The seven-year-old version of me was notorious for two things — staying up at ungodly hours and testing my grandmother’s unwavering attention during a late-night cricket match. The game was simple: I had to test how far I could sneak into the hall till she peeled her gaze off the screen — she never did. My grandmother Lakshmi Iyer’s passion for cricket was infamously obsessive. “We have eaten a lot of burnt food because amma would get distracted by cricket on the television,” my mother complains on the phone as my Chennai-raised grandmother cackles in the background. For us — a Tamil-speaking 84-year-old and her Hindi-speaking granddaughter — cricket became a language.
Recently, these memories of mischief and middle-ground were brought to the fore as a viral video of another paati analysing an India-New Zealand match did the rounds on WhatsApp. “After taking nine wickets cheaply, they (India) struggled to get the last one and the match ended in a draw. Everyone performed well but in the end, they couldn’t do anything. They ran out of time. The New Zealand batters were also spinners and tailenders and knew how to tackle (the Indian bowlers)…,” explained a chagrined R Lakshmi. The video was reposted by her grandson Arvind on Twitter and Instagram where comments flooded in awe of the 92-year-old and her apt analyses. “My family friend made it. She didn’t know it was being recorded, she just started giving her inputs. It was only after 2-3 hours that our family members told us they recognised her in the video. It was bonkers. Across all platforms, it has passed a million views,” exclaims Arvind.
Catching the cricket craze
Lakshmi’s beloved commentary is cast out of a long and committed journey with the sport. “I watch all cricket matches — IPL, test cricket, World Cup, T20. I have been watching them on television since 1984. When I was younger, my father would listen to the commentary with the transistor close to his ear. I had no clue what they were doing but now, I, in a similar fashion, watch all the matches and know all the schedules,” shares Lakshmi. In fact, for certain matches that were aired early in the morning, she would get up at dawn and finish all her chores to enjoy her cricket time, uninterrupted.
Eventually, Arvind, too, joined in on the experience, a sliver of their shared interest that would last for years to come. He recalls the Australia series that was broadcast at 4:30 am. “We lived next door. She would call on the landline and discuss the pitch conditions, who was likely to win, give pointers, and ask for my opinion. I would go to her house during the first drinks break. I remember the sight of her sitting on the floor with all the vegetables for lunch. We watched together as I drank coffee and she chopped vegetables,” he recalls.
When Arvind left home for further studies, discussions of the sport took the telephonic route. They would confer about recent matches, the games played by Arvind — a cricket player himself — and when Lakshmi became a little hard of hearing, calls turned to long, elaborately drafted WhatsApp messages. No matter the conversation, cricket is always a part of it, he remarks.
Bleeding blue
When Lakshmi turned her lights on at daybreak in Coimbatore, across the country in Kolkata, another cricket fan began her preparations for early morning matches. Several books could not document the now Chennai-based Vijaya Subramanian’s love for cricket. Literally. The 81-year-old is the regarded expert in a family of cricket lovers, having missed nearly no matches of the Indian team since the 1940s and keeping track of the innings in elaborate formats in notebooks. “I always support India. In my book, I write how much they score, how many wickets each bowler takes, how many runs they need and revisit the information to remember the matches…I always wanted India to win, that’s it,” she explains with one eye on the ongoing match.
Even external events did not stop her from catching up with commentaries, chimes in her son Karthik, whose zeal for the game is admittedly a product of his parent’s passion. “I remember we went to watch all five days of test cricket when we lived in Kolkata. My mother would cook in advance; we would take with us fruits, vegetables, idlis, molaga podi,” he shares. The ripple effect has further reached his son as well, who plays in the Tamil Nadu Cricket League. Generation after generation, the interest in cricket has only gone up, he observes.
But no one beats Vijaya’s enthusiasm for the sport, which came with patriotic rituals in their house on match days. “On one side of my mother’s notebooks, the scores are jotted (each run required written and scratched off till India wins), and on the other, shlokas — Sarva Karya Karya. There is a statue of Ganesha placed near the television and during the match, everyone sat in a particular position. My mother believed that if we moved, India would lose,” he reminisces.
The generational love for cricket and thirst for India’s victory has even extended to Vijaya’s sister and her son. “I began following the sport in the late 60s or so. My son is equally crazy about the sport. When India plays, I write shlokas and it’s disheartening when they lose. When we knew India was going to lose, my son and I would switch off the television and my late husband would urge us to watch the game in its true spirit, but we couldn’t bear to see the nation’s loss,” says Padma Lakshmanan, who still follows matches fervently.
The final innings
Some relive childhood memories with their mothers and grandmothers, others rewind the clock for those who are not around anymore, but whose passion has left an impressive mark and countless stories for the families to share. For Seetha L Gangadharan, watching cricket was less about the sport and more about relishing the excitement and enthusiasm that it invoked in her father Gangadharan and late grandmother Seetha Lakshmi Lakshmanan. “I follow the sport only for her. I remember, she would sit to watch the sport and no one was supposed to talk or disturb her. If India lost a match, you could notice that she was sad that day.
And she would analyse the game with my father — what went wrong, what happened. Over by over. Sometimes it would even carry on to the next day and they would even argue (about their analysis of the match). That is why when I saw that paati’s (R Lakshmi’s) video, I was instantly reminded of my paati,” she shares. She was very critical of the Indian team, adds Gangadharan, but because of her passion for Indian cricket.
“She wasn’t just all about the India vs Pakistan matches. To me, that is ultimate cricket. She just loved the game and watched it for the sport. When we were younger and studying in a boarding school, she would tell us about the matches and the players when we came home on weekends,” he adds, recounting a particular memory of when Nari Contractor got hit on the head with a ball in 1962 — an injury that ended his career as a professional batsman. When everyone thought he was out of the game, he returned as the Indian team’s manager. Gangadharan was only six when his mother explained the entire incident to him. But did he follow in his mother’s footsteps? “Without any doubt. Definitely. Until my last breath, I will love cricket,” he proudly announces.
With a fondness for the game, 37-year-old Siddharth Ananth’s late grandmother also left him with memories of matches and a habit of reading newspapers starting from the sports page. As he came across R Lakshmi’s video, he was transported back to times when all the grandchildren would scream ‘out’ to get a reaction from their pacing paati.
“My grandmother used to wear her emotions on her sleeve. She would constantly talk about the stage of the game, that so and so should take a wicket or score runs, about the fall in the run rate or increase in the asking rate, how a particular partnership would go. We would console her sometimes but mostly tease her about a wicket falling. In tense situations, she would pace up and down,” Siddharth thinks back to sitting in a living room with his cousins and his grandmother on match day. In a strange coincidence, the post that rewound the clock also revealed to him that R Lakshmi is his distant relative. A small world, indeed.
‘Cricket is the religion of India’ — we’ve heard it umpteen times. Whether that is true, I can’t say. But cricket is more than just another sport. For some of us, it is an inheritance.