Once upon a very long time ago

ON a winter evening 26 years ago I stood on the platform of the New Delhi railway station, one in a group of Stephanian cricketers come to see off our captain, Praveen Oberoi. Praveen hung casually out of the door of the train, tall, fair, and blue- eyed, except for his moutstache, a hero out of one of P. G. Wodehouse's public school stories. A few yards away, clustered outside the compartment's other door, were some boys from across the road, come to cheer their man. This was Hari Gidwani of Hindu College, bound for Indore with Praveen to play for the Combined Universities against Clive Lloyd's touring West Indian side.

Behind us, in the midst of the milling platform, a third cricketer was accepting salutations from his rather more restricted crowd of admirers. Rajeshwar Vats, also of St. Stephen's, had been chosen in the Universities squad but was not expected to play. In any case, he had not Praveen's glamour, not his looks nor his command of English either. In class and culture, Vats stood with the subalterns of Delhi cricket, some of whom, from his home club Rohtak Road Gymkhana, were talking at a discreet distance from the rest of us.

The whistle blew, and the blue bogies of the Grand Trunk Express pulled their way out of the station. Our heroes gave some last waves, and disappeared within. We dispersed, slowly, chattering away of what might happen in Indore. Praveen and Hari and their admirers all sensed that this journey could be the making of them, as cricketers. The names of those who had passed through Combined Varsities enroute to full Test honours was legion. They included Hemu Adhikari, Pankaj Roy, Polly Umirgar, Ajit Wadekar, even Sunil Gavaskar. A hundred, from Hari's bat, or five wickets to Praveen's account, and they might soon join that company. One of them, perhaps, scarcely both. But which one?

A week later Praveen Oberoi returned, his dream destroyed. Astonishingly (in view of his past record), he had been relegated to twelfth man. In the nets, the Punjab slow left-armer Deepak Chopra had made more of an impression, and there was no room in the playing eleven for two of their kind. Hari Gidwani was chosen, and with scores of 39 and 42 did not disgrace himself. But the century was scored by someone else, by Anshuman Gaekwad who, before the season was out, did in fact find himself playing for India.

Praveen did not show up in college for some time, but straight off the train came Rajeshwar Vats. For he had opened the batting at Indore, and lived to tell the tale. In the first knock he went early, but the second time lasted an hour. In vivid Punjabi, he spoke of how he negotiated the new ball, jumping out of the way of this bumper and nudging that outswinger past gully for four. When he was 24, Roy Fredericks came on to bowl his chinamen. The first ball was a slow half-volley. This is what happened next (as rendered, from this distance in time, in my inadequate English): "I leapt out, and gave it all I had (Vats was a big man, and could give the ball a took). I thought it was four to cover, but this bastard at silly mid off blew on his left hand, and then put it down, stopping the ball dead at his feet - the way, you know, a short corner push is stopped before it is struck." Our hitter had given it his hardest, and carried the ball three feet. Vats was so unnerved that he walked out to the next delivery, waved his bat in a hopeless fashion, missed, and was stumped.

Some hours previously, when the West Indies batted, it had been Vats' turn to bowl. The openers were on the move, and he had been instructed by his captain, Gaekwad, to keep them quiet. Bowl way outside the off-stump, said the Baroda man. Vats' first ball, at a lively medium pace, was a couple of feet wide, but the batsman stepped across and cracked it past point for four.

Gaekwad walked up to him, hissing, "more wide, I said, wider." "I did as I was told," narrated Vats, "and threw it a couple of feet wider still. But this time the bugger, just for a change, walked over and hit me against the line, over midwicket for six." He was taken off after two overs that cost 19 runs, figures that read respectably besides those of the main bowlers: A. Roy, 18-0-95-0; R. Chadha, 14-1-61-1; A. Zarapkar, 29-3-113-1; and (most consolingly for us) D. Chopra, 30-0-125-1.

The bastard at silly mid off, it can now be revealed, was Vivian Richards, that bugger of a batsman, Gordon Greenidge. It was their first tour overseas; as it was for that magnificent fast bowler, Anderson Roberts. Moving up the ladder of experience, the other batsmen in the side included the Guyanan trio of Fredericks, Alvin Kallicharan and Lloyd himself; while among the bowlers were Vanburn Holder, Bernard Julien, Keith Boyce and, wisest of all, Lancelot Gibbs. Derryk Murray, a former boy prodigy and Cambridge Blue, kept wickets.

Richards, Lloyd, Kallicharan, Roberts, Greenidge, Gibbs - six of the greatest of modern players, their names making music in any order and in any language. They came with their lessers to India in that winter of 1974-75, to play in a series that must still rank as the most exiciting series ever played on Indian soil. Certainly it seemed that way to me. For I was then 16-and-a-half, a full-time cricketer myself, a college boy eavesdropping on genius, playing with the lads who played with the men who played with the gods. From me through Oberoi to Bishan Bedi (his Delhi captain) to Clive Lloyd was but two-and-a-half cricketing steps.

For Indians of my generation, the West Indian cricketers were truly without equal. The first Tests I have aural memories of were played in England in the summer of 1966, when the home side was thrashed by three Tests to one. The visiting West Indian captain, who shall remain nameless, scored in excess of 700 runs, took 20 wickets, and claimed 10 catches. His support cast included that classical opening batsman, Conrad Hunte, the strokemakers Seymour Nurse and Basil Butcher, and the famous fast bowling pair of Charlie Griffith and Wesley Hall. A world crashed around me - and millions of others - when this side was thrashed by Bill Lawry's Australians in the winter of 1968-69. Indians who had watched Lloyd and company play here in 1974-75 were likewise devastated when that team was vanquished 5-1 by Ian Chappell's gifted unruly men the following winter.

But even those defeats pale into insignificance when compared with this year's whitewash in Australia. Sobers' and Lloyd's sides both fought hard, won a Test apiece, and but for partisan umpiring might have won a second. The present defeat, following upon an unexpected loss at the hands of an always mediocre England, must count as the lowest point in the history of Caribbean cricket. This, it seems, is the moment to recall other and better times, other and better cricketers. In columns to come, I will offer my tribute to the great West Indian cricketers I saw or heard about.

RAMACHANDRA GUHA

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