Postcards from Sachinganj

India - a word that had been pulling at my hair for 18 years. Your bog-standard adolescent daydreamer, I longed to go to this country, this huge continent of a billion people, with its Taj Mahal, elephants and princes in turbans. A country from where Britain had not so long ago removed her size-12 imperial feet. Finally, when India tugged hard enough, I arrived in Mumbai early on the balmy morning of November 12, 48 hours before the English team, to crazy Diwali lights raving all over the city.

What did I expect? Colour, noise, heat, spice, trains, poverty. How much did I really know? Practically nothing. A smattering of Victorian history, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Tully, bits of Rushdie, Seth and Dalrymple, a stick of incense. And, of course, cricket - that comely courtesan of both England and India.

But that courtesan turned out not to be so familiar after all. She behaves very differently on Indian soil. Back home, she hides in the cupboard, coming out on special occasions; in India she is an extrovert. She teases, screams, swoons and demands front-page news, television programmes and questions in Parliament. She cries out from the covers of Outlook and The Week, she is idolised by millions - men and women, rich and penniless.

From early, heat-happy, tired-eyed glimpses - the Conradesque Gateway of India and the Bombay maidans - to the long train journeys from Jaipur to Chandigarh to Ahmedabad to Bangalore, everywhere was cricket. Sitting in train doorways, dangling sunburned feet over reservoir, paddy field and station platform, mile after mile of India is swallowed up: a woman draws water laboriously from a well; a wrinkled man, dressed only in a piece of cloth, sits his grandson on his knee and together they wave at the passing train. A bird pecks grubs off a cow's back, a scrawny dog plays on the railway line; and from north to south, dawn to dusk, children play with bat and ball.

The longer I was in India, the more dosas I ate, the more my tastebuds got used to chai with sugar, sugar and extra sugar, the more cricket seemed to become a common language. In a country where people speak a picnic hamper of languages, (sometimes I'm convinced it is to make an English tourist with a smattering of French feel inadequate); where, from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean, people eat different foods, wear different clothes and practise different religions, cricket bestrides barriers. Or rather, Sachin Tendulkar does.

He, more than cricket, seems to bind people. As Ian Botham emptied bars in England, Tendulkar fills stadiums in India. It was a bit of a pop to my romantic idyll, actually, that there wasn't a mass of humanity charging the doors of the stadium before every Test, that there is a larger, more enthusiastic crowd on the first day of a Test at Lord's than there was at Mohali: there wasn't a full house at Chandigarh to see Harbhajan Singh spin England to defeat at his home ground, nor one in Bangalore to see Anil Kumble claw at his 300th wicket. It seems only one man has the draw. But then, if your pocket is empty, you get more to your rupee with genius.

Watching Tendulkar bat in India has become a cliché. Little master, spine-tingling Sachin, blah blah. But it really is all that and more. "You lot are more in love with him than we are," an Indian writer said after watching English journalists in action at a Tendulkar press conference. And maybe we are. We've been starved of a cricketer who does things that create an instant bond between the people who are witness to his feats. One of Tendulkar's fours, a straight drive at Mohali, brought a grin that stretched the entire length of the English press-box. But more than just watching him, you need to watch the crowd watching him. Or listen. The roar that greets him is a thunder roll that grows louder with every effortless stroke; the chants of his name those of a medieval crowd shouting for their King. David Beckham? He wouldn't know what had hit him.

I'd fallen for India and their fans during the 1999 World Cup in England which produced fireworks from Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly and Tendulkar. But, except when Sachin - or Virender Sehwag - was batting, much of this series lacked that immediate excitement. Nasser Hussain had done his homework and had watched where Australia fell down - he warned of turgid cricket, and much of it was. But just being there was an adventure. Watching England grow up quickly in the subcontinental heat, watching Harbhajan Singh bowl offbreaks with the sparkle of a legspinner, watching Tendulkar advertise, embarrassingly naffly, cars and credit cards, watching ex-players stride around grounds and hotels like demigods.

In India old players don't get put out to pasture, or pull pints at pubs or run sports shops like in England. Instead, they are put on a dais. No player can walk around a ground without being shouted at and pleaded at for his autograph. Sunil Gavaskar seems to live with the danger of walls falling in on him at any time. Everywhere, people are just desperate to get a touch of him. And this is a man who hasn't played Test cricket for close to 15 years. At a journalist's pre-wedding party, Gavaskar slipped in quietly but soon overshadowed the groom as the guests queued up to have their photographs taken with him.

Not everything is a romantic waltz, of course. A country where effigies of Mike Denness are burned in the street and where the Sehwag affair dominates the news while there is a war in Afghanistan could be accused of taking its cricket too seriously. A place where Dravid is routinely booed just because of his place in the batting order, where Deep Dasgupta, while making a maiden century, is shouted at to get out, can be accused of being unhealthily obsessed with the fortunes of one man.

But that's India. And with each waft of a sari that revealed a different shapely ankle, I was sucked further in. With each smile, I wanted more. Next time I'll see Tendulkar score a century at Eden Gardens, next time I'll see England win a Test, next time...