My cricket career...

I get quite nostalgic when I recall the moments of playing cricket in our society. I call it my gully cricket career. I want to share the passion of 6 of us(me and my friends) to play cricket and the agony of the elders in our society caused by us.

My Gully Cricket career started when I was in the 3rd standard of school. We used to play a series tournaments, usually during the after hours of our exams. Who said ball and bat are mandatory to play cricket? We used a writing pad and a ball made with handkerchiefs to play cricket. We had a cricket stadium specially architected for us to play cricket after school. It was a durga mata temple.

We had six different stadiums in our society. First one was in the parking of my building. This stadium was a compact one and we just had a chance for leg-side strokes for single, doubles and boundaries. No straight shot was allowed as it was the house of our watchman. Offside was a canal and backside was a bloody witch who used to eat our cricket balls. It was closed down by the cruel societians by allegedly parking their vehicles between our cricket pitch.

The second one was, in one of my friend's bungalow. It was a nice, safe area and free from elder's conspiracy to stop our play. It was all well until I - inspired by some Indo-Pak tournament - took the responsibility of breaking two consecutive windowpanes. My friend's family finally outraged their agony and their long lasted patience was over.

The third one was one of our friend's terrace. It was the best place to play cricket, no pressure of breaking windowpanes, no disturbance of vehicles. The only problem occurred was when the ball was shot out of the terrace. The person responsible for the stroke was also responsible to go 3 floors down and climb up with the current or a new ball on his own expenses. In spite of the immense physical labour of bringing the ball up, climbing the stairs, the batsman used to be declared as out. It was a strict rule in the terrace stadium. This was all going well, until my friend, who was living on the last floor below the terrace, complained of the plaster falling off from his roof. It was emphasised more as one night the plaster fell on his father's nose, which led him to stop our play in immediacy.

The fourth stadium was granted to us by the government, after watching our agony and passion for cricket. We started playing on the roads. Now that was well going, we had a big space, long boundaries, and we were able to play with full-pitch bowling. It was again my honour of breaking the fourth and fifth windowpane. The fifth stroke was so hardly and blindly hit that the glass was shattered in innumerable pieces, some falling into the house and some outside. This resulted in sacrificing my cricket bat for halal to the house owner. The anger of the house owner was so immense that we fled leaving all our cricket kit there itself. We lost our three new wooden stumps, two bats and three tennis balls. One of our younger players also lost his new pair of floaters in the attempt of fleeing. That poor guy was just removing the dirt from them while waiting in the resting area.

Then the sixth and the last stadium was on the other side of road. Same things happened. We weren't mature enough to learn from the history and it repeated itself almost 6 times, this was the sixth one. One of my friend and me distributed the responsibility of hitting the belly of a mid 40s women and breaking a windowpane respectively. That was the time when we felt like the societians would commit a satyagraha for us to quit playing cricket. The agony of that women was immense as the ball we were using that time was a plastic one. We fled as usual, and the news reached our parents. Most of us were beaten up by our mums or dads as our parents were unwilling to pay the expenditure of replacing the windowpanes.

Finally we were granted a legal permission to use the terrace stadium as my friend's father had fixed the roof with new cement plaster.