Shuttle
between Cricket and Hockey
Last night, around 10 o’
clock, I was witness to some unusual behaviour by the resident strays of my
lane. I heard them howling and yowling and barking and creating a ruckus and
went out to the gate to investigate. There was activity at both ends of the
lane. Down the lane I saw three mongrels running around crazily trying to bite
their own tails. On the other side, up the lane, I spied two retired mastiffs
stiffly trying to chase a Bobcat up the hongeˊ tree. Bob of course was hardly perturbed and just
sauntered away with a raised left eyebrow and a low growl. I was scratching my
head and wondering what happened to cause this contrasting behaviour, with Amavasya still a couple of days away.
It transpired that neither
the circling mongrels nor the chasing mastiffs were fed by any of the residents
as they usually are, chiefly because of some activity happening in distant
England.
I looked left and right. My
immediate neighbour to my left was a nonentity and he did not come out. My
immediate neighbour to my right was non-existent in the sense that it was a
vacant site. It was left to my neighbour’s neighbour, the one whose house was
on the other side of the vacant site, whose voice is like a bellow, the retired
cop, to come out and enlighten me. He told me a short tale of two games between
two neighbours.
The retired neighbour, sorry,
retired cop, related with much gesticulation that, on the one hand, India had
been humbled by Pakistan in London and, on the other, India had trounced
Pakistan in London. Which didn’t make any sense to me, like anything he utters.
Utter nonsense. These cops tend to mix up things just to confuse you and
extract some confession out of you. I almost owned up to a car theft attempt
before I realised that it was my own car and I had got the window open with a
steel foot rule only because I had parked the key inside the car and locked it
instead of parking the car inside the garage and locking it. Luckily I bit my
tongue in time and stopped myself from incriminating myself.
Coming back to the story
at hand, it transpired that India played Pakistan. If this was not bad enough,
they played them twice in two different games at the same time. In one game
they beat them and in the other they were beaten by them. Thumped them in
hockey and got thumped in cricket. The mongrels and the mastiffs were not fed
by any of the residents who were otherwise preoccupied screaming, ranting and
raving in front of their television sets, making them go crazy and behave as
they did.
India thumping Pakistan or
Pakistan humbling India is big news. When both these things happen simultaneously,
it is big, big news. Anything else happening in between is for the moment ignored.
With the newshounds busy shuttling between cricket and hockey, a shuttler who
also made news was almost forgotten. Almost. The line umpires called him in. He
found mention, albeit in fewer words, alongside the cricket and hockey news.
Kidambi Srikanth. He won the Indonesia Open Super Series Premier Badminton
Singles trophy beating Japanese qualifier Kazumasa Sakai in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Super. Kudos!
Hongeˊ
or Indian Beech Tree is an outbreeding legume tree, with a diploid chromosome number of 22, growing wild on sandy and rocky soils, including oolitic limestone, whatever that may be.
Amavasya
– New Moon.
