Howzat!

My brother and his cricket team, 2015.

A true story about an intergenerational love of cricket.

In our Nottinghamshire suburb, the trees are slowly swaying and the autumn cold sneaks in through the crack under the door. The sun is deceptively bright, the air crisp. It is lunchtime and my mother has made aloo paratha. I follow the dregs of butter around the plate with my finger as my father tells us a story about India in the 1980s.

As children, if my dad and his brother weren’t playing cricket, they were watching it. For passers-by, it was a common sight to see the two boys kneeling on the windowsill, pressing their faces against the glass. In the unrelenting heat, their foreheads left sticky marks against the pane as they gawped at one of the many cricket games conducted on the parched dirt road behind their home.

It was a daily routine – “Ma, can we?” – “Have you done your homework?” – “Na, but can we?” – “Do your work first”. My dad and his brother would sprint out of the house regardless, my grandma half-heartedly chasing them but stopping short, despairingly, at the door.

The ball was a tennis ball, the bat one in a line of endless hand-me-downs, the grip — once blue — almost fully unravelled. The putputput of the boys tapping the bat into the earth while waiting for the ball was part of the soundscape of the street for as long as the neighbourhood could remember. The children’s cries of “Howzat!” mingled with the calls of street sellers, the whirr of motorcycles, and the occasional disgruntled snort of a cow in the road. My grandma listened to the sounds as they spilled through the slightly ajar window as she cooked. Sometimes the ball would come through the window too, and the children would submit themselves to a scolding, momentarily contrite before being irresistibly drawn back into the game.

Only at 2pm was it safe to walk past without risking a ball to the head, when the sun shone its hardest onto the earth and even the matted fur of the tennis ball appeared to sweat. The boys, grinning and satisfied, would head inside to take a nap. The hot ground caught its breath and let out a slow exhale, and the dust took its chance to settle. 

As my father finishes his story, I observe with new interest my brother’s cricket bat lying in the hallway with its shiny new red grip. Next to it lies his cricket bag, his sturdy helmet, and his wicket-keeping gloves. The hallway ceiling is marked with indents and darker circles where my dad and my brother have gone rogue and played cricket indoors, my mother framed despairingly off to the side in the kitchen doorway.

As lunch ends, my dad stands up with a contended yawn and a pat of his stomach. As has been true since his childhood, he goes for his afternoon nap; irrespective of what the evidence outside suggests, his mind knows what it knows, and his knows that at 2pm it’s too hot outside to play cricket.