Paradise lost

I've never been to a cricket match with my mother. Which is ironic because it was she who first kindled in me a passion for the game; she taught me the basics with a plastic bat and a sheet of paper screwed up into a ball in a living room in West London's Bolsover Street. I've never been to a game with her but I've always felt her presence at the ground thanks to the delicious, fondly packed lunch hampers I took along.

For my first visit to the Eden Gardens in 1978, she'd packed luchi and alu dam in a capacious plastic container and dropped a dozen oranges into my satchel. (It was winter, the season of oranges, just as it was the season for cricket.) Subsequently, the very Bengali luchi gave way to filling, but dainty, hampers: filets of crumb-fried fish with long, fat finger chips and immaculately dressed salad; sandwiches with chicken, ham and mayonnaise and, sometimes, a very indigenous shepherd's pie. As the years went on, the food would be packed in shining aluminium foil; the flask full of cold water in the early days would give way to plastic bottles of mineral water.

The changing face of my lunch hamper (and, as day-and-night matches caught Eden Gardens' fancy, early dinner hampers) mirrored the changing face of the ground. The refinement of the food that I carried to the ground - and the increasing sophistication of its packing - were reflections of a new economy and a new awareness, a new attitude towards a game that was swiftly reinventing itself for a global television audience. These changes were reflected, in different ways, in the neighbours with whom I sometimes grudgingly shared my food.

I remember how, on one of the first visits, I'd listened in awe as a thirtysomething gentleman (he must have been as old then as I am now) explaining to his son the implication of dust flying from the pitch on the second day of a Test match. I remember the reverential look on the little boy's face and felt a twinge of self-pity because my father wasn't with me at the game. (I've never been to a cricket match with him either.) But that scene of paternal interest and induction into the nuances of the game was characteristic of the kind of people who went to watch cricket at the Eden Gardens then.

These days, the ground is packed with the cellphone-toting yuppie (who often calls home to check with those watching on TV what exactly is going on at the ground), the paan-chewing businessman and the corporate boss swinging a deal or two in the VIP box.

And father-son interaction? During the India Pakistan Test - which finally had to be played out in front of emptied galleries - in February 1999, I saw a father in his mid-thirties teaching his son how best to create a din with two empty plastic bottles. "No, you don't beat one against the concrete seat. You hold the two bottles in both hands and smash one against the other. Very rapidly. Like this," he explained delicately and went on to drum up a lively clackety clack as a live demonstration. The son - the reverential look on his face was identical to the one I'd seen on the other little boy more than 20 years ago - promptly followed his father.

For years now, soft drink giants have entered the Eden in mega size plastic bottles, which later come in handy to rain down on the pitch. Often, the cola is spiked with rum. (Real men in Calcutta always drink rum. Sadly, it stinks.) The queues are unending in front of the Bijoli Grill counter in the damp, cavernous bowels of the stadium. The charm of the homespun lunch has disappeared. The plastic bottles, too, have disappeared because of recent security regulations but that's a different story.

There have been changes - and they aren't good or bad, they are just changes - that have rendered Eden Gardens unrecognisable from the ground it used to be in the pre-TV, pre-day-night cricket days.

But there is one thing that hasn't changed at all. As you go through the turnstiles and walk through the long, wide, musty corridor between the concrete stands, there is one particular - and particularly vivid and unforgettable - moment when you first see the field: a patch of green framed beneath a patch of sky bathed in the kind of light that Constable or Turner reserved for their landscapes. It's a delirious moment, an instant when the pulse quickens and the heart thumps. In anticipation. In nostalgia. In that moment, the mind goes into rewind and fast-forward at the same time.