Guns, tweets and a hair-raising cab ride

What a day. Opened my inbox to hear from a friend on Facebook that Shashi Tharoor, the former UN Under-Secretary to Kofi Annan and a prominent Indian diplomat, had Tweeted about me. Then I watch Daniel Vettori make history at the SSC. After the day’s play, I stand in a guard’s booth fit for two with seven security guards and a machine gun, waiting for the rain to stop. To top it all off, my evening ends with a taxi driver encouraging me to become an actor because, with my dual languages, Arnold Schwarzenegger may one day help me bridge the gap between Hollywood and Bollywood.

True story.

I attend the post-match pressers and make my way to the main gate of the SSC to get my taxi. He calls to say he’s stuck in traffic. It starts to rain. The guard at the gate beckons me to stand in his cabin and stay dry. Thing is, there are already six rather large Devcon security guards and another soldier in commies with a machine gun inside. I hesitate but the rain is getting heavier and I have a laptop, recorder and an ipod in my bag.

“Please, please come,” yells one of the Devcon – that’s like a name out of Robocop. He and another guard make way but we’re really struggling to fit in, especially me with my bag. It’s a tight squeeze if ever I saw one, and I don’t do well with machine guns in my face.

So what do you do in such situations? Well of course, you talk cricket! We don’t get very far because none of them speak English, but settle on the fact that Muttiah Muralitharan is great and that Mahela Jayawardene really gave it to the Kiwis. I keep one eye trained on that machine gun the entire while.

My taxi comes to the wrong gate and I see the driver pulling in, so I excuse myself from the Devcon gang and run after the car. He doesn’t see me in the drizzle and dark, so he heads toward the enclosure inside. Finally I catch him, by this time pretty soaked, and we’re off to the hotel. Barely two minutes into the conversation – about the weather - he says I don’t speak like a foreigner.

I explain that I grew up in India and his eyes light up. His father is from Kerala and he has been on pilgrimages to Ahmaddiya Muslim sites in Kerala, Punjab and Bombay (sorry, I can’t refer to it as Mumbai). I tell him I live in Bombay and he starts telling me about this small mosque near the Bombay Central railway station. I pause. I live five minutes from that station.

Then he says the mosque is down the road from this famous cinema – Maratha Mandir, I remind him to cue much enthusiasm – and near the YMCA. By now the hairs on my neck have stood up. My house is opposite the YMCA and next to the mosque he’s talking about! Then comes the killer punch. “And next to this little mosque is one building where I was told the white actor in Hindi films lives,” says Mohamed Ali-Bawa. I tell him that’s my father and he loses it, slapping his forehead and exclaiming Allah’s power and taking his eyes off the road to shake my hand. He is thrilled; I am zapped. This cannot be happening.

In the next few minutes we discuss how small the world is, and by the time we pull into the hotel Mohamed has told me I should chuck all this cricket journalism “uselessness” and go in my father’s footsteps. He also tells me that Shah Rukh Khan, the Hindi film superstar who was detained for questioning at a US airport recently, has been invited for dinner by Schwarzenegger. “My friend, you speak English and Hindi, you have real talent which you are hiding,” he cries as I exit the taxi. “You join movies, you get power, you never know, one day Shah Rukh Khan and Arnold come to you and you mix Bollywood with Hollywood! It’s really great to meet you! May we meet again!”

And with that, he pulls out of the hotel driveway. Maybe tomorrow I’ll stick with an autorickshaw.