Food, Shelter, no clothing

here are many reasons why you should never go to a dressing room at an international match.

The players will tell you it is their oasis, their shelter from the storm outside, the inner sanctum that no infidel can penetrate. The only place where they can say what they want about umpires or referees, stroll around without fear of a Level 2 suspension for slow activity, say things to each other without cameras or microphones around. They can let off steam, have the odd punch-up, quietly read a novel. But there are other reasons. Two very good ones.

For a start, there is very little clothing around. On the few occasions that I have been in a dressing room, I have tried to be very studiedly nonchalant. Everyone else was, well, just plain nonchalant, strolling around like they were pushing a pram in a park. Our dressing room at the university, by contrast, was 8ft by 4 ft, so you changed very quickly. In larger dressing rooms the need isn't always felt. Serviettes find new uses and sometimes are as easily discarded.

And for a second, especially if you're parched or starved, like everyone is at Indian grounds, there is always a lot of good food and drink about in a dressing room. Now if you are watching a game in India, that makes it a real oasis.

And the food! For someone who grew up carrying a dabba to the ground, the idea of a spread in a dressing room was unreal. To us 'lunch' was what you grabbed from the dining table while running out of the house in the morning - like the marathon runners do with their drinks. Invariably it wasn't enough. It had a bit of love in it, but even that couldn't make it substantial. And four hours in a hot, sweaty room wasn't the best preservative. It was over in 10 minutes and you twiddled your thumbs for the next 45.

Still, we went along with it until one day I came back to the dressing room, hungry and tired, only to see a little hole burrowed into my new, yellow and black Adidas bag. My brother had saved out of a student allowance to buy one for me but it wasn't good enough against a hungry rat. I dumped the crumbs, kept the bag out of defiance and respect (you didn't throw away an Adidas bought out of savings just because a rat got there first!) and chose to join the rest of the team for lunch.

That meant a biryani at an Irani restaurant that was a five-minute drive away. Not something light and nutritious but a full biryani. Lunch was an hour long and normally you had enough time, but on days when the restaurant was full, the biryani took forever to arrive. Then we prioritised. The openers got theirs first and we went along in batting order after that. Often No. 3 only returned as the openers were going out, and the lower order had to walk back because we had run out of scooters and motorcycles.

So with arms and legs pumping we would hasten back, part walk and part jog. "Bhaskar khelra abhi ... Raju jaisa dikhra ... Suri hai abhi ..." There was a bit of pressure on the first four. And remember, no cellphones, so nobody could tell No. 5 that he was needed urgently. Often No. 10, who brought his food from home, would be wearing pads till No. 4 returned. Mostly these were the only times he got to wear them!

Shahabuddin looked after our dressing room and kit. That was the only thing he had ever done. When I was nine or 10, and hanging around the ground, the big players used to come there and announce: "Shahabuddin, zara bag andar rakho". There was a way in which they said it. And I imagined myself saying "Shahabuddin" exactly the way they did: like a throwaway, a mere word between two important sentences. Like this. "Zabardast bowler hai miya, kya swing karata ball ku ... Shahabuddin ... carefully dekh ke, late khelna padta."

When I finished with the university and knew I was never going to play cricket again, I asked Shahabuddin if I could keep the bat I had got used to. I didn't need to but felt like it. "Haan, rakh lo, usme kya hai," he said and shuffled away. I never saw him again.

I went to that 8ft by 4 ft dressing room again some time ago. It was full of construction material. There were no college cricketers there, with or without clothes on, no kit bags where rats could forage for sandwiches. And there was no Shahabuddin.