Twelfth Man

Good-looking young man
in your Crimean shirt
with your willow shield
up, as if to face spears,

you’re inside their men’s Law,
one church they do obey;
they’ll remember you were here.

“The Aboriginal Cricketer,” Les Murray

FOR THE FIRST TIME ever, Jammu and Kashmir has won the Ranji Trophy, India’s premier domestic first-class cricket championship. The team reached this spot after beating Karnataka, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh in the knockout stages. Its star pacer, Auqib Nabi, was among the top performers in all the away games. I have exhausted my mobile data, time and again, while trying to watch these matches. I have streamed the games and watched the highlights later to validate my joy at the sight of these underdogs “making it big.” But I must confess: I am an unreliable narrator. I look for the remnants of my past in their world anew, completing the puzzle of my incomplete cricket career as a twelfth man who was once at the helm of the junior cricket circuit in Kashmir. This is my story, and you must take it for what it is, served with pepper and a pinch of salt.

Cricket in Kashmir has always been about India and Pakistan. My earliest memories of watching the game are tied to the stressed atmosphere in my family when the two teams played. Uncles who showed little to no emotions would hurl insults at the often-unpredictable behaviour of the Pakistani side—insults that I inherited as I began to understand, acquire and inhabit the politics of the game. It was not our family alone, perhaps. In a geopolitical structure where India and Pakistan had everything to lose, the game became the site where violence was affordable for all. In the words of CLR James, the Trinidadian historian who wrote on being a West Indian cricketer playing the white man’s game, “social and political passions, denied normal outlets, expressed themselves so fiercely in cricket (and other games) precisely because they were games.”

We were only collateral in this saga. Questions of allegiance were imposed upon us as inheritance. They were reinforced every time Kashmiris celebrated the win of a side they should not have. Kashmir had hosted its first international cricket match in October 1983: India versus West Indies. Despite competing against the reigning World Cup champions, the visitors received unexpected support and applause from the crowd. The game was marked by boos and insults hurled at Kapil Dev and the rest of the Indian team. This atmosphere eventually escalated into a protest, with some men trespassing and vandalising the pitch during the innings break. Nevertheless, the match was completed with West Indies winning, in a home away from home, by 28 runs. Coincidentally, the men accused of vandalising the pitch during this international match were acquitted 28 years after the commission of the alleged crime. As I was to realise, Kashmir and cricket always oscillated between this oblivion and notoriety, ailments that summarise the world I stepped into in 2014.