Not-out man: An ode to Shivnarine Chanderpaul

There is a SPORTSTAR poster on the wall in my hostel room, wedged between Federer playing one of those gorgeous one-handed backhands of his and the Little Master guffawing during a breather at a training session. The subject of this one – dated 2nd May, 2012 – is a man in a roomy helmet and what seem like two black strips of war paint under his eyes, watching the ball he has just cut square of the wicket. He does not command the superlatives that are normally associated with the men on the posters on either side of his – words like sublime, perfect, magical, legend. Many would be quick to say that he does not live up to the moniker of the Hindu deity he is named after. Shivnarine Chanderpaul might be no Destroyer, but he is right up there in my personal pantheon of greats.

Prima facie, he makes for a strange choice, for I have always been one schooled in the long and glorious tradition of the orthodox. Feet at a distance from each other, firmly planted in imaginary parallel lines, and a straight bat; that is how I was asked to bat as an impressionable seven year old, and that is how I still do, on the infrequent occasions that I choose to publicly expose my absolute lack of talent and on the frequent occasions that I privately play out my walking-in-at-number-four-and-saving-a-Test fantasies when my room-mates are away. The oddity of his feet all over the place and his sideways bat caught my attention, and I asked my father why he was allowed to bat like that. I don’t remember his answer, but what I do know is that every time there was Cable & Wireless Test cricket in the Caribbean, I’d pray for the Windies top order to fall early so that I could watch Shiv bat a few overs before my bedtime.

I watched a lot more of Shiv as I grew older, and every time, I was inexplicably drawn to the incongruity of it all. The man was born to cut, nudge, shuffle and paddle. Still, he got the runs. He stayed there long after the flame of Lara’s flamboyance had been extinguished as soon as it had been lit, long after the languorous Hooper had walked back to the dressing room after displaying his entire repertoire of how to play the ball late. I’m not the kind of fanatic who remembers innings by date, the kind who can tell you where he got his hundreds and against whom. I hobble around using images as crutches, and in my imagination, a Test match in the Carribean is always associated with Chanderpaul chipping away, nudging one down leg and scampering for a single, a thorn in the flesh of the visiting side.

Bony little Shiv, he has always come across as someone who works hard on his game, the kind of guy who’ll go home and obsess over every chink in the armour, and even invent some in the process. Effortless is not an adjective one would associate with Shiv, and it sure hasn’t been easy for him. Growing up as a fisherman’s son in the outskirts of Georgetown in Guyana, where race has never been something to be just glossed over, Shiv was the first East Indian to play for the Windies in a long time. Until I read Rahul Bhattacharya’s lyrical The Sly Company of People Who Care recently, I’d thought of Shiv purely in cricketing terms. Now, the checkered  history of the coolies (indentured labourers from India who made Guyana their home – they are referred to as East Indians) in Guyana provides a somewhat distracting backdrop every time Shiv and his unique talents come up for consideration. Now I somehow understand why he feels the need to be there, to keep at it until someone tells him to go home because it is getting late. Jamaica and Trinidad can keep the flamboyance; let the Guyanese embrace defiance and doggedness.

He is a rather divisive character in cricketing terms. Some extol his selflessness, others condemn his selfishness. In this one way, he is much like Lara – but there was never a question mark over the Prince’s technique, over his genius. Shiv’s early career was marked by allegations that he was a hypochondriac until they finally removed a floating bone from his foot at the turn of the millennium. From there on, he has hardly let up, his current status as the 8th highest run-getter in Test cricket’s history bearing ample testimony to his consistency and staying power. Like that other champion of defiance, he was often thought of, and still is, as unsuited to excelling in the limited overs format of the game. Like Rahul Dravid, the statistics say a different story. He is the second highest run getter for the Windies with an average of above 40. He had a rather unremarkable stint in his first and only IPL, playing only three matches in the inaugural season in 2008 with the Royal Challengers Bangalore. But he has been plying his trade across the border in the Bangladesh Premier League for the last couple of years.

The prolific statistics aside, it is hard to put one’s finger on what it is that makes us want to watch Shiv Chanderpaul bat, grinding out another one of those match-saving innings while everything around him crumbles. As one given to seeking metaphor in sport, I’ll venture to say that watching Shiv bat reminds us of the battle that is the business of living itself. What most of us, who are mere spokes in the wheels of mediocrity, are striving for is not something as grand as happiness or sorrow, but survival itself. We, the unblessed, who can never be the sportsmen or the writers or the business tycoons we want to be, come to think of Shiv as playing for us – and we come together to celebrate the lack of his elegance, the lack of our elegance. To the aesthetes and the talented, whom we watch from behind the bars of the prison in which our ordinariness has us incarcerated, Shiv seems to be speaking for us. He seems to be saying – we seem to be saying – you can keep your art, we will survive to die another day.