Under the bright lights at the Holkar Cricket Stadium on Thursday night, the Kings XI Punjab players were practising intensively ahead of their IPL match against Kolkata Knight Riders. Among the onlookers was 11-year-old Rocky Dubey.
Rocky looked delighted. He had just met his favourite cricketer Yuvraj Singh who had given him a jersey of KXIP, a cap and a schoolbag. Rocky has been battling blood cancer ever since he was a one-year-old toddler.
Impending surgery
He has recently had a course of chemotherapy and will soon be undergoing surgery for a bone-marrow transplant; his father is the donor. He is too young to know what is wrong with him.
Nor does he know that Yuvraj himself is a cancer survivor (he was diagnosed with a tumour in his lung but came strongly back to the Indian team for the ICC World T20 in Sri Lanka in 2012).
When someone spoke to Rocky about Yuvraj’s successful fight against the disease, he was puzzled and looked at his mother Harsha. She smiled and told him: “Son, he is asking you about the infection in your blood.”
His elder sister Pranjali had also accompanied him to the ground.
“Rocky is quite good at studies; he is studying in Class V at Scholars Paradise School here at Indore,” Pranjali said.
Their mother chipped in: “He scored 95% in his last examination. He loves cricket. We have not been able to watch any of the IPL games yet, but we had watched the India-New Zealand Test match here in 2016.”
