Umair Ahmed Muhajir revisits his childhood experience of Sharjah cricket's golden years. I wish I had held on to those brochures we called "souvenir books" - glossy publications issued in advance of the Sharjah cricket tournaments of the 1980s. Looking back, the articles inside were little more than puff-pieces on the participating teams: India, Pakistan and some obligatory third nation (sometimes a fourth or even a fifth) brought in to avoid the tournament looking like a bilateral India-Pakistan series - veiling the truth, as it were, but only to heighten the ultimate pleasure of the encounter. Back then the souvenir books seemed like little pieces of magic that my father would bring back from his trips to Sharjah stadium; I devoured not only the write-ups, but also the full-page photographs that made even obscure players - such as an uneasy-looking Laxman Sivaramakrishnan in the white-bordered souvenir issued for the 1985 "Challenge Cup" - seem like titans. We lived in Abu Dhabi then, and I had never been to Sharjah, not being Old Enough for a day trip to the stadium.
Things began to look up after we moved to Dubai: I was older, and Sharjah wasn't far away at all. Certainly close enough for me to accompany my father to a 1987 India-Pakistan match in which no fewer than three Indian batsmen perished to the generally unthreatening Salim Jaffer's full-tosses. There were many more matches in the ensuing years, now preserved as a trove of disjointed images: Viv Richards sauntering back to the pavilion after having scored 36 nonchalant runs; a red-bearded Pathan raffle-ticket seller enraged at being mock-whistled at ("as if I were a girl", he fumed); Waqar Younis running in to bowl, his run-up an excuse to showcase his godlike open-chested form at the moment of delivery; my father's binoculars, difficult to focus but indispensable if I was ever to associate the men the scoreboard assured me were on the pitch with the photos I had seen in Khaleej Times.
In those days before live television telecasts of matches from far afield, I had no idea that the Sharjah stadium pitch was a "flat" one, that its parched surface greatly favoured batsmen over bowlers ("There's no grass on it," my father had long mourned). Television gave rise to other doubts too: just how many of Aqib Javed's seven wickets, for example, represented dubious umpiring decisions? By the time I left Dubai behind in the late 1990s, Sharjah cricket was losing its sheen: other neutral venues were springing up; and there were growing murmurs about match-fixing, murmurs that couldn't simply be ascribed to the whining of Indian fans who turned up to watch India perennially snatch defeat from the jaws of victory against Pakistan.
Perhaps it was simply that I was older, and more likely to fancy myself a cricket connoisseur, looking down my nose at the sort of pitch that afforded even moderately gifted batsmen time to back away from the stumps and pummel a Curtly Ambrose offering through the off side. (In 1994, I thought Basit Ali was good, but I knew he wasn't that good). Perhaps I was more likely to wince at the taunts of Ganpati Bappa chorya ("Ganpati [Lord Ganesh] is a thief") chanted by some Pakistani fans - taunts that could not be repaid in kind by Indian fans, for insults against Islam would not be tolerated by the authorities. Neutrality only went so far. All in all, by the time Sharjah hosted what turned out to be its last match in 2003, I was indifferent to its cricket, preferring to dream of test series and tournaments elsewhere. It didn't seem to matter anymore (did Pakistan celebrate after beating Zimbabwe to lift the Cherry Blossom Sharjah Cup that year?), and it wasn't until much later that I even realised that no one played international cricket in Sharjah any more.
But Ganpati Bappa chorya stayed with me. It wasn't just the bigotry or the unfairness of the situation, but the fact that it all seemed so, well, un-Sharjah. But why? It surely wasn't the fact that some religious sensibilities were more equal than others (the emirate had never made any claim to the contrary). Perhaps it represented a contravention of the stadium's spirit? After all, the whole point of Sharjah cricket was to enable India and Pakistan to play each other when cricket tours of the "other" country were rare. Moreover, the large expatriate population from the subcontinent meant that it was one of the very few venues where neutrality would mean a truly (and evenly) split crowd: an opportunity for Indian and Pakistani fans to wage war by other means, in each other's presence.
To me, this says something about Sharjah, and, more broadly, about the Gulf. For a few decades now, it has been common for critics of the Gulf states to dismiss them as almost unreal (and hence, by implication, vaguely illegitimate) places, their success dependent on their promise of secession from the world around them. One sees this tendency on display even in otherwise sober media coverage, where this or that outlandish idea (an indoor ski slope; the world's largest something or other) is held up as emblematic of what is "wrong" with the place. There is truth to this view, but it is glib. For a place like the Sharjah stadium - or, by extension, the Gulf - wasn't "unreal" in the sense that it had no connection to what was left offshore. Instead it was a crossroads, a place for certain sorts of (more or less fraught) encounters that weren't very likely in the surrounding region. In the 1980s, India and Pakistan mostly couldn't play cricket against each other except in Sharjah; more broadly, Pathans and Malayalees, bhaiyyas and Sikhs, couldn't stumble over each other anywhere else as they could in the Gulf.
To be sure, there were other desi diasporas worldwide, but these tended toward segmentation: Sikhs in Vancouver, Pakistani Kashmiris in the north of England, Hyderabadis in Melbourne, Bangladeshis and Gujaratis in New York. The Gulf was simply more varied. Anyway, in cricket-less North America, there was no public event that would bring desi immigrants together while reminding them of their otherness to each other; England, with its cricket and its desis, could have hosted such an event, but didn't see itself in that role: England was simply itself, not a medium for bringing foreign -stans face to face.
All of which means I was right to be unsettled by Ganpati Bappa chorya - but not for the reason I imagined at the time. My unease, I see now, was also the discomfort of someone who had to recognise the untenability of an idea that had hitherto been assumed. Politics, bigotry, and nationalistic hatreds - "reality" - weren't checked in at the stadium gate. Sharjah's promise, the region's promise, was and is a different one: of simply enabling the encounter, on ground that has never been a blank slate.
A snatch of a taunt overheard long ago only makes sense now: the real Gulf wasn't - and shouldn't be - about keeping the rest of the world out; it was also about enabling those nearby to stumble upon others who wouldn't be encountered elsewhere. In the wake of the recent economic turbulence, perhaps that's why I remain sanguine about the Gulf's prospects: not because of the billions of investment dollars, but because as long as Indians and Pakistanis, or Malayalees and "North Indians", Bombayites and Tamilians, Pathans and Muhajirs (I could go on: west to the Levant and Egypt, or to Europe; or east to the Philippines and beyond - but that wouldn't be cricket, would it?) need to meet, transact, eat each other's food, resent each other in proximity, and make love, the meaning of Sharjah stadium may be renewed. Ye Hindu hamare fast bowlers se darte hain ("These Hindus are scared of our fast bowlers") I heard in 1991, in the same tournament when that impossibly little boy with curly hair, Sachin, helped take 65 runs off five overs from the fearsome Wasim and Waqar, finally ending India's Sharjah jinx against Pakistan. I turned to glare at the man behind me, but nearly two decades later I see something more. Alone, each of us might have been anywhere; but the two of us, sitting a row apart in unfriendly togetherness, as those around paid us no heed - back then, it could only happen there.
Umair Ahmed Muhajir is a lawyer based in New York City. He blogs at qalandari.blogspot.com.
