India vs West Indies: Fear Gone

West Indies are touring India and I had to look at the fixture list to be sure. The series runs until October 17, with white-ball cricket sandwiched between the Asian Games and the first beats of Navratri drums. When I mentioned this to my father, he put the tea down.

“Who bowls for them?” he asked.

I read some of the names. He didn’t recognize any of them and looked like the man who told him his old school had been demolished.

“No hold?”

I reminded him that Michael Holding retired in 1987. He said he knew that. He said it the way a man talks when he hopes to be corrected. Michael Holding, also known as Whispering Death, took 249 wickets in 60 Test matches. (Photo by Reuters)

A forty-minute phone call followed that I would call the lecture out of respect. I will compress it. It starts in June 1983.

My father was twenty-two that summer and four months into his first job. India have won exactly one match in two World Cups and the bookies in England were 66 to 1 against them winning the third. In the final at Lord’s, India were bowled out for 183, a score that the neighborhood gathered around the tea stall radio and declared respectable for a team in mourning.

West Indies, who had won the first two cups, went after him. Balwinder Sandhu bowled Gordon Greenidge through the goal with a ball that Greenidge opted to leave. Then Viv Richards hit Madan Lal high in the air and Kapil Dev ran back, a very long way, and took the catch over his shoulder. West Indies were all out for 140. India won by 43 runs.

In my father’s lane, the residents went crazy. The man who had bet against India that morning was seen entering his house and not coming out for two days.

That autumn the West Indians came to India to discuss it. They came with a grudge and the fastest bowlers in the world, and my father still has a vocabulary for them. Holding, he says, ran in so quietly that the referees complained they didn’t hear him coming, hence his name ‘Whispering Death’. Malcolm Marshall, who finished with 376 Test wickets at 20.94, delivered balls that arrived sooner than thought. Richards came out helmetless, chewing gum, with the walk of a man who showed up late to his own party and wondered where the music was.

My father watched at the neighbor’s house because he didn’t have a TV. It was a black-and-white rig with an antenna on the roof, and the neighbor’s son would climb up to adjust it whenever the picture wavered, which my father told me happened precisely when Marshall came on. As the bowler began to run, the room became so quiet that you could hear the sizzling of tea.

India lost the series three nil and my father will not hear the word loss associated with it. Sunil Gavaskar reached his twenty-ninth Test hundred in Delhi and tied with Bradman. In Ahmedabad, Kapil Dev took nine for 83, the best figures by an Indian in a Test. At Madras, Gavaskar made 236 not out, the highest score of his career. The scoreboard says one thing. My father has a different set of books. Sunil Gavaskar and Kapil Dev. (Photo by Reuters)

The fear of the West Indies team had a long history and also had a refrain. In 1950, at Lord’s, West Indies beat England for the first time on English soil. The spinners Ramadhin and Valentine did the damage, and calypsonians then living in London, among them Lord Beginner, sang in the evening. His “Cricket, Lovely Cricket” has been sung in the islands ever since. Calypsonians understood what a scorecard couldn’t: a match is a story, and a story needs singing.

India was slowly getting to know the other side of this story. 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. In Kingston a few weeks later, Bishan Bedi declared the innings closed at 97 for 5 as the rest of his batsmen were too injured to bat. Gavaskar won thirteen Test sets against them. From 1980 to 1995, the West Indies did not lose a Test series, and in the midst of that long reign, on a June afternoon at Lord’s, they shattered that legend.

I never saw Brian Lara ‘live’ in his prime, a lonely thing among cricket lovers who did. I met him on TV, with a backswing so high and so late that the bat seemed to be waiting for permission. Then came the stroke, the flourish that belonged on the stage. His records are the kind a child can recite: 375 in Antigua in April 1994, then 501 away to Warwickshire seven weeks later and in 2004, back in Antigua, 400 not out against England, still 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 down 308 against Australia and won by a single wicket. Brian Lara almost single-handedly held together the dwindling West Indies cricket team. (Photo by Reuters)

I saw Shivnarine Chanderpaul from the cheap stalls at the Test in India and he didn’t do well at all. He stood in front of the crease, shoulders squared to the bowler like a man waiting for a late bus, scratching at his keeper while the bowlers took his patience personally. They called him ‘Tiger’. I remember thinking that no one 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 the house with their bare hands.

The decline of the Windies came quickly. The two-time world champions lost to Scotland in the 2023 qualifiers and missed out on the World Cup being played on Indian soil. Australia played 27 at Sabina Park last year. Glimpses of the old light still show. At the Gabba in 2024, Shamar Joseph, a former Guyanese village watchman, took seven wickets to win the Test for the West Indies by eight runs. In 2016 at the Eden Gardens, Carlos Brathwaite hit four consecutive sixes in the last T20 World Cup final and Dwayne Bravo’s ‘Champion’ danced in the dressing room. That night was of a format never imagined by the old fast men and my father thought it reckless I would say, but he watched every ball. Carlos Brathwaite dismantles Ben Stokes to secure West Indies the 2016 FIFA World Cup T20. (Photo by Reuters)

To what do we owe fear? A lot, as it turns out. The Indian batting learned its jitters in the shadow of these fast bowlers and the Indian bowling learned its threat by studying them. When Jasprit Bumrah runs in today and the foreigners go quiet on their knees, some old lessons from the islands seep through him. We paid off the debt on time and continued to pay long after the creditors stopped collecting.

My father doesn’t own a transistor and hasn’t for decades. He’ll be watching this series on his phone, held at arm’s length like a sacred object, with the volume all the way up. Somewhere in the second he tells me over the speaker that they used to be faster. Then he leans in the same way he once leaned on his neighbor’s floor and waited for the ball to come before he thought about it.

– The end