Leah > Books: 2016‎ (116)

“India: A country said to have two real religions – cinema and cricket.”

“India: A country said to have two real religions – cinema and cricket.”

In the next few minutes, Anand Mehta came up with the following observations about cricket: that it was a fraud, and at the most fundamental level. Only ten countries play this game, and only five of them play it well. If we had any self-respect, we'd finally grow up as a people and play football. No: let's not expose ourselves to real competition, much safer to be in a “world cup” against St. Kitts and Bangladesh. Self-obsession without self-belief: the very definition of the Indian middle class, which is why it loves this fraud sport.
Poised to offer the world more deep thoughts about the gentleman’s game, Mehta heard:
Shot! Bloody good shot!...
Confronted by the sound and smell of an instant of real cricket, Mehta felt all his mighty observations turn to ashes.

“People thought I had a future as a writer, Manju. I wanted to write a great novel about Mumbai,” the principal said, playing with her glasses. “But then...then I began, and I could not write it. The only thing I could write about, in fact, was that I couldn't write about the city.
“The sun, which I can't describe like Homer, rises over Mumbai, which I can't describe like Salman Rushdie, creating new moral dilemmas for all of us, which I won't be able to describe like Amitav Ghosh.”

I am also inclined to overuse the word 'old', which actually has less to do with age, as it seems to me, than it does with familiarity. It sets a thing apart as something regarded with a modest, habitual affection. Sometimes it suggests haplessness or vulnerability. I say 'old Boughton', I say 'this shabby old town', and I mean that they are very near my heart.

I was struck by the way the light felt that afternoon. I have paid a good deal of attention to light, but no one could begin to do it justice. There was the feeling of a weight of light – pressing the damp out of the grass and pressing the smell of sour old sap out of the boards on the porch floor and burdening even the trees a little as a late snow would do. It was the kind of light that rests on your shoulders the way a cat lies on your lap. So familiar.

I might seem to be comparing something great and holy with a minor and ordinary thing, that is, love of God with mortal love. But I just don't see them as separate things at all. If we can be divinely fed with a morsel and divinely blessed with a touch, then the terrible pleasure we find in a particular face can certainly instruct us in the nature of the very grandest love. I devoutly believe this to be true. I remember in those days loving God for the existence of love and being grateful to God for the existence of gratitude, right down in the depths of my misery.

Well, I can imagine him beyond the world, looking back at me with an amazement of realisation - “This is why we have lived this life!” There are a thousand, thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.

As he stood he closed his eyes and let his mind trace out the melody as it rose and fell. He knew no other bird which could combine within a single phrase that round, full-throated tone like a thrush or blackbird before soaring up as impossibly high as the trilling of a skylark. But his favourite of all was a low, bubbling warble, a note so pure and liquid clear you felt refreshed to hear it, as if you had actually drunk the spring water the sound resembled, welling fresh from the rock.