The room they built for Vaibhav Sooryavanshi

Vaibhav Sooryavanshi during the India A Tri-Nation series in Dambulla, Sri Lanka. (PTI Photo) In Belfast this week, men with measuring tapes tackled a small architectural problem. India needed a second dressing room. Not the usual social affair where grown professionals peel off their pads and discuss their hamstrings, but a separate one because one of the cricketers India brought to Ireland is fifteen and the law takes a dim view of a minor sharing a changing room with grown men.So they built a room for him. Dwell on it because it’s a whole story compressed into a carpenter’s act. The richest governing body in sport has commissioned a private chamber for a boy it has not yet decided to select. Robes are being sewn, while the voters are still arguing behind closed doors whether the coronation should take place at all. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi from Tajpur in Bihar’s Mithila region may or may not make his India debut against Ireland tomorrow. He can walk away and, at 15, become the youngest man ever to play for India, dethroning Tendulkar into second place in a record held since 1989 when the boy’s parents were children themselves. Or he can sit in his lovely new room and watch as the selectors have done the cold arithmetic and decided that a side that has just won the T20 World Cup needs no urgent disruption on a damp Belfast evening. Both are true at once, and holding both is the only honest way to look at him.Consider what it is. The IPL numbers read like a typo: 776 runs, strike tally 237, Gayle’s record sixes in a season broken by a child who wasn’t alive when the league started. Cricket men, professionally allergic to hyperbole, reached for words they normally keep under lock and key. Bat speed almost unheard of before. Back to the grainy footage of Sobers. Grown men who gave their lives to bowling left, in one beautiful word, confused and helpless. This is not the language of promises. It is the language of arrival.

Vaibhav Sooryavanshi with the Player of the Match trophy after his explosive 94 in the final of the Tri-Nation Series in Sri Lanka. (Photo Credit: BCCI)

And yet cricket is not a meritocracy as the posters insist; it is a meritocracy complicated by arithmetic. India openers Sanju Samson and Abhishek Sharma, not problems to solve but men who have earned their places, one of them the player of the tournament that India just won. Shreyas Iyer, the new captain, wants the middle. Mathematics has no spare chair. To unseat a prodigy, you have to unseat someone who’s done nothing wrong except not be a sensation, and there’s something almost cruel about the way perfection can quietly fall short when a phenomenon emerges.This is the part that dream traders miss. We like our talent stories to run downhill and pick up speed: small town, bat, records, inevitable blue jersey, strings of cues. But the interesting thing about Sooryavanshi week is not the inevitability. It’s friction. He’s at once too good to pass up and too distracting to put into it, and how that tension is resolved tells us less about him than the people holding the pen over the team sheet. The boy accomplished his task. In the only sentence the chairman of selectors managed, he selected himself. It remains to be seen whether the adults have the courage to act, or whether they will wait with caution for a softer opportunity against a kinder opponent.I find that I don’t really care which way it goes. If he plays and destroys the Irish offense, we’ll be in for something. If he waits, the room they built will hold his breath for a few more days, and the record will remain, as will the records. I hate the flattening into a fairy tale, the reduction of a strange and unresolved moment to the usual dream come true syrup.A boy from Bihar scared a plank into building a room for him. Whether he is allowed to sit in it tomorrow is in the end a smaller question than the one already answered by his arrival: that another of them, faster-stronger-younger, as we promise, is not coming. It’s here, fifteen years old, stuffed and waiting for a decision that should have been beneath it.