Sixer Satish

[Authors Note : This story came to me almost spontaneously when I was given a prompt by a friend to write a short piece concerning sports and comedy. Its probably my best work on this blog for now. Its has many elements of comedy. Reading time: 10 mins approx. Come, go ahead , give it a read… ]

Satish loved cricket. He had always loved it, as a kid he always loved the sound of window panes cracking with the impact of his sixes that he was famous for through out his galli ( locality ). ‘Sixer’ they called him and he loved the name. Cricket helped him live, and he knew it. Growing up in the slums, without a proper family or education, cricket , was perhaps the only binding thread of the otherwise scattered pieces of his life. Without the love of cricket , he would have perhaps fallen apart or worse see himself as a failure. But with cricket, he was alive !

Sadly as much as he loved cricket, cricket seemed to ignore him. He never got a chance to be selected in the state teams, as he only loved hitting sixes and never ended up scoring more than 20 runs and after which he would invariably go out in all of the important matches. So now he would attend Stadium packed matches wishsing that a camera would focus on him and he would make it to cricketing history. Sadly , till now it had never happened. No matter what he did, how much he cheered or jeered he camera always shyed away from him. But he was not one to lose hope so easily, cricket could not ignore him forever.

So it was not surprising that when the India-Pakistan-Srilanka triseries was hosted in Mumbai, he was one of the first ones to buy a ticket. He always did. He never missed a single match in the city. He was proud to say that most of what he earned was invested in cricket, after as the most important sport of the country it needed funding and it was every tax paying dutiful indian’s duty to buy tournament tickets when ever the opportunity came. Sixer Satish always did his duty.

The match started with the srilankan team winning a tosss and cruising across to a comfortable 332 runs. “Fluke ! yeh hain Fluke ! ” shouted Satish. It was one of the few english words he knew , he had heard it on television often and he was convinced it meant something bad. The Indian Innings started with a big bang from Sehwag and he decimated the srilankan bowlers. As the bowlers seemed to metaphorically beg for mercy, the Indian hard hitter spiked up the runrate to a whopping 12 runs/over. But, just like luck and wealth which don’t always stay long , a fatal shot brought his innings to an abrupt end. Soon after the Indian lineup began crumbling against the onslaught of the rejuvinated srilankan bowlers who finally saw a ray of hope. Finally things became stable again as the reliable partnership of the great wall ( dravid ) and the god of cricket ( sachin ) kept rebuffing off bowling attacks and inching up the score. Soon Indian was at 300. As, close to 1/6th of the world’s population held their breath, the score came up to 307/49.5 overs. As fate would have it, now , only a sixer could save India. Sixer Satish was biting his fingers away. The final ball, flew from one end of the wicket to the other… and Thwack ! , flew right across the stadium.. towards Satish. As he fixed his eyes on this flying hope , it seemed to get closer and closer and bigger and bigger. The hair on his skin stood rapt to attention and the adrenaline in his veins seems to flow swifter than blood, he could see it as larger than life itself and then, it was right in front of him.

Dhak !

Indian won the match that day. And it was perhaps the first time in history, that an Indian had sacrified his life for cricket. As news panels argued back and forth and TRPs bounced up and down, one thing was certain. Satish had finally done it. He had become a permanent part of Indian cricketing history, forever.

– Palash Nandi