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| V V: Cricket's metaphors for life | |
| BOOKMARK | | V V / New Delhi November 22, 2008, 1:06 IST | |
A novel spun around cricket with its slips, gullies, silly points and covers
All sports provide metaphors for life’s highs and lows. But it is cricket that provides the most, and perhaps the best, for life’s many uncertainties. Take this sentence. Cricket has just lost a great player in Saurav Ganguly but Indians may be sure that Yuvraj is already batting for India and can expect a long innings unless some crisis catches him on a sticky wicket. If he goes in early he is bound to take the shine off the ball provided he is not caught in the deep or stumped while stepping out before he has his eye in. More likely, he will carry on to the last man and will be hitting the ball beyond the boundary as he has always done once he settles in. As the phrases, show cricket has enriched the language in innumerable ways and we often find ourselves using its terms all the time (there are many others) without realizing where they have come from. Jennie Walker’s 24 for 3 (Bloomsbury, Special Indian Price Rs 695) is a novel spun around the cricketing world which for many of its lovers is a metaphor for life itself with its slips, gullies, silly points and covers.
Walker is the pen-name for the award winning poet, Charles Boyle, and the novel is really like a poem in prose. During a Test match between England and India, an unmarried woman, who is having an affair and whose teenage step-son has gone missing, asks her husband and lover to explain to her the rules of the game. Surprising things happen like they happen in our everyday lives but these are explained through the scenarios of the cricketing world.
And there are many scenarios because “it’s a game involving many different skills and a lot of patience…It can also be affected by external factors: the weather, for instance, and not just when it rains—if there is moisture in the atmosphere, the ball comes through the air in different ways, it swings or turns and the bowler can more easily deceive the batter. Or the condition of the ground, whether it’s hard or soft or downright muddy. Or personal rivalries.”
Or simply by the condition of your mind which could be for so many factors—like getting up from the wrong side of the bed. It’s important to have a cool head because many decisions have to be made, both considered ones, after weighing the pros and cons, and “ones for which you have less than an instant of time, a blink of an eyelid. Mistakes are made. Not infrequently the players feel the game is unfair.” But that’s life, a game with many rules, but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the Holy Book. It is small wonder then that so many play dirty, that things often feel as if you have been done in.
A novel it is said, tells a story but it is, above all, a philosophy expressed in images. “Nothing happens, much. Then something does. Then nothing again, or—rarely something else. Then nothing, and so on and so on until it becomes hard to perceive any difference between nothing and something.” It is rather like Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot. Two tramps, waiting, waiting but nothing seems to happen. Waiting for time to pass that would have passed any way? It is hard at first to figure out whether it is the philosophy or the cricketing scenarios that dominate the novel; but it becomes clear soon enough that it is poet who is calling the shots who uses the metaphors of cricket to tell his story of a series of events over a five-day Test match.
Hemingway says somewhere that the good writer competes only with the dead. Walker’s 24 for 3 will be compared with others, especially with C L R James’ Beyond the Boundary or other great writings on cricket’s glorious uncertainties that have been anthologized time and again. Neville Cardus springs to mind, but so do many others. Walker’s 24 for 3 is in the same class—a celebration of a great game.
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