Last Stop on the Rawalpindi Express (Part 1, maybe)

when i was young, i had a certain idea about love. to me, love meant contentment. it meant something pleasant, something that did away with your fears and anxieties and worries. something which was soothing, reassuring, pampering even. i expected love to be a natural progression of adulthood, as inevitable and predictable as finding a 9-to-5 job, of finding a respectable spouse, of having a number of well-behaved children living in a well-kept house. i thought love was about the absence of tensions and worries and dread and fear. in my understanding, love was like gripe water, soothing my infantile pangs of pain.

in a way, none of this was wrong. love can, and is, all these things my testosterone-challenged mind had concocted. 

and yet, love is something more.

if sunday was the day the e-mail was invented, then monday was the day the first forward was sent. email forwards are a culture unto themselves, revealing little in terms of truth themselves, but opening up so much more about the person who sent them. the recently politicized student who sends you petitions to sign, the recently married acquaintance who masks her new-found disillusion by swamping you with brainless quotes written on jpegs of blooming clouds, the idiot friend whose much-hacked inbox keeps popping out viagra-extolling viruses, the generally shy colleague who sends you jokes that contain some contrived homily at the end. 

then there is the forward that fathers or uncles usually send. those that are vague attempts at asserting continuity and stability. sometimes this is manifested in ISI-sponsored propaganda that link to the dajjalian conspiracies seeking to threaten the status-quo. sometimes, they arrive as pseudo-scientific studies proving that sleeping on time and driving carefully are the road to wisdom and salvation. and sometimes, they arrive in the form of lists which are meant to showcase and reimagine the 'image' of pakistan. 

usually, such emails contain a host of images and bland facts which are meant to prove how pakistan is not just a haven for terrorism and violence. they are replete with pictures of places like lalazaar, with inane descriptions such as "considered by many to be heaven on earth." they tell of disparate achievements, such as female fighter pilots, and of course this guy.

 inevitably, as they scramble around vainly to find something to impress, they proudly mention that largeness of our army.

it goes without saying that such forwards do nothing to fire up the patriot within me. after all, those lovely places are rendered unvisitable due to the wars. those o'level grades are just past-paper-rattafication taken to a new extreme. and that large army... well, vicariously overcompensate much?

but that's not the reason such a forward, or indeed any discussion on the 'image' of pakistan is so irksome. firstly, because unlike other countries, we are the problem child, the sulken sallow faced one with the absuive history, with the suppressed past and the unpleasant future, with the myriad contradictions and the embarassing realities, with the stunted development and without the full eyes, the perky breasts or the coy smile. discussion of image don't work well with our country.

but more improtantly, it is because the quintessential experience of living in pakistan and actually enjoying life there is notoriously difficult to distill into words and images. if it must be understood, it has to be felt to be known.

milan kundera had written once about how someone in love can be surprised to find themselves feeling hungry, because love has this way of taking over your body, your physical sensations, your internal workings. its the realisation that love is not always a soothing panacea, but instead something which has a way of shredding nerves, jostling your insides, plummeting your breath and squeezing your mind. love can't be understood through words and drawings, through painting and sonnets, through songs and ballads, love must be felt. love is visceral.

and that's how we arrive at our understanding of shaiby.

of the countless eulogies that will be written for him, all will make use of statistics to highlight his chronic absenteeism, all will give numbers to collate his outrageous disciplinary fines, probations and bans, all will wistfully reflect on figures to showcase what could've been, had he been more fit, more committed, more someone else...

which might be fine, but the true joy of shaiby, the love felt for him, is experienced, not written.

cricket is a game of infinite pauses, of starts and re-starts. 

every delivery, the game comes to a rest, and every delivery it starts up again. each delivery builds up a sense of anticipation and each delivery is resolved with some sort of a climax. it is this pattern that makes test matches so addictive, because the whole pattern replays itself for two innings, for ninety overs a day, for five days. inevitably though, most of the time such moments are bland, the buildup tepid, the climax anti-climatic. the toilers toil, the grafters graft, the nurdlers nurdle, and fakmal drops the catch.

not with shoaib though.

every time, every single time he runs in from those colossal distances, there is an exhilirating buildup, a cascade of potential outcomes, each more glorious and disastrous than the next. his run-up whips us into a frenzy that engulfs everyone, his action and delivery are literally an explosion, and the outcome forever brands itself onto your emotional make-up.

what is truly brilliant is that these emotions are not restricted to his team's fans alone, because the inflammable nature of shoaib means that any and every eventuality is possible.

to make my point, take these two deliveries to sachin. i don't even need to link the videos, because you all know what i mean.

the first is from kolkata, where it takes literally an hour for sachin to arrive at the crease while the crowd shits its pants in anticipation, and it takes ages while tony grieng and charu sharma continue to mount incessant platitudes on the little master, and it takes another lifetime for the sachin to get ready and face up, and further eons still for the thundering speedster to arrive at the crease.

and then.

and there is an ecstatic blur as the ball is released. 

and then.

and then there is silence. 

there are flayed stumps. there are broken hearts. there are new dreams and old fears. and there is a new hero.

take your time to digest that.

but as i said, the joy is not for his supporters alone. four years later, the two met again in centurion, in a world cup. it was a moment that sachin himself has been waiting for for over a year. that rabid fans had been praying and cursing for even longer. and once more, as shoaib runs in, it feels that all the world and time and history are collapsing into this one moment and either you or the entire cosmos are about to implode. and when sachin visciously stabs at the ball and it soars in the air, the moment seems to stretch even further, becoming even more unbearable and oppressive, until it sails into the crowd and despair/joy overwhelms you.

those two balls, those two moments - that's what shoaib is about. 

not about five-fors or strike rates, not about tests played or fines paid, but about the moment, the unbearably violent, destructive, overwhelming experience. 

those who know love will know this feeling well, this feeling where everything seems to be in chaos, everything seems to come together and break away, everything rips anew and apart - the feeling we feel when shaiby bowls.

because love is not just rainbows and cookies, love is agony, love is pain, love is delirium. 

love is a shoaib akhtar delivery.