Train to Trent Bridge

George Binoy06-Jun-2009

Life revolves around the cricket team you're following on tour. I made dinner plans with a friend for Friday evening, but then received an email from India's media manager which said that the team would be practising at 9am in Nottingham on Saturday. Dinner was eventually a hurriedly eaten sandwich at St Pancras station before catching the 8.15 to Nottingham, further north in the midlands of England.

I couldn't help but notice a few people sitting on the floor at St Pancras, reading, eating, and talking on the phone. It's quite a common sight in India, too, but that's largely because there's no choice. I ran my finger along the floor to check if it was dusty. It wasn't, but I still parked myself in a chair.

In India, if you see a white person on the streets, you can be sure 99% of the time that he or she is a foreigner. Not so with brown people in England, because of the vast Asian population in the country. It's only when I speak - usually to ask for directions, or how to work a ticket machine - that people realise I'm not from here. The next question, usually, is about what I'm doing here.

It's what the man sitting across me on the train asked. And when I said I was going to Trent Bridge for the Twenty20, he said he knew little about cricket. Just how little, I was surprised to discover.

My favourite players, because he asked, were Jonty Rhodes and Sachin Tendulkar. After explaining who Rhodes was and why a South African was my preferred choice, he asked who Sachin Tendulkar was. I nearly choked on my water - the purchase of which, by the way, apparently helped people in Ethopia, or so said the bottle. There are a lot of advertisements for fair trade in England. I thought for a moment and said that Tendulkar was a teenager who went on to achieve what generations in India dreamt about.

And then he remarked casually that he'd heard that the Ashes in 2005 were a big deal. So startled was I that he had to offer reassurance that he wasn't winding me up. As we steamed through the countryside - seeing what Enid Blyton painted in her books - I attempted to explain the three formats of cricket. The two-hour journey sped by and soon Nottingham castle loomed into view, sitting atop a hill, as we entered Robin Hood country. Wonder if Ishant Sharma knows where his Fake-IPL-Player nickname, Little John, comes from.

It's supposedly summer in England - the weather forecast predicted a maximum of 16 degrees centigrade and a minimum of 2. The solitary sweatshirt I hurriedly packed suddenly seems as useful as a malfunctioning fan in an Indian summer.