Off-side: Swinging for glory between toast and tea

Last Tuesday, while waiting for my order at a packed Kolkata teahouse, I caught myself midway through a cover drive. Not in theory, but in action. A full, fluent, graceful flourish — wrist soft, eyes on the imaginary ball, elbow high enough to make even the legendary Ramakant Achrekar proud.

There was no bat. There was, unfortunately, a long queue of patrons who had braved the April heat for an early morning cup of Darjeeling tea, toast, eggs, baked beans and cakes — an English breakfast to celebrate the Bengali  Noboborsho (New Year). A child stared, puzzled; the mother ostentatiously shuffled him away, as though madness might be contagious. And my niece — who had, until then, walked beside me with affable tolerance — chose, quite suddenly, to develop a raging allergy to embarrassing uncles.

I’d like to pretend that this was an isolated, spontaneous fit of imaginary sporting prowess that I have never actually possessed. But men — particularly Indian men — are afflicted with such sports-induced derangement. We have done worse.

We’ve delivered Wasim Akram’s in-swinging yorker between gunny sacks of basmati rice and towers of Surf Excel. We’ve shadowboxed in office corridors, or jogged down an airport terminal like we were running between wickets — bag in one hand, boarding pass in the other.

We are the men in linen trousers pretending to be Sachin Tendulkar with no bat and no shame. We are Virat Kohli playing the pull shot on the pavement of Park Street, utterly certain that we’ve dispatched Jofra Archer through the mid-wicket boundary. Our arms whirl, hips rotate, and the laptop bag thumps against our ribcage as the scooterist hoots and passers-by ogle.

Women, meanwhile, seem oblivious to such a malady. My sister has never lunged across the dining table to replicate P. V. Sindhu’s smash, and my mother is yet to fling the rolling pin like Neeraj Chopra’s javelin — despite the trouble we create in her kitchen. My partner, though, had mastered a Jonty Rhodes dive, flinging herself into a Mumbai local with an agility that suggests Olympic potential.

They view our imaginary athleticism with patient bewilderment, grateful not to have caught the illness, while we rehearse history in fluorescent hallways and risk our rotator cuffs to honour heroes who will never know our names.

“What are you doing?” they ask, half-laughing, half-concerned.

“Practising,” we say.

“For what?”

We don’t know. For nothing. For everything. For the moment when someone, somewhere, recognises the genius of our kitchen-floor footwork and says: “You could have played for India.”

We won’t. Obviously. Our knees crack. Our shirts strain against our muffin tops. We can’t run without groaning. But inside our heads, every corridor is Eden Gardens, every lunch break is a World Cup final, and every cover drive in the office pantry is worthy of Harsha Bhogle’s exuberance.