I have long given up wondering how sport matters so much to my grandfather. Recently, Harsha Bhogle — on Twitter — was part of a conversation where people gently mocked him about the dearth of audience for non-Indian Champions’ League games. If Mr. Bhogle had to make a case to defend himself, Thatha should have been Exhibit A. The last time he and I spoke, over a telephone and separated by a sea, a continent and an ocean, Thatha told me — with great enthusiasm and greater detail — the travel plans of the Perth Scorchers and the Lahore Lions.
Unlike most armchair sports fanatics, Thatha was an athlete himself. My mother sometimes reminisces about being taken, as a girl of 10 or 12, to sports events for employees in the government services. My Thatha , who was a Post Master, would always compete.
My mother’s clearest memories are of the athletics races where Thatha , dashing, tall and fair, would win without really trying. And always first. In my mind’s eye, he does an Usain Bolt as he approaches the finish line, turning around to smile at his competitors in the distance. Unlike Bolt though, he is wearing a white veshti , folded up. I cannot imagine him in track-pants.
My own memories of my athlete Thatha are of him swimming at the Marina beach in Chennai, at the ripe, young age of 78. One image is etched in my mind — that of him parting a clear grey wave with his freestyle. Thatha and I played carrom all my childhood — another sport he was a champion at. While I was pretty good, I was not a patch on him. At his best, he would finish a board before you got a shot. He was — and still is — a very fit man. Until a few years ago, he would clench his fist tightly and challenge us kids to open it. There was, I discovered later, a trick to it: go for the thumb first and then prise open the rest of the palm. But, he may have just been letting me win.
To me, however, Thatha the sports fan far outshone Thatha the sportsman. In the 1960s and 1970s, when Test cricket was the only form of the sport played internationally, my grandmother would take time off reading her (second, third?) novel for the week to jot down scores from the radio. Thatha would call from his workplace at lunch and she would read them out: “Ken Barrington c Durani b Desai 3”. Consequently, to this day, when I try to mine Thatha for old cricketing stories, it is her memory that is more precise: “That Barrington was a real Boring-Ton,” she pitches in. “He would never get out.”
Varied interestsThatha watches nearly every sport. That is no exaggeration: for instance, I distinctly remember him being completely immersed in a much-delayed telecast of equestrian sports on Doordarshan once.
It is tennis, however, that is his eternal muse. He watches every tennis match that’s broadcast on Indian television; if he misses it live, he’ll watch a rerun, with just as much gusto. This gives him a unique edge over most people I know: he has developed an amazing sense of current form. Prior to the Wimbledon, for instance, he has watched all matches at the Queen’s and, if they show it on TV, then every match of the Gerry Weber Open in Halle too; to top it all, he’s watched Serena power her way through the Aegon Classic!
A few years ago we ran a small experiment. I challenged Thatha to predict results for matches for the French Open and I displayed them on Facebook: remarkably, he got them all right.
If there is one sentiment that governs his sport-watching, it is the sense of being rooted constantly in the present. Indeed, if sport were a woman, she’d be flattered by how unquestioning his affection for her is — irrespective of how much she is transformed over time, he continues to love her, always seeing her as she is now, betraying no nostalgia for a lost past.
This is best exemplified by his love for T20. Despite having the patience to watch New Zealand play West Indies over five days on three occasions over a month, he’s taken to T20 like Dhoni to captaincy. This love extends easily to the domestic leagues too (more parallels with Dhoni?). “We’re not doing well all of a sudden,” he once declared mournfully over the phone. Sitting then in rural Bihar — without access to TV — I racked my head over who India was playing then. Was it the Under-19 team he was referring to? Slowly it dawned on me: “we” was the Chennai Super Kings, a team he wholly identified with and, by extension, presumed I did too.
I have two memories of Thatha and sport that beg retelling: the first is from a few years ago, when he was suffering a bout of severe diarrhoea. In between dashing to the bathroom and lying in bed, he’d grown weak and had nearly lost his voice.
This one time he spotted me as he hobbled out of the bathroom. He just about steadied himself by leaning on to the wall, and signalled me to approach him. I rushed, wondering if he wanted some glucose or water. He looked at me and croaked: “Score?”
In 2006, the Football World Cup was on and, while I was no fan of the sport, I did still manage to catch a few games. He, on the other hand, stayed up until the early hours of the morning to catch games.
“I don’t know if I’ll get to see another World Cup,” he told me. He was 86 then and now, at 94, he’s seen two more and I am certain has a few more left!
sharanidli@gmail.com
