The year of living dangerously

Watching India bat in the second Test against Pakistan in Faisalabad this January, one moment, one delivery, something clicked in my head. Shoaib Akhtar, using the second new ball, bowled a bouncer, and Mahendra Singh Dhoni, with a spellbinding savagery, smashed it for six.

I thought it was a hook; the next morning's papers - describing how, in a pulsating counterattack, Dhoni had reached his first Test century and saved India from following on - preferred to call it a pull. By then my mind had moved, replaying Michael Sembello and "Maniac", lost in a once-and-forever nostalgia oval.

It wasn't always like this. Years ago, before placid wickets and mindless one-day games made genuine fast bowlers seem like cowboys at a vaudeville show, Indian batsmen weren't supposed to hook.

Like good boys, they were supposed to defend ("That's another immaculate forward-defensive stroke from Gavaskar. Copybook, I tell you."), drive along the ground, sweep when the spinners came on. Some, like the oriental sorcerer Gundappa Viswanath, were obligated to late-cut.

That was another India, another time: a time before 1983, a time before Mohinder Amarnath.

The Lala's second son was not a cricketer you instantly fell in love with. A slow, lumbering gait and zero charisma: this one wasn't a charmer.

He made his Test debut the year I was born. I first saw him a decade later, in 1979, wearing a sola topee, felled by Rodney Hogg, collapsing on the stumps in the Bombay Test against Australia. He looked quite ridiculous. Since he'd been hit by a Richard Hadlee bouncer earlier in the summer in England, his obituary was readied. At 29, he was history - too old and too unequal to fast bowling.

Like Douglas MacArthur, he vowed to return. Mohinder didn't give up, he scored runs for Delhi with an accountant's determination and worked harder and harder on his fitness.

In the early 1980s, in the innocence of adolescence, I took the Ranji Trophy a little more seriously than the selectors did. Mohinder grew on me, gradually. So did his status as Indian cricket's perennial underdog. He was the outsider who appealed to the loser in us all - the antithesis of the dominant Bombay lobby.

It was just before the 1982 tour of England. Mohinder had hit another century in another Ranji final, been cold-shouldered another time. Asked about it, Raj Singh Dungarpur, manager for the tour, raised his thikana nose, "Let us talk about the future of Indian cricket, not the past."

I still haven't forgiven him.

In six months, Mohinder was back in the team, battling Imran Khan and Pakistan, hitting three hundreds in a lost cause - and hooking. At least I saw those games on television. The best was yet to come, and I only heard it on radio.

In early 1983, Kapil Dev led his men to the Caribbean. It was India's only series in the West Indies against the pace quartet. They lost 0-2: a nailbiting finish in the first Test, and a 10-wicket defeat in the fourth at Barbados, reputedly the fastest pitch of them all. I still remember the scores - India 209 and 277; Mohinder 91 and 80. Need I say more?

It was an epic contest. As Subhash Gupte, by then living in Trinidad, later put it, "They kept bouncing, and Mohinder kept hooking." In one Test he was hit on the head and retired hurt. He returned a few wickets later, was met with a first-ball bouncer - and hooked it to the boundary.

Of course, I saw none of this. It was an age before 24x7 telecasts. In a household remarkably free of cricket fans, I had but a transistor on low volume for company. In that strange, pre-modern media environment, All India Radio brought just the first two sessions live to listeners. The post-tea session was delayed, coming as a "deferred" broadcast about an hour later, perilously close to school time.

In sum, this meant I was up all night. Most difficult was the period between the tea break and commencement of "deferred" commentary. The house was silent, the lights were out; only the trams could be heard moving on the streets of Calcutta, calling to each other as it were, urging me to close my eyes but stay awake, and imagine the grit, guts, and glory of a gladiator in a faraway land.

As it happened, 1983 was a great year for music. Late at night, while the players had lunch, between tea and resumption of commentary, I was kept up by shortwave radio - BBC, or maybe the Voice of America, or an Australian show - and by the pirated cassettes on my Walkman: The Police and Synchronicity, Billy Joel and "Uptown Girl" - and "Flashdance".

Mid-tour, Sembello burst onto the charts with "Maniac": "You work all your life for that moment in time/ It could come or pass you by / It's a push of the world, but there's always a chance / If the hunger stays the night." I had found Jimmy's anthem.

It was famously said of Ken Barrington that he "came out to bat with the Union Jack wrapped around him". Mohinder was sculpted of similar steel. He was perhaps what so many of us wanted India to be - a fighter. He was not a Gavaskar, not a natural; Jimmy was Ivan Lendl to Sunny's Bjorn Borg.

Later in 1983, Mohinder helped India to the Prudential Cup. There were to be more failures and successes, more depths and peaks, many more comebacks. The man eventually retired in 1990, having played first-class cricket from 16 to 40.

For me, it didn't matter. I could savour the Mohinder of 1983, the witching hours when I'd close my eyes and watch him hook - hooking, as Sembello may have sung, like he'd never hooked before.