How is your uncle at cricket? I need full black and white footage and peer reviews before I vote.
In the sparsely populated South Indian village where I grew up in the late 70s - early 80s, all the narrow, dusty roads winding through the tiny homes would be totally deserted on blazing hot, eerily quiet afternoons. The stray dogs and impoverished goats would hide from the burning sun under the shade of parked bullock carts. Post lunch was siesta time for everyone. Even the old folks suffering from unbearable chronic pains would take a small nap and wake up at sunset to continue their painful lives. In our street, my uncle would be the only one staying up during the peak heat hours; working alone, buried in his dogeared text books solving analytical problems.
Uncle was preparing for his entrance exams to get into a government job. In Indira Gandhi's India that was a sure shot way to a stable life. In his mid 20s, my uncle already had a tendency to disagree with popular opinion. "David Gower is not as elegant as he is made out to be. He is left handed; and that creates an optical illusion". He believed he was capable of observing things that escaped the eyes of most people. "Ronald Reagan tends to smile a lot if he is going to lie". He overanalysed everything. "Good people do good things to feel good about themselves. This selfishness takes away the goodness from the good act".
He wrote the entrance exam every six months, every year, for many years on the trot; and never cleared it. His confidence waned. His shoulders dropped. He avoided eye contact. He stopped greeting people. He didn't get married. He stopped speaking. And he was dead before he turned 30; found lifeless when the town woke up after the siesta on one hot summer evening; in the room next to the dry well.
They say he was not fully there. They say he had brain tumor. They say it was a heart attack. They say his family was cursed. They say he took his own life.
My uncle batted at no 6. He was a hard hitting batsman. Capable of scoring 15-20 runs in 3-4 overs. He was a fast runner between the wickets. I have seen him hit three sixes. One of them cleared the church ground and fell into the priest's garden. His wife refused to return the ball and we had to abandon the game. He called himself a leg spinner. I don't remember him turning the ball from leg to off. He was more of a Kumble type of bowler. He would take wickets regularly and was a star bowler of sorts. He was more effective when he bowled round the wicket.
They say he was not studying for his exams in those quiet afternoons. They say he had an affair with the milk woman who was found walking in and out of the room next to the dry well on many days when she had no reason to enter that room. They say her son, born in the same year of my uncle's death, looks like him. That boy was also a hard hitting lower order batsman and bowled leg spin that didn't turn much. He wrote the same exams, cleared them in one attempt; and he is working for the central government in Delhi now.