For one Nepal cricketer, sport becomes post-tremor motivation: ‘I will definitely play again’

Paul Radley talks to Subash Pradhan, a Nepalese cricketer whose family home and cricket career were upended in the devastating April earthquake.

The April Nepal earthquake left cricketer Subash Pradhan with a broken home and body – but also a resolve to fight back from the hip injury and resurrect his career. Pawan Singh / The National

KATHMANDU // Halfway up a small hill which overlooks the city and the Kathmandu Valley, Subash Pradhan surveys the wreckage of the family home his grandfather built.

His 10-year-old sister’s red bicycle pokes out from the rubble. His wicket-keeping gloves and cricket bat are buried somewhere underneath the broken bricks and splintered wood.

“I used to feel so peaceful and happy when I came back to this place after cricket,” he says with a smile. “Now it feels like ...”

He breaks off, searching for the exact English translation. “Where people go when they die,” he says. A graveyard.

Nobody died on this specific site when the earthquake struck on April 25. Pradhan, though, felt certain he was going to.

He and his family were preparing to sit down for their Saturday lunch together on the third floor when the ground began to shake and fear overwhelmed them.

Pradhan hauled his sisters Paru, 10, and Srijana, 13 (actually his aunt’s daughter, but he calls her a sister) into a tight embrace.

The walls caved in and the house went down. “We were all buried under the mud,” Pradhan says. “I had seen with my eyes my father and mother go under the mud.

“There was sound coming, saying ‘Rescue me, help me,’ but after a few minutes there was no sound. Then I realised there was no point living a life alone. If my family are not there, what could I do? I told myself, ‘I don’t have to live, let me go’.

“I didn’t have any recognition, but after some time, people rescued us and took me to hospital.”

When he came around, he discovered his right leg was facing in the wrong direction.

He had a dislocated hip and an injured left hand.

The family members were each taken to different hospitals. Given that communication networks had been disabled by the devastation, for some time he did not know they had all survived, too.

The aftershocks which followed the initial 7.8 earthquake were regular in the days that followed.

So overcome was he by the mental trauma, he pulled the cannula linking him to an IV drip from his arm, limped down the stairs, and discharged himself from hospital. “I knew I had been lucky once, I didn’t think it would happen a second time,” he says.

He went back to where his home used to stand and slept on a mattress on top of some rubble, under a simple tent of a tarpaulin sheet hoisted across a single wooden pole.

Next to the site of their razed home, the family have now built a temporary house from bricks and mud, with a corrugated iron roof and a plaster interior. They hope it will last for six months before they can move into a new home.

They also persuaded Pradhan to return to hospital to undergo treatment to repair his hip injury.

It had a telling effect.

“I was in hospital, I was totally in trauma,” he says. “When I was there, I saw people who did not have hands, people whose spinal cords did not work, but they had the courage to live.

“When I saw that, I realised I could overcome my hip dislocation and do better. If that guy had the guts to think like that, I also had the courage to be positive, too.”

Pradhan, who is a professional cricketer for the Armed Police Force side, is only able to walk with the aid of a crutch, which will be the case for some time yet.

Now 25, he hopes to rebuild his promising cricket career, having been inspired by visits to his home by national team players such as Paras Khadka, the Nepal captain who is also a clubmate of Pradhan’s. “I definitely will play again,” he says.

“We are human beings and we need motivation. My friends from the national team came here and that boosted me.

“That made me realise what I am here for. I have to continue with it. I know for the past one and a half years I have not been in the team, and I was disappointed with that. But I have to continue, until I can stand on my feet again.”

Born in Kathmandu, Pradhan first learnt the sport while a student on the other side of Nepal’s open border with India.

He played gully cricket during formative years in Delhi and Lucknow, and when he brought those skills back to his homeland, he found a thriving scene.

He made his debut for Nepal at the 2008 Under 19 World Cup in Malaysia, where the likes of Virat Kohli and Ravindra Jadeja, for India, and Australia’s Phil Hughes were also making their way in the game.

He hopes his compatriots can help bring some cheer to their country when they try to qualify for the World Twenty20 this month. “They could realise they have nothing to lose,” Pradhan says. “Our country has gone through a disaster. They can think, ‘We can do this small thing to make them happy’.

“If they think what we have gone through, this thing will boost them and help them perform better.”

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