Grief and loss on the 22 yards

IPL 2020: Former India cricketer Snehal Pradhan, in her latest column, weighs in on the life of cricketers, who despite battling adversities - sometimes as severe as dealing with the loss of a loved one - are courageous enough to carry on with the game they have come to love so much.

“Cricketer ek majdoor hai,” says Nitish Rana during a recent video interview. Sitting in his Delhi home, he tells his host, “Aapko roj khana hai, to roj kamana hai. Har din runs banaoge, to aapko life me kuch milega.” If you want to earn your keep, you have to work every day. Only if you score runs everyday will you get somewhere in life.

IPL 2020: Nitish Rana waves a special jersey with name of his late father-in-law.(IPL/Twitter)

Last weekend, as Rana was earning his keep, his burden was heavier. The work he did that day was lonesome, his runs more focused. When he scored his fifty, his good friend Rinku Singh ran out carrying a message, not for Rana, but by him. It was a shirt bearing the name of Rana’s late father-in-law, a shirt his team had printed for Rana when they heard that Surinder Marwah was ailing, a shirt Rana hoped to hold aloft while Marwah still lived. Marwah passed away the night before the match. Rana held the shirt aloft in his memory. The same day, Mandeep Singh lost his father and turned out for Kings XI a few hours later in Sharjah.

Learning of the bereavements suffered by Rana and Mandeep made me revisit my own experience with loss while on the field. In 2015, I lost my maternal grandmother, while in the middle of an inter-zonal tournament in Kolkata. I took the next morning’s flight to Pune, but couldn’t get there in time to be there for my mother as she laid my grandmother to rest. I spent just a day with my family, and then took the evening flight back. I was on the field the next day; exhausted physically, drained emotionally, but there. Instead of being home, holding my mother’s hand, helping my brother wade through the formalities, I was on a cricket field, doing my job.

But then cricket isn’t just a job for us, is it? How many jobs involve trying to represent the country, a dream the entire family must work towards and sacrifice for? And yet I think I would have come back even if I was certain of my spot in the national team. After all, my role models did the same: In a home international series in 2011, our captain Jhulan Goswami lost her grandmother. She played on.

Duty calls. The show must go on. They would have wanted it that way. All these are different ways of saying, what we do is a privilege, not just an occupation, for better, or for worse. I spoke to many in the sports industry for this piece, they all remembered Virat Kohli batting a day after his father’s death. Few could think of a time when an Indian cricketer—male, female, amateur or professional—said no to the game, and spent significant time with family instead. Perhaps it’s true: some work is more than work. How can a player abandon a dream that the family has dreamed together? How can cricketers, who are creatures of two families, let down their teammates?

Sacrifice is inherent to sport. But there are some sacrifices no one should have to sign up for, like Rana not being able to be there for his partner as she said goodbye to a parent. In normal circumstances, both Rana and Mandeep might have gotten to go home for a while. Given the Covid travel and quarantine restrictions, it’s an impossibility. Grief and bio-bubbles are a Venn diagram we never thought we would have to draw. But grief and insecurity is an overlap that we should talk more about.

Think about Mandeep: He was only getting an opportunity to open the innings because of an injury to Mayank Agarwal. Had he gone home, he would not have scored a match-winning fifty a game later, redeeming a till then barren season. This should never be a consideration, but it may be naive to think it was not.

In western cricketing cultures, they perhaps do a better job of remembering that cricket is their occupation, not their life. Ben Stokes has missed much cricket, even in a sparse year, to be by his ailing father’s side. When Rishabh Pant’s father passed away days before the 2017 IPL, Pant missed just one game. His then teammate Chris Morris remarked how if it was him, he would have bought a one-way ticket home.

So, as we rightly applaud the courage it takes to play on with grief, let us also think of creating a space for courage of a different kind. Courage to stay home and grieve, courage from those in power that say, ‘Go. Take care of your family. We will take care of you.’ There is a thin line between appreciating the difficulty of their choices and glorifying their sacrifices. Such sacrifice should never be the only real option.

Snehal Pradhan is a former India cricketer, commentator and writer.