First, a confession. This book review was not supposed to appear today. It was slated for next week. But perhaps the seductive charm of a drunk, dying and brilliant sports writer, combined with the mysterious lure of an elusive cricketer, who could have been the most talented to play the game, is too much to resist. When I first took the book home, the intent was to flip through the pages to see what it was like. The flipping lasted too long into the night and the next day I had to ask the books editor whether — with due respect to Chocolate Wars — Chinaman could go first.
The book begins with a question: “Pradeep Who?” So let’s begin this review, too, with a question. Make that two.
Is this fact or fiction? Is it a cricket book?
Difficult questions. The answer, as in many other cases, lies somewhere in between.
It does not claim to be a cricket book. Far from it. Somewhere soon after it begins, there is a small paragraph titled, Sales Pitch. It reads: “If you’ve never seen a cricket match; if you have and it has made you snore; if you can’t understand why anyone would watch, let alone obsess over this dull game, then this is the book for you.”
Do not take that seriously. It is one of the hundreds of smart lines that dot nearly every page.
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The book is mainly about the two fictional characters mentioned above. Sixty-four-year-old (it’s not clear if the Beatles had a hand in deciding his age) W G Karunasena is dying because his liver is out of whack. But he thinks he is blessed. He thinks about men younger and healthier who have suffered multiple bypasses, drinkers whose bodies were unable to keep up, who exchanged the bottle for sobriety and the permanent frown it brings. He has watched drinking acquaintances find solace in religion and family, men go from being life-and-soul-of-the-party to disagreeable old teetotaller. For the mornings and afternoons of his working life, Karunasena has treated himself to a compulsory shot, and has treated breakfast and lunch as optional extravagances. Yet, his bill of health, until the doctor broke the liver news to him, had been clean. Karunasena takes it as a warning, a yellow card. If he behaves himself, he may not have to miss any games. With this, he embarks on the pursuit of Pradeep Mathew, who he thinks was the best to have played the game.
Karunatilaka told another newspaper in an interview that Karunasena began as a minor character. It turned out he had lots of stories. “Sometimes the best way to tell a tall tale is to get a drunk to narrate it.”
It is a tall tale, all right. The book succeeds in seducing the reader by dangling the carrot with which every cricket fan is obsessed: An eternal debate over who was the greatest of them all, a pot that gets stirred every time Sachin Tendulkar scores a century. This book adds a new dimension to the Sachin versus the Don debate by creating Pradeep Mathew. Unlike Tendulkar and Bradman, Mathew is not from a cricketing superpower; he is from Sri Lanka, none of whose players features in the top 10 of the all-time great lists that keep coming out.
Secondly, Mathew, unlike Tendulkar and Bradman, is a bowler. An extraordinary bowler at that — he could bowl pace or spin, right-arm or left-arm. There is the mention of a match where a team played five bowlers, of which a fast bowler took three wickets and a spinner five. Karunasena’s friend Ari swears that it was actually a sixth bowler who took all the wickets. How did they manage that? The whole team was wearing blue and yellow caps when bowling. “Who does that,” asks Ari, and you find yourself nodding.
You find yourself wincing because Mathew’s is an unfulfilled talent. He flickered all too briefly before vanishing, adding a touch of tragedy that lifts the book several notches. You may find, if you think (this is a book that will make you think frequently), Mathew’s tragedy being resonated in Karunasena’s wasted life. Had he done justice to his talent, he may have become known by his initials, which are the same as those of the first star cricketer.
The book is also about Sri Lanka, its politics, its society, and the world at large. There are many incidents, many characters, which are real. Some are fictional. And there are some in between. (There is a cricketer named Mohinder Binny, for instance. For those who came in late, Mohinder Amarnath and Roger Binny were in the Indian team that won the 1983 World Cup.) Pradeep Mathew is fictional. I knew this, yet could not resist the urge to search for him in the player profiles at Cricinfo, the mother of all cricket databases. In part, I was compelled by Karunatilaka’s statement in the interview mentioned above that “everything about Pradeep Mathew is true, except for his name”.
I did not find Mathew on Cricinfo, but I did find other sites, ostensibly inspired by this book, which tried to convince me that the fellow was real. One such — http://pradeepmathew.com/ — has a “Cricinfo profile”, which, upon clicking, opens a page showing Pradeep Mathew’s Cric1info profile. Did you notice the digit? I missed it the first time.
CHINAMAN
The legend of Pradeep Mathew
Shehan Karunatilaka
Random House India
395 pages; Rs 499
