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Cricket with the literary touch

I'd read in this part of the world. Every cricket report was a fascinating essay that combined cricket, observations beyond the boundary, humour, and many a human and literary touch. He would not have been out of place among that old English school of cricket writers comprising Neville Cardus, John Woodcock and Alan Ross for whom reporting cricket was an opportunity to create literature. Not for them such sensational assessments as Team B not deserving to be in the same arena as Team A, only to find the favourite annihilated. Not for them the obsession with a Bradman or a Tendulkar; a Trevor Bailey gardening or a Merchant plodding was equally noteworthy. The pity is that with all the cricket-watching he did, K. N. Prabhu did not add much to the world of cricket books.

I'd read Prabhu regularly from the 1950s to the 1980s. But I caught up with him only in 1997. That's when he started writing the occasional bit of nostalgic musing for me and rather more frequent Letters to the Editor packed with information on Madras and cricket. It was these twin interests of his that had us meeting whenever he was in Madras. Over lunch and a drink, we'd have long, leisurely chats when time seemed to stop still while he'd talk of the cricketers of our youth around the world and I'd talk of the old Madras I kept discovering more about every day. He wrote for Madras Musings till 2003, when the passing away of his wife and his failing health slowed him down. Between these meetings and his articles and letters, I discovered how much of his youth he'd spent in Madras. When his father, who was in the postal service, was first posted to Madras in 1929, they lived on Ellis Road, not far from The Hindu's 100 Mount Road and St. William's School on Peter's Road. When Mother Margaret Mary could not twist her Irish tongue round `Niranjan' in school, she christened him `James', a name that a few called Prabhu well into retirement. In the Ellis Road days, a treat was being taken to Whitesaway Laidlaw's (now the VGP showroom) or to the neighbouring 4-anna-8-anna store, Wrenn, Bennett's. There were silent films at the Cinema Popular and at the Elphinstone, where an orchestra played in the wings. Then it was off to the mofussil only to return to a home on Lloyd's Road in 1935. On the evening of September 4, 1939, the poster at the entrance to The Hindu's office alarmingly read, "England declares war, sub sighted off Madras"! Then began the Loyola years with the sports-loving Father Murphy where Prabhu and a couple of others brought out the handwritten Loyola Magazine with spoofs on Winston Churchill joining the Wardha ashram to study Gandhiji's secret on ahimsa, and on the Aga Khan `dating' Sarojini Naidu. It was at Loyola that he discovered what "a splendid game hockey is" watching the legendary Khalsa Blues in action.

Later, remembering the 1940s, "this old Madrasi realised what he missed by settling in Bombay." He once wrote of "_when you could take in the paatu kacheris at Suguna Vilas Sabha or Rasika Ranjani Sabha after a day at Chepauk watching Gopalan and Ram Singh, with the bonus of lunching on potato bondas and badhaam halwa at Krishna Iyer's on Pycroft's Road_and then going on to hear C.R., Sir Sivaswami Iyer or Alladi Krishnaswami Iyer speak at one of the many halls Madras boasted." Indeed, Prabhu made Old Madras come alive for many between 1997 and 2003 just as he had made the playing fields of England, Australia and the West Indies live in the minds of readers for three decades before that. I wish someone would collect those dispatches of Prabhu and publish them for those who knew not such writing and for those who remember what enjoyment his words gave them.

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