Playing It My Way: My Autobiography Read Online Free PDF Page A

I’d often fall asleep on the bus – if I managed to sit down, that is. Anyone who has been on a Mumbai bus at peak hours will know just how difficult it is to get a seat. On days when I wasn’t so lucky, it was still a challenge just to stand with the kitbag, because the bus conductors would inevitably complain about me taking up the space of another passenger. It could be embarrassing because the conductors were often rude and would sometimes ask me to buy two tickets. I didn’t have the money for a second ticket and I had to learn to take these remarks in my stride. Dirty clothes often added to the embarrassment. After I’d played in them all day, the clothes were usually in quite a smelly state and this was the cause of a lot of discomfort and guilt on the way home. With time I evolved a way of wrapping the kitbag around me. Just as the helmet and pads became a part of me while batting, so the kitbag became an extension of me on the bus.
    So when people ask me these days if I have ever been on public transport, I tell them I used to travel on crowded buses and trains four times a day during my first year at Shardashram. And from a very young age I used to do it alone. I’d often take the bus or train from Bandra to Churchgate, and it was all a great learning experience. Within a few months I had made a lot of friends and we had great fun travelling together to matches.
Moving to Shivaji Park
    After a year of commuting between Bandra and school, my family realized that the daily travel was getting too much. I had to catch a connecting bus midway into the journey and if I missed the connection I’d be late for school. Also, the one-and-a-half-hour journey would end up exhausting me and it had started to have an impact on my training time. More worryingly, I had twice fallen sick in the first year of my daily commute to Shardashram and had also contracted jaundice.
    It was decided that I should move in with my uncle and aunt, Suresh and Mangala, because they lived at Indravadan Society, an apartment block close to Shivaji Park. In the end, I stayed with them for four years and they were hugely supportive of my endeavours and had a formative role to play as I grew up. In fact, there were times when I even made my aunt throw balls to me in our living room. I had bought a couple of golf balls and transformed them into an oval shape with the help of a blade. I had done this intentionally, so that when my aunt threw one to me, the ball would change direction after pitching, either coming in or going away. The whole idea behind this was that, while killing time at home, I would learn to play with soft hands without damaging things in our living room. Throughout the drill, my aunt would sit on her chair, and after playing the ball I would collect it and hand it back to her. When my aunt wasn’t around, I would hang up the ball in a sock and hit it with the edge of my bat. Hitting it with the bat’s full face was much too easy and when I hit it with the edge I would try to middle it as many times as possible. When it did not hit the middle, it would come back from different directions (it became an inswinger or an outswinger) and it was fun to negotiate the challenge. These drills helped my hand–eye coordination and also my awareness of which direction the bat should come from to meet the ball.
    My uncle and aunt’s house was a thirty-minute walk from school. It meant I could get more rest in the morning and could come home for lunch around 1 p.m. and go back to play a practice game at my club by early afternoon. Sir would invariably schedule three practice games a week for me and would ensure that I batted at number four in each one of them. He could do that because it was his club. I would bat in my favourite position in all the matches I played and if I got out I’d have to change quickly and go out and field. This was a good incentive to keep batting and not get out at all, as I didn’t enjoy fielding anything like