But America remains the great challenge, despite an Indian population that now exceeds three million souls. Americans have about as much use for cricket as Lapps have for beachwear. Ever since Abner Doubleday, in the mid-nineteenth century, introduced a simplified version of the elemental sport in which bat contends with ball, Americans have been lost to the more demanding challenges — and pleasures — of cricket. Baseball is to cricket as simple addition is to calculus — the basic moves may be similar, but the former is easier, quicker, more straightforward, and requires a much shorter attention span. And so baseball has captured the American imagination in a way that leaves no room for its adult cousin. The notion that anyone would watch a game that could take five days and still not ensure a result provokes widespread disbelief among result-oriented Americans. “You mean people actually pay to watch this?” exclaimed one American I tried to interest in the game. “It's about as exciting as measuring global warming!”
“Yeah, and just as important to half the planet,” I responded dryly.
To be a cricket fan in America while the ICC World Cup is going on is akin to being a Brazilian samba dancer quarantined at a Quaker prayer meeting during Carnival week. Sitting in New York, you could as well be in Timbuktu for all the awareness people around you have of what's happening. A billion people may be on tenter-hooks around the world for the results of each match, but the august New York Times, which likes to think of itself as a world-class newspaper, doesn't even report the scores.
In earlier days cricket fans in the United States built their schedules around trying to catch the static-ridden numbers squawked on the BBC World Service twice a day. Today, though none of the 103 channels on my Manhattan cable television set offer a glimpse of cricket, suburbanites with satellite dishes can buy a World Cup package hawked by Indian-American television entrepreneurs. During earlier World Cups, movie theaters in immigrant neighborhoods that normally screened Bollywood blockbusters aired telecasts of World Cup cricket matches instead. And now there's the Internet — willow.tv, named for the wood that cricket bats are made of, sells a package that video-streams all the matches onto your PC. So living in America is no longer cricketing purgatory.
But, except when matches are played in the Caribbean, the avid America-based fan desirous of watching world-class cricket has to contend with the tyranny of what the French like to call the décalage horaire. Cricket is played in the rest of the world when people in America are supposed to be asleep. So satellite television has spawned a curious subculture in New York City. On days of crucial matches, shadowy brown figures flit through the dark predawn streets, heading for the homes of the privileged few who own satellite dishes. They whisper into cell phones in an arcane code: “Who's at silly mid-on? Has Irfan bowled a maiden?”
One night, a grizzled New York doorman regarded my friend Nikhil and me with undisguised skepticism. It was 3:30 A.M. — not the usual hour for visitors to drop by, even in Manhattan. “They're expecting us,” I told him firmly. “Buzz upstairs and see.”
He did, and they were. But the grizzled guardian at the gates couldn't suppress a shake of his head as he directed my friend and me to the elevators. Our hostess, Neera, greeted us at her door and led us down a darkened hallway past a bedroom where one of her sons slept under a blanket. “He has an exam in the morning,” she whispered. In the master bedroom a television flickered. Our host, Sanjay, resplendent in white cotton pajamas and sitting propped up in bed, waved us to a sofa. “They won the toss,” he announced in tones of doom. “We're getting clobbered.”
Nikhil and I sat down heavily, after only three hours’ sleep. “Maybe we shouldn't have got up for this,” I said as raucous shouts arose from the TV, confirming a disastrous Indian showing. “Are you kidding?” Nikhil replied. “Would you have missed this for anything?”
I had to admit I wouldn't. After years of being denied the most sublime pleasure known to Subcontinental Man — watching an international cricket match — this was heaven. For fans like me, New York has long been a citadel of barbarism, where the world's greatest sport is neither played nor reported in the papers. For decades we had to get our news of important matches via shortwave radio. The Internet for the first time brought live scores on demand — manna from on high. But to actually see a match? So what if it was taking place nearly a dozen time zones away? Nothing could beat having a friend in Manhattan with a satellite dish who was (a) a cricket fan and (b) willing to let you into his home in the middle of the night to watch the Indian team in action.
So it was that recent Sunday morning. Roused by the hoots and whistles emanating from the TV, Neera and Sanjay's houseguest wandered in, bleary-eyed from sleep. A while later their elder son awoke; a recent recruit at a big-name Wall Street firm, he had gotten home from work after midnight but was determined to catch an hour or two of cricket before heading back to the office at 7 A.M. The younger son, with his accounting exam to take, joined us next. As the cricketers on screen trooped off to their stadium lunch, Neera whipped up a breakfast of eggs and bagels for the watchers. The match resumed, and as the Manhattan morning advanced, friends who had been obliged to keep more conventional hours began to drop in: a family with young children, another from Connecticut, a young couple who had eyes mainly for each other despite the magnetism of the match.
Conversation sparkled in the combination of Hindi and English that Indians know as Hinglish. A nephew of Sanjay's arrived with his baby; when he heard the score he almost dropped the infant. Relatives who couldn't make it called from assorted locations to ask for news. Masala chai flowed. By noon it was over. India had lost, half a world away. Nikhil and I headed back to reality.
“What's goin’ on up there, anyways?” the doorman asked. I opened my mouth to explain, then shut it again. “You're American,” I said with a sigh. “You wouldn't understand.”
Like the other remnants of the colonial presence, cricket has been thoroughly Indianized without losing its essential British moorings. After producing Oxbridge-educated Test stars for England, Indian cricket now reaches deep into the subcontinental soil, sustaining innumerable grassroots tournaments, attracting the largest audiences for any spectator sport in the world and creating stars more comfortable in Marathi or Tamil than in the language of “silly mid-on,” “sticky wicket,” and “bowling a maiden over.” Indeed, cricket is no longer what Americans imagine it is, a decorous sport played by effete Englishmen uttering polite inanities (“marvelous glance to fine leg, old chap”) over cucumber sandwiches. World cricket now uses Hindi terms (the doosra trips off the tongues of Oxonian commentators). Cricket is now an Indian game; many who play it have no sense of owing it to England. Yet just as Indian nationalists used British traditions and institutions to overturn British rule, so also Indians have taken up an English sport and delight in beating the English literally at their own game. Today more than 80 percent of the game's global revenues come from India, as the vast television audience of a growing economic giant clamors for the sport.
So the cricketing cause in America may lie in the hands of Indian immigrants. Just as the growth in the Hispanic population made soccer a mainstream sport, the enthusiasm of subcontinentals might yet spill over to their American neighbors, just as Indians and Pakistanis have brought cricket stadia to the United Arab Emirates. It may be a long while before cricket acquires the worldwide following of soccer or even tennis, but thanks to the mobility of modern labor and the passion for the game shown by its émigrés, cricket is spreading around the world. Maybe, one day, America might even catch up.