A long long time ago, I used to play cricket for my college team. I used to dream of being a fast bowler for India. To feel the giddy rush of the sprint towards the pitch, with the wind in my ears and the warm smell of sun burnt grass all around me - and to bowl with all the power that my momentum and shoulder strength could muster - an insane rush of power and primal strength coupled with years and years of honed cricketing practice. All this with the deafening roar and cheer of thousands and thousands of delirious fans in a stadium flooded with big night lights. What a life, to do the one thing that gives so much happiness, and to do it again and again, in front of a billion people! Was quite the dream indeed. I can't convey to you the extent to which I would dream this dream, all through my teen years and into my very early twenties.
But then, life happened. Or rather, nothing happened. I didn't do anything. To live my dream. Instead...
Fast forward several years. I'm 26 now, and a lot more rounded around the mid-section of my exterior, and a fully integrated atom in the big machine that is corporate America.
It is 9:20 PM on a Thursday night. The silence is too depressing, and I put on some music. The Final Cut - by Pink Floyd starts to play. I ease back into my chair as familiar music fills my ears. I stare into my screen and pore over numbers. I have to finish up some stuff for a project due tomorrow. It is either a late night tonight, or four hours on Saturday. I choose the former. Every day, five days a week, I try very hard to make digital ad-space on some websites financially lucrative to advertisers - to advertise their wares. It works too. People buy products they don't need, with money they often don't have.
I welcome you to my American dream.
My phone buzzes. A message from my kid brother back home. "Brother, can you call?" I tell him I will call him as I walk back home.
A few minutes later, I'm walking back home. I pass a giant parking lot on the way home, and I decide to walk through it to save a few minutes. The downtown streets are deserted, and the parking lot is totally vacant too. A vast rectangular strip of land, brightly illuminated with a few neon lights.
As I step on into the lot, I get that familiar feeling - one that has grown all too infrequent over the years. If you grew up like me, playing cricket in India in the 90s, there is a permanent OCD ingrained in your brain - you are trained to imagine cricket fields in vast vacant spaces (mostly due to the lack thereof in Mumbai, where any cricket game would have rules subordinate to the presence of cars, buildings with very fragile windows, passers-by and other deviations from regular playing conditions).
Instinctively, I picture a pitch, and fielders at the far ends of the lot. Within a fraction of a second, my brain has already sized that the straight boundaries are too long and the side boundaries would be too short for the pitch the way I am picturing it. Would probably be okay, another part of my mind quickly reassures (probably because I've actually played games on more disproportionate grounds).
I can even see my 22 step run-up, and my best buddy Rohan batting - a few intense contests from many years ago spring to mind (Rohan was a worthy rival - the best batsman I knew. He dreamed equally intensely of batting for India then - he is now a traveling network analyst-consultant in upstate New York). The bright neon lights only complete the picture. With a fictitious seventy thousand strong crowd cheering in my ears, I make my way through the empty lot and on to the street that will eventually lead me home.
I get to play cricket once or twice a year now. I don't know if I will ever play that sport as well as I used to once upon a time. I don't even know if I love cricket as much as I used to back then. Life grows on you, and you are trained to like all things somewhat equally, and nothing all too much. But every once in a while, it is impossible not to get transported back to a time when that lovely lovely game meant everything and more to me.
Pink Floyd didn't know how right when they ended the song the Final Cut with
'Thought I ought to tear the Curtain down,
I held the blade in trembling hands,
Prepared to make it but just then the phone rang,
I never had the nerve to make The Final Cut'
I walk back to my empty apartment thinking what it would have been like if I'd made my final cut.
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