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said about it to my English friends was accurate.
    Haven’t people done more inexplicable – and worse – things on a whim?
    It was quite a price to pay, it turned out, for a whim. Especially for someone who ate only a banana for lunch every day for a month to raise the money for the ticket. The travel agent, a Bangladeshi, had his cramped, airless office off the Bayswater Road. He sat behind a chipped Formica desk and swivelled around to the calendar tacked up behind him when he heard my request.
    The chair squeaked when he turned. One of the wheels did not work. The venetian blinds at the other end of the room were crooked. One of the slats was missing, letting in the feeble November sunlight.
    He scratched his chin and said it would be difficult, getting a ticket now, at such short notice in the winter when so many Indians were travelling back home, and asked if it would do to leave a fortnight later. When I explained that I didn’t merely want to go but in fact
had
to go on precisely the date I said, he conceded that it could be arranged, through great enterprise and resourcefulness on his part. Besides, as a fellow Asian, he promised me a discount. He booked me into an Aeroflot plane from Heathrow to Dum Dum airport.
    Only later, when I compared prices with Bengalis that I knew in London, did I realise that he had ripped me off. But that afternoon, as I walked out of the agent’s office and into the stream of traffic on the Bayswater Road, my heart was singing. I had a ticket to the final at the Eden.
    My parents were aghast when I told them. Many of my friends back home thought it was some kind of a joke. But those I knew in England did not find my plan as outrageous as I had imagined they would. My tutor, an Australian who was a member of the MCC, felt the break would do me good. And that this was as good an excuse to go home as any.
    Now it seems to me that what I was doing was, in a way, expected of me by the people I had come to know in England. It fitted the notion that they had of the Indian cricket fan who would go to any lengths to satisfy his desire to watch a match at his home ground. It made them feel vindicated; it confirmed what they thought they knew: if you’re Indian, you must be crazy about cricket.
    * * *
    To make my homecoming sweeter, India reached the final. But the real cracker of a match – the match that became part of Indian one-day cricket lore and added to the myth that Sachin Tendulkar was already becoming – was the game India played against South Africa at the Eden on 24 November.
    I was on the plane at the time.
    I heard and read all about it once I’d landed. In fact, my parents – who by the time I arrived had overcome their reservations about my trip and were overjoyed at this sudden opportunity to see me again – recounted the details to me as we drove home from the airport.
    I saw the rerun later on TV. South Africa fielded first. India ran up a meagre 195 in the full quota of fifty overs. Mohammad Azharuddin, in sublime touch throughout the championship, scored ninety off 118 balls in that cavalier-careless-caressing manner that only he had with the bat. (It was so calming, so de-stressing to watch him. It always is, I suppose, when you see something so awfully difficult being made to appear so ludicrously simple.)
    When the visitors began their reply, Anil Kumble and Ajay Jadeja quickly pegged them back. And despite a valiant sixty-two from Hudson, South Africa came into the final five overs needing forty-five to win the game. But they fought back, and with one over left they needed just six to win. As skipper Azharuddin and the seniors – Kapil Dev, Prabhakar – went into a huddle to decide who should bowl those final make-or-break six balls, audacious, unfazed-by-the-big-occasion Tendulkar, only twenty-two, walked up and asked for the ball.
    Azharuddin gave it to him, though it was never absolutely clear if he did so because he