Cricket has a way of compensating for the realities that produce it. After all these years, the 2001 Test series India played at home against Australia still seems like the beginning of a spring that came after the blackened winter at the turn of the century, when a series of match-fixing cases proved that India’s cricket was rotten to its core. It makes no sense that the constructed drama of sport should balance out the treasons and stratagems of life. But balance it does, and sports fans are privileged by their ability to believe in it. This privilege, and the thing it hides, are both embodied for me by Mahendra Singh Dhoni, whom I love, yet was thankful to see retiring at the end of last year.
I was one of those who left cricket fandom to stand out in the cold when the match-fixing cases came to light. I did not come back in during the India–Australia series; to this day I have no idea what VVS Laxman actually did in Kolkata. But I returned to cricket when Mahendra Singh Dhoni arrived, and brought with him something we had never seen before. He made, of course, a remarkable entry into India’s consciousness. His first international century came in his fifth ODI, a dazzling 148 against Pakistan in Visakhapatnam. He kept wickets in a style that made Parthiv Patel and Dinesh Karthik seem like afterthoughts. He had, as Claire Clairmont said of Byron, a wild originality of countenance. But Dhoni was by no means the first killer-diller of the millennium; India was already in the age of Virender Sehwag and Yuvraj Singh. Rahul Dravid, for his part, also kept wickets with his customary grace; he too, was very handsome.
The unscientific attraction of Dhoni was his extraordinary confidence, for which no really satisfactory explanation has ever emerged. Athletes are expected to act with audacity; they are known to be stoic; they train all their lives to achieve the tranquility in which all great sporting feats, attempted in stadiums spilling over with screaming fans, are accomplished. So much of our joy in sport comes from these things that we know how to recognise them almost instantly. Yet the degree to which Dhoni managed to combine all of them in his affect was unprecedented. Cycling fans may remember that the literature of pre-convicted Lance Armstrong was full of notes on his comic-book physiology: the unusual length of his thigh bones, the 80 percent slow-twitch muscle fibre, the heart and lungs like blacksmiths’ bellows. The cottage industry of Dhoni journalism is similarly full of wonder about his intangible super-talent: an attitude that came from nowhere, was impervious to everything, and unchanged in victory or defeat.
It was thrilling. When Dhoni set his jaw at the end of a match, it seemed to be the perfect way to respond to the whole rigmarole, not just as a player, but also as a fan. You wanted to confront cricket with that spirit of boldness, with that enjoyment that was neither grim nor frivolous. It was a useful attitude in defeat, but it was extraordinarily lovely in victory, too. When men like Harbhajan Singh, accused of racially abusing Andrew Symonds on a tour of Australia in 2008, celebrated a Test victory at Perth as though it were a vindication of Indian character, you could look at Dhoni, unruffled even in jubilation, and be reassured by his sense of proportion. Yet, in those heady years, as Dhoni took charge of the team, and India made its way to the top of the Test rankings, it never occurred to anyone to wonder whether Captain Cool cared enough or not. He was in it for the game, a hundred percent; he just managed to put aside the anxiety over its outcome.
A decade after he made his entry into Indian cricket’s upper echelons, that spirit still seems utterly unique. In an attempt to start from the source, the writers of The Caravan’s January 2015 cover story, Sidhanta Patnaik and Dileep Premachandran, went to Ranchi and Kharagpur, his early playing fields. There is no wellspring of self-possession in small-town eastern India, a region whose cricketers have been historically disadvantaged and overlooked by the mainstream. If there was some early, extraordinary will to power, no one seemed to know of it. But of course, geography can only explain things up to a point. Ranchi no more made Dhoni than Mumbai made Sachin Tendulkar, from what we know.
One of Dhoni’s former trainers in Kharagpur remembered a boy running alone at night on the track around the Railways stadium, trying to get faster and stronger. That is the sort of thing heroes do in movies; perhaps that is the sort of movie that used to unspool in Dhoni’s head when he stepped on a field. Perhaps it still does. Perhaps it no longer matters. We don’t know.
What we do know is that the story emerges in a bleaker present. It seems impossible to look at Dhoni on field and imagine that he enjoys himself, now. Patnaik and Premachandran also analyse Dhoni’s ubiquity, and the fatigue it causes him. Forbes ranked him fifth on a list of the world’s most valuable athletes, because his endorsements are endless, and he probably makes money for breathing at this point.
But he also plays more cricket than any other international cricketer today, and the last year, with its tribulations for India on field, has been especially hard. I have fallen out of the cricket habit again, but so, apparently, has Dhoni. The comic-book hero mask is still in place; but when I look at him on field now, I can’t help but think of the character in Penelope Fitzgerald’s Human Voices, whose implacable calm, the novelist writes, is “really recklessness.” He is “a gambler who no longer felt anything was valuable enough to stake.”
We stand at the cusp of establishing whether or not this is literally true. Dhoni made his Ranji debut in 2000, the year that Mohammed Azharuddin was convicted of match-fixing. By the time he retired from Test cricket last month, winter had set in hard, once again. Over the previous couple of years, the fantasy surrounding Indian cricket has been detonated daily by allegations of corruption and severe conflicts of interest involving its top administrators. Dhoni was questioned extensively by the Mudgal committee investigating his boss, N Srinivasan, and he may figure prominently in the report submitted by the committee to the Supreme Court, which is currently hearing a case against Srinivasan. Lance Armstrong took cortisone and HGH to destroy the precarious moral conditions that preserve a sense of fairness in the sporting environment; Dhoni, at the very least, has turned a blind eye to those conditions. It may be that he is never called to account during these investigations; perhaps not for the rest of his career, or the rest of his life. Yet the facts remain, and will shadow the Dhoni story, just as it will the story of the whole game. The more we learn about the administration of cricket in India and around the world, the more it seems that re-arranging reality is a precondition for playing the sport as much as it is for watching it. I’m afraid we may learn all too soon the ways in which this, too, is compensated.