'I wasn’t there'

It could have been one of the greatest days of my life and I went AWOL. At the precise moment (16:44:19, as has been meticulously noted by some newspapers) that Sachin was deftly playing Chaminda Vaas to the onside for his hundredth run, I was driving around central Delhi, just 6 km from the Kotla Stadium, listening to radio commentary - instead of being at the ground - and muttering “YOU IDIOT, YOU IDIOT, YOU IDIOT!” to myself.

But on this admittedly minor scale, it was quite an experience being in Delhi traffic at this momentous hour and noting that other people in other cars were listening to their radios as intently as I was: fiddling with knobs, pulling at antennae, the passengers at the back leaning forward.

Sachin hit the four that took him from 93 to 97; six people sitting in a large Sumo next to my car exchanged high-fives. Ganguly failed to take a single; another driver muttered a curse and shared conspiracy theories with the lady sitting next to him. The radio commentator got excited, shouted “Is he OUT??!” when Sachin nicked a ball short of second slip; in numerous vehicles, hands abandoned steering wheels and flew to heads. It was high drama on the streets.

The radio channel didn’t have advanced sound filters to muffle the crowd noise, which meant that from around the point SRT got to 98 it was almost impossible to hear the commentators over the screams of tens of thousands of spectators. In that last over, when Ganguly hit a four, the crowd roared a standard roar (whether they were applauding the boundary or shouting at Dada to get off the striker’s end is another question). But when he took a single off the next ball, the noise made my car shake (shaken myself, I jumped a red light, that too in the high-security India Gate vicinity). From that point on till well after Sachin had reached the 100, I couldn’t hear a thing the commentators were saying – but then, I didn’t need to.

So that’s my story for the grandkids; it may not be as exciting as some others, but I’ll tell it anyway. To all of you who were at the ground, do spare a thought for us little people who weren’t. We were as much a part of the celebrations as you were.