The West Indies are touring India, and I had to check the fixture list to be sure. The series runs to 17 October, white-ball cricket slotted between the Asian Games and the first drumbeats of Navratri. When I mentioned this to my father, he put down his tea.
“Who is bowling for them?” he asked.
I read out some names. He recognised none of them, and he made the face of a man informed that his old school had been demolished.
“No Holding?”
I reminded him that Michael Holding retired in 1987. He said he knew that. He said it the way a man speaks when he has been hoping to be corrected.
What followed was a forty-minute phone call that I will call, out of respect, a lecture. I will compress it. It begins in June of 1983.
My father was twenty-two that summer and four months into his first job. India had won exactly one match in two World Cups, and bookmakers in England were quoting 66 to 1 against it winning the third. In the final at Lord’s, India were bowled out for 183, a score the neighbourhood, gathered around a tea stall radio, declared respectable for a team in mourning.
The West Indies, who had won the first two Cups, went out to chase it. Balwinder Sandhu bowled Gordon Greenidge through the gate with a ball Greenidge had decided to leave. Then Viv Richards hit Madan Lal high into the air, and Kapil Dev ran backwards, a very long way, and took the catch over his shoulder. The West Indies were all out for 140. India had won by 43 runs.
In my father’s lane, residents went berserk. A man who had bet against India that morning was seen going into his house and not coming out for two days.
That autumn the West Indians came to India to discuss the matter. They arrived with a grievance and the fastest bowlers on earth, and my father still has a vocabulary for them. Holding, he says, ran in so softly that umpires complained they could not hear him coming, which is how ‘Whispering Death’ got his name. Malcolm Marshall, who would finish with 376 Test wickets at 20.94, delivered balls that arrived before the thought of them. Richards walked out without a helmet, chewing gum, with the stroll of a man turning up late to his own party and wondering where the music was.
My father watched at a neighbour’s house, because he owned no television. It was a black-and-white set with an antenna on the roof, and the neighbour’s son climbed up to adjust it whenever the picture wobbled, which in my father’s telling happened precisely when Marshall came on. When a bowler began his run, the room went so quiet that you could hear the tea sizzling.
India lost the series three-nil, and my father will not hear the word loss attached to it. In Delhi, Sunil Gavaskar made his twenty-ninth Test hundred and drew level with Bradman. In Ahmedabad, Kapil Dev took nine for 83, then the best figures an Indian had returned in a Test. In Madras, Gavaskar scored 236 not out, the highest score of his career. The scoreboard says one thing. My father keeps a different set of books.
The fear of the West Indies team had a long history, and it had a chorus too. In 1950, at Lord’s, the West Indies beat England for the first time on English soil. The spinners Ramadhin and Valentine did the damage, and the calypsonians then living in London, Lord Beginner among them, sang the evening away. His “Cricket, Lovely Cricket” has been sung in the islands ever since. The calypsonians understood what a scorecard cannot: a match is a story, and a story wants singing.
India learnt the other side of that story slowly. In 1971, Gavaskar scored 774 runs in his debut series in the Caribbean, and India won there for the first time. In 1976, at Port of Spain, India chased down 403, then a Test record. At Kingston, a few weeks later, Bishan Bedi declared the innings closed at 97 for 5 because the rest of his batsmen were too injured to bat. Gavaskar went on to score thirteen Test hundreds against them. From 1980 to 1995 the West Indies did not lose a Test series, and in the middle of that long reign one June afternoon at Lord’s put a crack in the legend.
I never saw Brian Lara ‘live’ in his prime, which is a lonely thing to admit among cricket aficionados who did. I met him on TV, with a backlift so high and so late that the bat seemed to be waiting for permission. Then came the stroke, a flourish that belonged on a stage. His records are the kind a child can recite: 375 at Antigua in April 1994, then 501 not out for Warwickshire seven weeks later, and in 2004, back at Antigua, 400 not out against England, which still stands as the highest score in Test history. He finished with 11,953 Test runs. The innings I would put in a museum is the 153 not out at Bridgetown in 1999, when the West Indies chased 308 against Australia and won by a single wicket.
Shivnarine Chanderpaul I did see, from the cheap stands at a Test in India, and he made no flourish at all. He stood front-on at the crease, shoulders squared to the bowler like a man waiting for a late bus, scratching at his guard while the bowlers took his patience personally. They called him ‘Tiger’. I remember thinking nobody could look less like a great player, and then I looked at the scoreboard. He played 164 Tests between 1994 and 2015 and scored 11,867 runs at an average of 51.37. Between them, Lara and Chanderpaul scored nearly 24,000 Test runs for a team that was losing around them. They held up a house with their bare hands.
The decline of the Windies came swiftly. The two-time world champions lost to Scotland in the 2023 qualifier and missed a World Cup played on Indian soil. Last year Australia bowled them out for 27 at Sabina Park. Flickers of the old light still show. At the Gabba in 2024, Shamar Joseph, a former security guard from a Guyanese village, took seven wickets and won a Test for the West Indies by eight runs. In 2016, at Eden Gardens, Carlos Brathwaite hit four consecutive sixes in the last over of a T20 World Cup final, and the dressing room danced to Dwayne Bravo’s “Champion”. That night belonged to a format the old fast men never imagined, and my father, I should say, found it frivolous but watched every ball.
What do we owe a fear? A great deal, as it turns out. Indian batting learnt its nerve in the shadow of those quicks, and Indian bowling learnt its menace by studying them. When Jasprit Bumrah runs in today and a stranger’s knees go quiet, some of the islands’ old lessons are working through him. We repaid the debt in attention, and we have kept paying long after the creditors stopped collecting.
My father owns no transistor and has not for decades. He will watch this series on his phone, held at arm’s length like a sacred object, with the volume turned all the way up. Somewhere in the second over he will tell me through the speaker that they used to be faster. Then he will lean in anyway, the way he leaned in once on a neighbour’s floor, waiting for a ball to arrive before the thought of it.
– Ends
