1

In the end it was all a bit unreal.

MS running a double, a World Cup in the balance, and Marty Guptill’s sharp throw breaking a billion hearts. It’s easy to read the symbolism now, after the game is over, but until that point, India never lost hope.

Until MS is at the crease, India rarely does.

But then he isn’t, and the silence that descends is deafening.

And as he walks back, we see under the helmet a rare moment of emotion, our Iron Man betraying something he rarely, if ever does: Despair.

That hurt. It hurts even now. It will hurt a long time from now.

But the ball before the last was a short one from fast man Lockie Ferguson, and those eyes had flashed fire, sending it across backward point with a scythe we know really, really well. In the slow motion replay of this shot, he walks calmly across to Chahal after playing it, watching it go all the way. The sequence barely lasts three seconds, but it is pure Bollywood.

In those three seconds, a nation watches their old warhorse, eyes glued to screens, and they believe.

In those three seconds, at least for those three seconds, a nation sits back and breathes.

Their hero is there, and he will deliver victory. It’s what he was born to do.

It doesn’t happen.

But what matters, and what will always matter, is that MS was there till the end, and we believed.

2

I always knew I’d be writing this one day, and though I’ve known this for so long, and dreaded it for even longer, you can’t do much when the time comes.

And the time has come.

I don’t know, though. I don’t know if the announcement is coming now, this week or the next, or if he will stick around for a farewell series at home, with perhaps a domestic game for Jharkhand as well. Perhaps the World T20 next year? That’s a stretch, perhaps?

But then, with MS, what do you know?

When he does, better writers and way more knowledgeable experts on the game (excluding Sanjay Manjrekar, national prick) will tell you what he did for the game and for his country, dissect how he did what he did, and prepare a timeline of his achievements across a trophy-studded career.

What I want to write about is what he meant. To me, of course, as a fan, but also to a generation.

And for that, we’ll have to go back a bit. In cricket, you always have to.

3

Our game is unique in that it is, and always has been, self-consciously obsessed with its own history. We are bred on its lore, on stories of Gundappa Vishwanath and Sunny Gavaskar and Kapil Dev and Bishan Singh Bedi. Our fathers had their heroes, our mothers had theirs, and our grandfathers told us tales of test match scores put up on The Hindu’s offices on Mount Road.

Us 90s kids, we had Dada and Jammy and Sachin and Viru. We had the Sharjah games, and we had Ajay Jadeja and Robin Singh. We didn’t win as much, sure, but boy did we have fun. When Hrishikesh Kanitkar swept that ball for four to win us that final against Pakistan, the Indian Air Force quarters I lived in then erupted in one unanimous roar of pure, pure joy.

A childhood of these memories is not one I take for granted.

But Indian cricket was changing, and the first time it became really evident was in 2007.

You see, until then, though I watched cricket, loved the game, and adored our heroes, I never saw myself as one of them.

How could I? I was not them, I could never be them. Dada was almost a Calcutta royal; Sachin was a Bombay blue-blood; Dravid and Kumble were the smart, cosmopolitan Bangaloreans; Viru, Gambhir, and Nehra were the brash Delhi brigand; Ajay Jadeja was actually from the royal family of Jamnagar. Big city boys, some of them from high privilege, with clear pathways to cricket, better facilities, and city ecosystems to nurture their game.

For a long time, I took it for granted that to play for India meant that you had to come from the traditional cricket cities, the powerhouses of Bombay, Bangalore, Delhi, and Madras foremost among them. Sure, a couple of boys made it from here and there. But largely, Indian cricket was them, and nobody else.

But then he arrived.

4

Even today, it boggles my mind. After watching him fanatically for close to 15 years, I’m still amazed by how he did it. Long haired Bihari boy, straight out of the hill country, raw and muscular, no money, no connections, comes to the game, and fights his way in through sheer physical and mental ability.
How did he find it within himself to become the leader he became, skilled, supple, and street-smart? How did he take all of that pressure in and deliver, at the crunch moments, blows of such staggering confidence and ferocity, that even now in the twilight of his playing days, even in the direst of dire situations, we believe?

In the movie they made on him, there is one detail I particularly love: In no scene is his name mangled into the cooler-sounding, Hindi-ized Maahi; It is the curt, cut, Bhojpuri Mahi.
As it should be.

He made me believe that it didn’t matter where you came from. He made me believe that we — of the smaller towns, of the temple verandahs, of dusty back-streets, sons of carpenters, daughters of clerks — that we had it in us too. That we had it in us to be anything we wanted to. If we put our minds to it. If we worked for it.

Sure, a lot of us would fall by the wayside as we tried. Sure, looking at him, we see the one who survived, and don’t see the million others who failed.

But again, we look at him, and know that one of us made it. Did what he or she wanted to, got up there and showed everyone what we are capable of, what we could do if only the smallest opportunity was given.

I will never let anyone forget where in the country he found his own fanatical, almost worshipful fan base. In working class, hard-grinding, heat-oppressed Madras, Dhoni became a demigod. Thala, they call him down here in the Tamil south, an epithet of respect and awe, a title not given lightly. Say something adverse about Thala here, you are bound to get stares and cold looks. Keep it up, and you might get a threat. Don’t say more. This city works hard for a living, and they are rabidly protective of one of their own. Remember, the Chennai Super Kings have never had another captain. From the beginning, they loved him with ridiculous, hysterical fervour.

I would know. I’m one of them.

5

MS will retire as India’s most successful captain, holder of a legacy that includes the team that is now dominating world cricket, this semi-final loss notwithstanding. The genius of his leadership made this generation. Confident, world-beating superstars, galacticos. King Kohli, sublime Rohit, awesome Bumrah, magical Kuldeep, a fierce, prowling-at-point Jaddu.

But for us from the Mofussil, from India’s small towns, he will always be more than that, way more than that. MS is the story we will tell our children when we tell them what is open to them in this world, what is possible. If only you could put your mind to it, if only you work hard, very hard. You can be captain of India. You can build a rocket. You can be an Olympian. You can build a company. You can help people. You can do anything you want.

And like Dhoni, you can do it your way.

When Dravid and Sachin retired, I shed tears, of course; I’m a 90s kid, after all. But when MS goes now, and he’s going to, I’m unsure of what it will take to console me.

Because when our heroes bow out, they don’t leave alone, do they? They take a bit of you with them. Your life has gone on along theirs all this time, and they’ve become this constant for you: You turn and there they are.

No one talks about it, but there’s comfort in fandom; there’s feeling, there’s ownership, and because there’s all this, when they leave, there’s emptiness too.

6

MS Dhoni is my hero. I was 20 when he won us the 2007 World T20, 21 when he won us the CB Series in Australia, 24 when he won us the World Cup, and 26 when he won us the Champions Trophy. In between, he found time to win two IPL trophies for the Chennai Super Kings, capping it with a third in 2018. I was 30 then, this last year.

My entire adult life has been one of following him around cricket stadiums in the country, shouting at the top of my voice when he swaggered to the crease. I have finished college, got a job, made a career, loved and lost, loved again and got married, and in all of this, when I’ve turned around he has been there, sometimes in the blue and at other times in the yellow, playing, winning, and living.

In his calmness, courage, and leadership, I have found inspiration and strength.
But most of all, because of where he came from and what he stood for, I have found, in a way, myself.

As someone said when you walked up those stairs on Wednesday, Thala, thank you.

Thank you. You’ve given us everything.

It’s 1976 in Philadelphia, and the working-class folks in the city’s south have been hit by a particularly vicious cycle of economic slowdown, strikes and unemployment. One of them, a part-time bartender, is dealt rough hand after rough hand. He loses his job as a substitute teacher, his wife leaves him, his mates are struggling. It’s a tough time. As a background to all of this is the horror run of the Philadelphia Eagles, the city’s NFL team, their team.

This is the setting for Ericson Core’s 2006 football movie, Invincible, starring Mark Wahlberg.

What follows is a classic tale of determination, luck, and redemption - almost trademarked now as a storyboard for the American sports movie. Mark Wahlberg’s Vince Papale, a 30 year old with some footballing talent and a lot of heart, somehow ends up playing for his city’s beloved team, and leads them to glory. It’s a pretty good movie, drawn from a true story, but that’s not why it’s one of my favourites.

Invincible is as much about Philadelphia as it is about its characters and about football. The idea of the city as a community, with its people holding it and themselves together in tough times, is a major theme.

In one of the movie’s strongest scenes, Vince and his father Frank (played magnificently by Kevin Conway) are sitting on a porch on a cold evening. Vince has been training with the Eagles, and the season’s about to begin. But now he’s starting to feel that he’s not good enough, that he should give up.

Looking up at his son’s face, Frank tells him, “You know how I used to tell you about Van Buren scoring that touchdown back in ‘48? That touchdown got me through 30 years at that factory. Got me through all those times your mother being sick. When I told you not to get your hopes up, didn’t mean that I wasn’t.”

People who don’t understand sport and fandom won’t get what Papale’s father is saying. Is it possible, really, for something as relatively insignificant and even trivial, like a football team’s win, to provide solace, to make up for financial troubles, for life’s daily humiliations, your own failures?

Well, yes. It does all that and more. We wouldn’t be sports fans otherwise.
But how, and more importantly, why?

In 2008, the first year of the Indian Premier League, when the Chennai Super Kings were brought together, I was 20, and attending engineering school. No one knew what would become of this experiment, this new tournament. Which was our team? Which was not? Should we be even picking a side? No one had any idea.

The choice was made for us, somewhat, in the pre-season team branding campaigns. While some teams went for cosmopolitan, everyone-is-welcome imagery and music (Deccan Chargers — Go chargers go, with no mention of Hyderabad itself), some went for more local fare (Knightriders — Korbo lorbo jeetbore). But none went at the idea of the local team with the extent that the Super Kings did: All the songs were in Tamil, all the promos were in Tamil, the videos featured temple gopurams, the Marina, and plastic bat-wielding paatis. The campaign was almost exclusionary. This is the Tamil team, it seemed to say, no one else’s. And we went for it. We were sold. This seemed like our team. These seemed like our people.

There was also another very important cultural peculiarity at play here. Chennai is very unique in that it’s widely held to the capital of an entire people, not just a linguistically partitioned state. Madras remains the capital of the Tamils, literally, culturally, and emotionally. Michael Wood points this out beautifully in his 1993 travelogue of the Tamil south, The Smile of Murugan — “Ask a Tamil abroad where he’s from, and he’ll say India. Ask him where he’s from if he’s elsewhere in India, he’ll say Madras.”

It was this love for Chennai, as our city, namma ooru, that made the Chennai Super Kings start out with the fanfare they did. Chepauk remained full that first season, as the team came together. They played a swashbuckling, entertaining brand of cricket; I remember the first season as a flurry of wins and celebrations, upended by that last cruel defeat to Shane Warne’s young, punching-above-their-weight Royals.

Season followed season, star player was followed by star player, the years rolled on, and along the way, the team started to represent an entire people, their love for the game, and their ferociously beloved capital.

I don’t know when it happened either. I certainly supported the Super Kings in the first season. I loved MS Dhoni, the idea of his small town childhood, and it was natural that I support the Tamil team led by him. What I do not know is when that support became something deeper, a fandom I now wear on my sleeve, a cultural marker, even an expression of who I am.

I was 23 when the Super Kings won their first title. I was 24, a struggler in Hyderabad when they won the second title. I was trying to keep the job I had. I did not know where I was headed. I remember that time chiefly as a dark blur of depression, punctuated by a yellow flash of glory.

That victory meant everything to me.

The following years did nothing to dampen the love I had for the Super Kings. They still played great cricket, so what if they didn’t win the trophy? For me, it was enough that they existed. Supporting them, watching them, knowing them was one of the highlights of the year.

And then came the ban.

The years that the Super Kings did not play coincided with two tough years for me. I did very well professionally, but at a cost. My losses were personal, deep, debilitating. And my team wasn’t there to help pull me together. This isn’t cheap sentimentality; the Super Kings have been a constant presence, an entity that I could count upon, and in a time of continuous, sometimes enervating and sometimes crippling change, I needed them, even if just to remind myself of who I am.

And there are times when you need these reminders.

In a little more than a week from now, the Super Kings will take the field again, against Rohit Sharma’s Mumbai at the Wankhede. The 11th season will begin.

And suddenly, magically, nothing would have changed. All that happened in the interim — all of that, would, for a while, be forgotten, set aside, made to wait. For a while, nothing else would matter except that they had returned. An even more weathered MS, a slightly plumper Raina, a pluckier Jaddu, the latest Bravo song, a long-haired Vijay; they will be accompanied by a new yellow horde, hopefully with the same spirit and flair that made us love them so much.

For me, it’ll be personal, as I suppose it will be for a lot of others.

Soon they’ll be here, playing at home. The floodlights will be on at Chepauk. The Bay of Bengal will blow on to the sweat-drenched backs of fans on the eastern stands. On the MRTS train back after the game, the whistles will fly, the song will be sung, with plastic-bottle music as accompaniment, again and again and again.

I’ll be there too, singing at the top of my voice, singing the song I’ve sung all these years, singing myself hoarse. No one will be listening, but the loud, urgent declarations of my allegiance will ring out into the southern night: This is my team, this is my city, these are my people. This is who I am.

The best part of the Hyderabad summer, when I was there two years ago, were the mornings. They dawned cold and fresh, forcing me to gather my sleeping bag and run back into the house from the terrace. In another five minutes I’d be off towards the Banjara Hilla mosque, blending in with the crowd answering the muezzin’s first call to prayer.

This is still the memory that defines Hyderabad for me, a vision of the faithful in white kurtas and grey beards, walking towards a voice that seemed to lure them towards it. It seemed magical, and if you think about it some more, actually is.

I thought then, as I still do, that a little faith can be a beautiful thing.

I’d go straight to Ismail Chacha’s shop at the mosque gates, where I would be handed Irani Chai in a glass cupped within both his weathered, gnarled hands in almost lost Hyderabadi courtesy. Chacha would inquire about my health that morning and proceed to tell a story. He would start with “Jab Nizaamon ka zamaana tha, Sairam beta, tab Hyderabad main..”, and I would listen, tea in hand and my mother’s old brown shawl around me, to tales of the Old City.

Madras mornings, though, are different.

The wind is not wind, it’s breeze. The sea is Madras’s most conspicuous presence, and easily its most beautiful. But lovely as the beach is in the mornings, the city won’t give you enough time to enjoy it — the sun will be up soon, and you need to go places, see people, make money.

Which means the best part of the unrelenting Madras summer is when the sun decides it has done enough damage for the day, and descends to the west, much to the relief of an assaulted city.

This Monday, a friend handed me two tickets to the Chennai Super Kings vs Rajasthan Royals game. It was half past six when we set out, on a summer evening in Madras.

Poet Meena Kandasamy had written a short piece in the Hindu for last year’s Madras Day, and I saved this passage from it –

“If you care to learn her (Madras’s) whole history, listen to it come away in layers, like the names of old, unforgettable lovers — Pallava, Chera, Chola, Pandya, Vijayanagara. Empires who held her close, coveted, almost concealed, since the 7th century — a port city on the Coromandel Coast.

She speaks a language with a legacy of 2,000 years; she also understands every word of English. She romps around with jasmine on jet-black hair, night or day. No other city shall ever seduce you in Madras’s Tamizhachi style: with sultry, sidelong looks; with spontaneous speech; with all her selfless, surplus love.”

It’s almost invisible, the subtle invocation of Madras’s gender in the passage, but I was struck by how natural it seemed. Maybe this is because we almost always describe cities and countries as female, but in the case of Madras, I don’t think it could ever be otherwise.

Madras can never be a he.

As I sat on the back of my friend’s expensive sports bike and took in my adopted city, Madras’s femininity asserted itself, in a way I never would have thought possible.

We drove through Thiruvanmiyur, where on a small side street clogged with going-home traffic, a pookari sat on a wooden stool and chatted animatedly with a customer, while her arms expertly measured out mozhams of jasmine blooms. We passed Adyar, where, as a college bus stopped to let down students, a horde of young girls jumped down, heads buried in iPods, hair free and voices high. Footwear in front of the temple on LB Road overflowed onto the street. Mothers and daughters headed in, as the slow humming sound of shlokas being recited wafted out in the warm air.

Mylapore came and went in a buzz of activity. Madras’s oldest neighborhood is a standing history lesson, and again, women are its chroniclers. We passed Bharatanatyam students in full costume returning from classes, maamis waddling around getting provisions and retired evening walkers gathering around the old coffee shops.

We’d almost reached Santhome.

It isn’t widely known, but Santhome is an integral part of the story of Madras’s birth.

On August 22, 1639, Francis Day, an Englishman, signed the lease for a tiny strip of beach he had obtained from the local chieftain of the Vijayanagara Empire. It was a village called Madarasapattinam, only about three miles from the Portuguese settlement of Santhome.

Francis Day chose this particular village for a reason. He had fallen for a Portuguese woman; he was in love, and she was in Santhome.

The village became Fort St. George, and marked the birth of the city of Madras, the oldest modern Indian city.

This August she’ll be 374.

We passed the gorgeous Santhome Basilica, drove on to the Marina Beach Road, and the ancient lighthouse flashed to our right. Queen Mary’s came and went, and the lights of Chepauk appeared from around the corner. The roar of the crowd came a minute later. The captains were heading out for the toss.

My friend fed a little more juice into the bike’s engine.

There have been numerous attempts to decrypt Madras and its people, its conservativeness, its intellectual snobbishness, its aspirational atmosphere, all of it.

I have an explanation of my own.

Madras is a small town. It is not a metro, and it never will be. It is a migrant city, populated by people coming from all over Tamil Nadu’s bazaar towns and villages. Madras is where their dreams congregate, this is where they come in search of success and fame. It may be one of our country’s biggest cities, a centre of art and culture, a business and technology hub, but the city’s people will always be from the small town.

And that explains everything.

In a Tamil village, where they are usually homemakers, the evenings belong to the women. They have finished the chores of the day, had their customary evening shower, and have descended, goddess-like, into the streets for their shopping, or are looking out from their balconies, or are talking at doorways or are going to temples, smelling of jasmine and turmeric.

Madras absorbed that village evening, and reflects it every single day.

Madras’s Premier League team, the Chennai Super Kings, is captained by someone the city loves to bits, Mahendra Singh Dhoni. They chant his name like a God’s, they fight his critics rabidly, they pay thousands to watch him play.

I know this, I do too.

The man from the small town of Ranchi in Jharkhand, is now claimed by Madras as her own.

MS Dhoni wasn’t born in India’s major cricketing cities like Bombay or Calcutta, from where most of India’s players come from. He did not attend elite schools, which usually pave the way into state teams and then into the national team. He was not rich, nor did he have any influential uncles on selection committees. He served as a ticket checker when he played for the Indian Railways. He is from the working class, a boy from the hinterland.

Which makes Dhoni an underdog, like most of Madras. Of course the city loves Dhoni.
He is one of their own.

I got patted down by the security people at Chepauk and was shown my seat. Two rows behind me sat an elderly woman and a little girl wearing her hair in ponytails. When the Super Kings song came on, the little girl broke into dance and the old lady laughed as she clapped and sang along.

“Enga ooru Chennaiku periya whistle adinga”

I turned around towards the game, singing with them.

Notes

This was first written in April 2013, and has been on my blog since. Reprinting this heavily edited and rewritten version here for Madras Week.