Mixing Peanuts and Cricket

Gulping down the insipid coffee to inoculate me against a Saturday hangover, I ran pell-mell down the apartment stairs out into dawn and jogged to the road. I tried flagging down the first auto; he refused point blank. I waited in my adidas sneakers for ten more minutes before Autorickshaw #2 acquiesced and off I was to play cricket after a really long gap of seven months.

As the rickshaw sped across the non-existent hustle and bustle of a sleepy Sunday morning on the Lokhandwala roads, early morning joggers, sleepy tea stalls and paid toilet booths flashed by. The significance did not strike me. I leaned out of the auto to get a glimpse of the glorious sun, rising across a clear blue expanse and some retarded bird shat on my clean-washed T shirt. Denigrating the process of digestion and in turn the lineage of retarded birds, I moved to a more central position inside the auto. The auto-man took double the time, triple the distance and four times the fare. Cursing, I jogged my way through tall apartment buildings that concealed a well-laid ground. And by well-laid, I mean it in all the senses possible.

But currently, it was as deserted as the premiere show for Vettaikaran. There was just one plumber/watchman who started toe-carving kolams on the earth on seeing me. Disgusted, I fished out my phone and called the organizer.

"Dude..!!". I said.
"Thood", he mumbled.
"WTF are you??" I screamed like a scorned PMS-struck teenager.
"Eh?", he said.

I realized it was futile and called the next in command. His wife answered the phone promptly. I told her that the situation was one of national importance. She understood quickly; a bit too quickly. The reasons were unclear; was it because I usually charm the pants off any middle aged woman I talk to or because she wants her spouse to get some dosage of good exercise? With no intention of stealing Tiger Woods' thunder I settled on the latter. Ten minutes more and the ground was littered with paunchy, grumpy men cursing wives, kids, marriages and for some reason, Aamir Khan.

But cricket is that sort of the game where you end up liking the game irrespective of all that aforementioned balderdash. I saw a marked increase in the players' confidence levels as they pranced and danced across the ground, literally violating what was left of her. The transition seemed so wonderful that I started believing in the true spirit of cricket. Cricket runs in our blood, cricket is everything; it can cure breakups, beat the hell out of a Chuck Norris flick on the television and create bonds so strong that chemists in Kazakhstan are still conspiring to develop a bio-weapon out of it to unleash it on Antarctica. I squinted at the sun and suddenly realized all my beliefs was just bovine excreta.

The main reason was that the apartments around had come to life with mushroomed spectators. Most of them were bored housewives whose husbands were still snoring the ceiling plaster down. Anyway, half an hour into the game the first innings was nearing its end. My stomach rumbled as I took my menacing approach of a bull on steroids to bowl the last over. I graciously gifted 17 runs in one single over. My ancestors turned in their graves as the humiliation lost me my so-sought after mojo. I could feel the audience sniggering at my plight. It had to be redeemed. I beat my belly and swore to get even. As I was walking back to the pavilion, frustrated, a vision holding a plate of peanuts and a goblet of lime juice rose. It was a benevolent-looking Maami, resplendent in a brown madisar who had come down from the apartments. I thanklessly gorged on the peanuts without thinking twice or even thrice.

Our innings began disastrously, chasing 83 runs in eight overs with 6 batsmen. Our openers got out so quickly that it looked like a trekking expedition to the pitch. After that, a decent flow of runs poured due to some exquisite stroke-play from our penultimate batsmen. There was a brief scuffle sometime during the game, when the hormonal drool content in the ground attained an all-time high; the only difference being, I have never seen punches being hindered by paunches (excluding Sam Anderson). Anyway, just when we looked like we were going to make it easily, there was a rather an unfortunate mix-up effecting a run out. Methinks, the batsmen were just running to get closer to the Maami who sat benignly, pacifying the returned batsmen who were only too pleased to be worried over. The score stood at 70 runs in seven overs. 12 was required off the last over as I went in to take strike.

My team of MBPs hoisted me and delivered swift kicks to my butt in celebration. Little did they know what they were soiling their hands with. I wrenched free from all of it, the team, the now-Chimp-scored audience and the lovely Maami (who winked while she was consoling the captain of the MHPs) and flew to the apartment gates. And then the pieces fell into place. That scheming Maami! But in her defense, it was all for the greater good(s). And yeah, she was also very pretty.

However, invariably, as luck would have it, autos after autos turned me down. I started running in the general direction of my house hoping to get a lift. And lo and behold! My apartment tower was right behind the ground! The grinning chipmunk of an auto-man, coiled in a hammock in Goa, recounting his exploits in the Mumbai underworld outsmarting rich, stupid kids with his ultra-sub machine autometer and impeccable driving skills as the bunch of loosely-clad auto-women oohed and aahed in pseudo-orgasmic pleasure; loomed in my face. My stomach burned, literally and figuratively.

I was steps away from the door when the Bhakra Nangal dam broke.