Comment

Just a little while ago, I was at the CCI. No one calls it by its expanded initials but they should: the Cricket Club of India lives up to its name, with cricket memorabilia looking at you wherever you turn, starting from the original Ranji Trophy which sits in magnificent splendour in the entrance hall.

Upstairs, the corridors are lined with historical cricket photographs. There’s the young Indian little master sitting reverentially by the side of the Don. That’s Little Master Edition No. 1, Sunil Gavaskar. Edition No. 2, Sachin Tendulkar also did the same pilgrimage and I am sure that photograph too is on some corridor wall.

A whole section is reserved for Anil Kumble’s record haul of wickets against Pakistan in the Delhi match: all ten of them. Presiding over all this overpowering nostalgia is the overpowering figure of Raj Singh Dungarpur himself, a man as steeped in history as the club he has presided over for heaven knows how many years.

But more than all this is the view you see from the clubhouse: the lush green lawns and the imposing stands of Brabourne Stadium, once the Mecca of Indian cricket rivalled only by Calcutta’s Eden Gardens, but for the last very many years reduced to holding minor matches as the rival Wankhede Stadium, only a cricket ball throw away, gained primacy.

The story behind why that came to pass is irrelevant now except that it foisted an unwanted cricket ground on our city. And even if it is argued that in a large metropolis two stadia can co-exist without tantrums as Lords and the Oval do in London, Wankhede’s gain wasn’t just Brabourne’s loss; it was every cricket lover’s irredeemable loss.

That’s because Wankhede was built in haste, and built for profit. It certainly wasn’t built by anyone who had ever watched and enjoyed a cricket match. We see cricket being played in England and Australia, the two Originals. Men come to watch with their women, and women often with their children. Costumes are worn and beer is drunk and a picnic spirit pervades the air.

The last time I went to Wankhede was about five years ago and I swore I would never go again. Someone at the CCI told me he had made that vow 20 years ago. "The only time I’d sat on benches like that," he said to me, "was in Class I. And I was much smaller and slimmer then."

Those benches, let me tell you, are narrow (perhaps they used the measurements of anorexic models). They aren’t just narrow, they crowd into each other, so that moving to your "seat" involves a pirouette of shoes and legs, and when you sit, your knee is propping up the back of the spectator in front of you. Perhaps they used measurements of anorexic dwarfs.

But the Wankhede torture goes further: its loos are dirty, its eating facilities the kind where they throw food at you. Worse, Wankhede is a death trap, its escape routes so narrow that even anorexic dwarfs would trample each other to death if there were a stampede.

But now, oh unbridled joy, major cricket has come back to the Brabourne. Will it last? It won’t, because this tournament isn’t necessarily a forerunner of Big Cricket returning to its roots. They are improving the facilities at Wankhede, I am told, and since it’s the headquarters of the Bombay Cricket Association, Wankhede is where the future action will be.

Will they improve the seats? Will they use full-bodied, full-size models for measurements? Will their toilets be clean and their food edible? Will their escape routes actually be that? Perhaps. We can only reserve judgement until everything’s complete. But even if they build a new Wankhede to international standards, how will they recreate history?

Years ago when the Oval and Lord’s weren’t particularly well-fitted, you felt a sense of tradition and awe when you entered their grounds. That’s because you knew that Bradman had played here in 1934 and scored a triple hundred or that Ray Lindwall had come running in that effortless way of his or Jack Hobbes had taken guard to the very first ball of the match.

The British, more than anyone else, know that you can’t manufacture history. It’s either there or it isn’t. And wherever the British have it, as they do almost everywhere, they preserve it and nurture it. They certainly don’t willfully throw it away.

But then, I suppose, we aren’t British, are we?