Thus, on the merit of his incandescent bowling, he was picked in the U-19 state side, the first tangible vindication of his burgeoning bowling prowess and the vindication of the scouts' wisdom. From there, his curve only went upward, culminating in his first-class debut in 2016 and then the surprise inclusion in the final, an opportunity he embraced with both hands, snaring six wickets in the second innings against Mumbai. "All that hard labour back there," he says. All that hard labour on those notoriously turgid surfaces in the unrelenting heat of Ahmedabad. His bowling is a product of that very impairing environment. "I realised there is no point banging the ball in or bowling as fast as I could. Being accurate and regularly pitching the ball at the same spot was the best method to get wickets (on the surfaces in Gujarat). If you can move the ball both ways it surely helps too. Otherwise, you have to be naturally quick like Jassi (Jaspreet Bumrah). I'm not, and my main strength is accuracy," he admits. There was also another less-noticed facet of his gam, his work-rate. The ability to keep bowling untiringly in the fourth-stump corridor for overs on end. No one sent down as many as Gaja (55) in the final. In the second session of the fourth day, he bowled as many as 13 overs on the spin. "It's also about preserving yourself and having bowled so many overs back there, I didn't feel tired at all bowling long spells in Indore. Also I have worked really hard on my fitness," he says. It was on that day alone, he wasn't spotted batting on the practice patch beside the Gujarat dressing after stumps. He'd keep on batting until twilight descended at the stadium and until one of his teammates or the manager begins yelling at him to wind up. "I still work a lot on my batting. I haven't forgotten it. I have to, for I'm an all-rounder," he states, with a sense of firmness that offsets an otherwise self-effacing ddemeanour. Patel, meanwhile, believes he has the potential to become Gujarat's Abhishek Nayar. It's a flattering metronome, a lofty tag that Gaja would strive well to live up to. Whenever, he feels short of motivation, he can unsheath from the file the old newspaper clipping. Rising through pain Around the same time Gaja was metamorphosing from a batsman to bowler.err an all-rounder. a robust boy from Rajkot was making every head turn, or rather heads sway, with his bristling aggression with the leather ball. Soon, he was an MRF Pace Foundation trainee, a regular in Gujarat U-19 side, having switched over from bitter rivals Saurashtra, then climbed to the national U-19 side, was picked in the U-19 World Cup that won (though he played a single match) and made his Ranji debut at the age of 18. He seamlessly transitioned, consistently getting wickets and slamming a hundred. But then creaked his knees, and he had to spent several months in pain and without playing cricket. This drilled into him a morbid fear on injuries. It deeply affected him, so much so that everytime he would begin his run-up, he was doubt-ridden, and hence distracted. "I used to be gripped by a fear of being unable to play cricket at all. I was not able to go at full pelt," he recollects. Maybe, that explains his mercurial nature of his career graph. One season he would be all sharp and incisive, and just when everyone assumes he he cracked the consistency, he buckles next season, sort of an alternate-season blues. It's best captured by his season-by-season break-up. In his debut season, he took 20 wickets at 29, not a bad entry, one would think. The next season, he took just eight wickets, and of those five came in a single innings, his progress was stymied by the first of his several knee injuries. He made a resounding comeback, whittling out 33 sticks at 17.18. He stuttered again (17 wickets), before he picked himself up again this year, influencing big matches and emerging as Gujarat's highest wicket-taker (28 at 26.14). The anomalous feature of the 24-year-old's numbers is that he hasn't picked a single five-wicket haul—a three-wicket haul here or a four-for there has been the pervading theme of this season. "He shouldn't be gauged by his numbers. He has taken wickets at crucial phases and has shown tremendous energy. You can give him the ball and expect more than 100 per cent from him," the coach points out. So whenever the chips are down on the field, captain Parthiv’s searing pair of eyes pries for him. More often than, he doesn't disappoint him either. There would be the occasional bursts of profligacy, like drifting down the leg-side or hurling in one bouncer too many and two feet over the batsmen's head, but produces the sort of vibrant spells that lift the overall morale of the team, even if he goes wicketless. "The energy he brings into the team is important, not only on the field but also in the dressing room," the coach says. All those Gujarati-Hindi pop songs that blare from the dressing room are mostly from his phone. He is the cheer-leader, prankster and dancer all compressed into one. And while juggling between all these he realised his batting potential too. At the start of his career, he wasn't fixatedly serious of his batting. He could freewheel, strike a few lusty blows and spurt the tempo. But en route to rattling off an unbeaten 47 at No 9 to orchestrate a one-wicket run over Sri Lanka in an U-19 fixture in Visakhapatnam, it dawned on him that he could be more than just a lower-order batsman. "I realised I can improve my batting and spent more time working on technique," he says. In his debut season itself, he scored a hundred. Two years later, he notched up another too, but it's the cluster of half-centuries in his team's title-winning seaon that he keeps closer to his heart. This season, he has scored 288 runs at 28 including a brace of invaluable half-centuries, a 60 against Punjab, and more vitally a 73 against Odisha in the quarterfinals, coming into bat when Gujarat were 71 for 6 at one stage. It was also a year he banished the fear of getting injured too. "I have become fitter and I do a lot of conditioning to keep injuries away, and I play without the fear of getting injured," he says. After a fulfilling season, he can resume the old dream of his-to play for the country.
