I was 5 and the only kid to my parents and was a huge fan of
cricket. Don’t remember how it all happened, I was a huge Indian team fan, me
and the kids in the hood followed everything that the Indian team did on the
Panasonic color television imported from Saudi in the neighbor’s house. Life
was much free then, I didn’t have to think twice before doing anything, we got
the bats carved out of the branches of the coconut tree, five rupees rubber
balls that was funded by fifty paise shares by each of the kids, stumps made
out of the unused firewood, and a foursquare barren land in the hood that was
our home ground.
Sachin was always the
hero; we distributed the lemon toffees that cost 10 paise when India won. As
the craze for cricket grew in us, we tried our hands at making the leg pads
which never materialized mainly due to the anarchy of the parents. When we
couldn’t afford the five rupee rubber balls we tried making them using the
plastic wastes which also ended up as a failed backhouse R & D. Grand mom
was the savior to us as she helped us tie the plastic covers together and make
a round shape out of them tying torn cotton cloths around. We hired the R&D
from my grandmother.
We played matches with the kids who lived on the other side
of the road, kids who were not any associate of the P.C family, kids who lived
on the other side of the fields and kids who lived near the big mosque. We made
sunglasses out of old x-ray prints and their frames with thick paper so that it
looked exactly like what the players wore on the screen. We tried to dive like
the Australian wicket keeper (the Indian wicket keepers never dived then) and
often the skin peeled of our elbows. Life was all about playing cricket in the
sun, setting up matches for egg puffs (pronounced as pupps) and the broken
tamarind branches that used to run behind me when Ammi didn’t see me back home
after dusk.
Like the craze for cricket the craze for the products that
the players marketed also grew. Everybody loved drinking boost and buying the sports
star magazine which had stickers of world cricketers. That was the first time I
saw a television commercial that had Sachin drinking a dark brown liquid. At
first I confused it as boost, and later realized that it was nowhere near it, I
couldn’t read English then and never knew what the black liquid with a round
logo in a 350 ml soda bottle meant.
As a kid I always wanted to drink it, I showed the bottle on
a flex board that again had sachin with his happy smile, to my father and he
told me since the color of the drink was dark it was not good for kids of our
age. And I hated him for that not because he didn’t get me the drink but he was
degrading Sachin in my mind, Months later when I happened to go with him to the
school which was in the neighboring town his colleagues and subordinates
showered all their love on me.
They took me to the canteen and offered me juice and soft
drinks; I never knew how soft drinks tasted then. One of them kept repeating
few names of the drinks for me to choose and all I could understand was
“PUPPS”, and I told yes to it. I was waiting for my favorite egg puffs (Pupps)
on the table when the dark brown drink that Sachin promoted on the imported
Panasonic color television in the neighbor’s house arrived with a thin long
straw which was bigger than the straw I had seen on the mango fruity juice
packets.
The uncle there told me to have my “Pepsi” and I realized
that it was called “PEPSI” and he was never talking about the egg puffs (Pupps)
that I thought. I was happy, over jubilant for few reasons, the first being
that it was something Sachin drank in the commercials, I was the first among my
friends to drink Pepsi in the company of elder people and I got something that
my father said NO for. I had a wide big smile, with all the hyper excitement, I
kept the straw in my mouth and pulled out a big sip which crossed the limits of
my tongue and went direct to my throat causing a choke and an upward flow of
the liquid to my nostrils and I coughed bad, leading the liquid burst out
through my nose and I remained senseless for few seconds for which I didn’t have
a measure then.
PS: Moral of the story, be it at age of five or age or 23
years and 360 days, never do things that your father prohibited you from.
Ramadan Kareem
T.R.K
