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| Football was the flavour, from Surya Sen Street to Santoshpur, as bricks or slippers doubled as goalposts. “We generally play cricket on a bandh day, but with the World Cup on we chose football,” said the boys in blue or yellow, white or red. Picture by Pradip Sanyal Victor uses his head on b-day. (Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya) |
Monday’s bandh was a bandh with a difference. Not because Calcuttans trooped to work for a change but because football outscored cricket on bandh day. The deserted streets doubling as football fields got VICTOR BANERJEE — an avowed cricket baiter and soccer (and hockey) lover — to pen a piece for Metro on the beautiful game.
“Bandho Karo”, “Cholbey Na” — but no power on earth can stop the unstoppable lure and love for football that course through every true-red Bengali’s veins.
In my bourgeois circle of insatiable capitalists, I must be the only one who will miss the Communists when they are skittled out by Maradona’s Mamima, Mamata. Over the last 34 years, they have given us 66 days of free football on the streets. Add a weekend to that figure, because a bandh has no meaning if it doesn’t attach itself to a sympathising public holiday, and you get a minimum of 132 days of twin-brick goalposts and football mania that takes over the highways, byways, oalees and goalees and goes to make Calcutta and Bengal a throbbing domain of the possessed.
My father was still a teenager when he and Sailen Manna played as stopper backs for the Howrah Union football team. My father joined the army at 18 and in his early 20s went on to become an IFA governing body member in which his father had served as well, then became the Combined Services football captain and coach, and finally a selector of the Indian football team in which he couldn’t play because of army duties. He picked his old friend Manna to captain the side and that was when India won Gold in the 1st Asian Games.
I too have played for my school, my college, my district, travelled in lorries to play for tea gardens, Planters’ Clubs, for a brand new side of the ’60s called Bhratri Sangha, trained on the Maidan at dawn everyday with Mewalal, played for the CC&FC when I began working as an executive in an MNC and finally posed as an Anglo-Indian called “Banfield” to play for the adventurous Rangers Club and then spent a week in a swanky nursing home with a knee injury that had me hooked on sleeping pills for the next five years.
These days, strolling through paras in the evenings, reminds you of the times when the Pinkos first took over and their indiscriminate bomabaaji kept citizens and children closeted indoors. But today, they’re out; the World Cup is in.
At 7.30, when you walk down deserted and still-dimly-lit narrow alleyways, the plaintive conch is drowned by the blare of vuvuzelas and the heady aroma of dhuno (incense) adds to the mind-blowing madness of football as fathers and sons and mothers and daughters and dogs sit bolt upright around their television sets and scream and yell and bark their conflicting support and bigoted dogmas at each other.
For days we’ve been enthralled by images of pathological euphoria, laughter that echoed over seas and continents and tears that broke hearts in every corner of the globe. Elation, frenzy, beautiful and animated faces that lit up our television screens and the wizardry of footies who dribbled through our cares and spread unbridled fun for 30 glorious days will fade next Sunday, to quietly gather its chicks under its wings and hatch new talent in little coops around the globe, so they can all emerge from their shells to the rhythms of the samba on Copacabana, and reignite our spirits and our burning passion for football, in Brazil in 2012.
For three weeks now, my wife has been preparing a “match menu” for me, every single day.
They have ranged from prawn cutlets, to crumbed mutton chops, to prawn cocktails, lobster bisque soups, aloo marich, jhaal moori, mangshor ghoogni, chireybhaja with a sliver of Assam’s Bhoot Jhalakia thrown in when my team was level or losing at half time. Crisp Patshe maachh, crisper Borali from Assam, the crispiest Mouralla that Tanusree’s friend Manas Das served at Mishtu’s wedding, Double Mutton and Unda-Aloo Karti rolls from Nizams, Raan from Zeeshan, Biriyani from Arsalan, Momos from Blue Poppy dipped in our own ground-chilli-chopped-garlic-poured-into-bubbling-hot-sesameoil-sauce. Salted Aamra from a street vendor’s basket, Phuchkas on a platter with shaken and stirred water from our Phuchkawallah’s earthern pot, and I even had the temerity to make my host at the Tolly pay for and pack two plates of Fish Fries that last Saturday resembled Bijoli Grill’s. But on that saturnalial evening, with all that ceremony and celebration at hand, the young brats of Germany prevailed.
On the cards for this week are Kobiraji Cutlets, charcoal-burned and blackened barbecued pork chops with long snappy finger chips from potatoes that I personally bought from a lady whose stall (near the fish market) I have patronised for years, Jumbo cutlets from crayfish I bought from Shibaji at Ojha’s, and I shall conjure up something special for Spain’s win on the 11th. Wanna bet? And it’s all in the name of Football.
Now, in less than a week, after a month of total abandonment and brotherhood, when the Taliban were silent and the Americans ceased destroying fields of glorious poppies and our endless Pak bashing was put on hold, the fever of the most incredible sporting event on our planet, the Fifa World Cup, will give way to the insipid Anglo-Saxon’s boiled-potato compromise with eternity, CRICKET.
This resurrection, after Kerry Packer’s glorified and Lalit Modi’s vainglorious attempts, encapsulated in an out-of-context quote from John Howard (who was only referring to himself), would be “Lazarus with a triple bypass”.
Chooloye jak!
[Do you, like Victor, choose football over cricket? Why?Tell ttmetro@abpmail.com]