The rules

My grandfather was always obsessed with rules. And now I feel like I understand why. Sort of. It’s not really so long before the generations stretch back into a very different time. He was the last of eight children, and his father was 55 when he was born. Just four generations separating my life from the time of the Raj. He was shipped off to boarding school in England for part of his youth and he came of age just as the British finally left for good. Rules. He was a navy man. More rules. There’s a photo of him and my grandmother in 1954, leaving the church in which they were married, through an archway made by the other officers holding their swords aloft.

My parents euphemistically describe him as “depressive.” I know where I got it from. He hated it when dinner didn’t start at eight on the dot, or when one of his seven children would put their elbows on the table, or when a friend, even in a non-competitive round of golf, wouldn’t putt out. He was exacting. He needed things to be done properly and completely. When he first met my mom, she brought a jam tart to the house for dessert. He asked her if she’d made the jam. She hadn’t. He said: “Well, then you’ve made half a jam tart.”

Family lore says that his father, my paternal great-grandfather, was the person everybody in town would come to with their disputes and problems, trusting that he would be able to give them the proper read on what a just outcome would look like. My grandfather was, likewise, always concerned with what was fair and decent. I’m sure this kind of inherent conservatism would have grated on me, if we’d had the kind of relationship where that was worth getting into. But, despite my politics, I am also obsessed with people’s choices. I care too much about what is right and what isn’t.

He was never much of a talker. He would leave the room if people started to gossip—he believed it was wrong. My grandmother was always the life of the party so he didn’t have to be. But in his nineties, he would still perk up if the subject turned to cricket. The rules were clear there. Earlier this year, he was watching an Indian Premier League match when he had the stroke that would eventually lead to his death.

My first experience with cricket was at my grandparents’ house in Pune, when I was two. My dad gave me a plastic bat and bowled to me and my other young cousins. That’s what I’m told, at least. 

Twenty nine years later, I’ve come across cricket again! I have a new essay out in The Believer. It’s about a cricket match from 2001 in which India’s Sachin Tendulkar was accused of ball tampering by a British referee. This became an international incident that was never really cleanly resolved. I could explain further but it would probably just be better for you to read the piece.

I didn’t watch cricket at the time—I was seven and living in the United States—so I can’t say that I remember this incident clearly. But as I learned about the sport as an adult, the way that everybody—fans, players, gatekeepers, politicians—interacted with the rules, technically called The Laws, became fascinating to me. (Mike Marquesee’s Anyone But England and Ramachandra Guha’s A Corner of a Foreign Field were great resources on the racial and class politics of the game.) There was such an intense obsession with honor and gentlemanliness and the way that these things reflected on entire populations that seemed, frankly, nuts. 

Obviously, all of this is tied up with colonial rule, ideas about hierarchy and obedience, and the relationship between Britain and all the now-independent countries that play first-class cricket. With who gets to be assumed decent and who has to prove it. Thinking about it through that lens, the ways in which cricketers were seen as disgraces or mistreated saints made a bit more sense.

How you may feel about rules has a lot to do with who you might think you are in relation to them. Most of the time, if the rules don’t touch you, if they reinforce something flattering about your self image, then you’ll believe in them. But then again, somebody who has run afoul of them may cling to them tightly, hoping they can still prove themselves decent. I’m not sure where my grandfather saw himself in relation to the rules, exactly. But I do wonder what he would have thought of the Tendulkar incident. Would the referee have looked like an arbiter of justice, or a threat to it?