A True Friend

CR Chandran

By V Ramnarayan

“Why don’t you play for us, as anyway you are not a regular in the full SBI Hyderabad eleven?” The man who put this question to me was the captain of the SBI Secunderabad team, a poor cousin of the star-studded ‘first XI.’  I am not sure of my facts 48 years after this conversation took place, but I think all rounder Srinivas was the captain, and the team also had military medium pacer Srinivasan in the team. CR Chandran, a talented medium pacer all rounder, a guest player, was the star of the team. This was a couple of years before Andhra Bank started recruiting cricketers, and Chandran joined them.

Chandran and I hit it off straightaway, one reason perhaps being that I am called Chandran at home. We were to become Ranji Trophy teammates in later years, and in a minority of two as vegetarians amidst a bunch of carnivores. He was a great fan of Amitabh Bachhan, and styled his hair and wore his clothes and shoes to imitate his hero, but I found him to resemble Vinod Khanna much more, especially after he started wearing glasses to correct his myopia. He was a natural ball player, an attacking opening batsman who loved to entertain, to risk his wicket just to set the spectator’s blood racing. A showman, in short. He was also a more than useful medium pacer who became quite an expert swing bowler in time. He had surprisingly small hands, which meant he frequently injured them batting or fielding. Towards the end of his twenties, he started putting on weight, but when I first met him, he was quite an athlete. Off the field, he was a gentle person, soft spoken and almost introverted. With close friends, he enjoyed a good joke, but rarely laughed out loud, doing so silently with his whole body, shoulders heaving. He was the perfect companion of an evening, especially when accompanied by Mr McDowell. He was a smoker, too, like many of us misguided cricketers of the era.

The late Murtuza Ali Baig, an Oxford Blue and Abbas Ali Baig’s younger brother, was Manager, Personal Banking Division, at SBI Secunderabad, where I was serving part of my training period in the bank. Baig knew me as the rather dispensable bit player in the bank’s first XI, and had no hesitation in allowing me to turn out for the B team, which was a motley assortment of Secunderabad staff plus guest players like Chandran.

Our first match that season was against Nizam College, which included the likes of K Jayantilal and Abdul Jabbar. By this time, Chandran and I were thick as thieves, and I wagered him I would get Jayanti’s wicket. I won that bet dismissing the former India opener quite cheaply, and even started dreaming of routing the rest of the college XI. Unfortunately, the lefthanded Jabbar had other ideas, and I have never forgiven him for that. He launched a savage attack against our meagre bowling, scoring 176 in about 150 balls, until, leg-weary and demoralised, we were ready to plead for mercy.  

As I said earlier, Chandran joined Andhra Bank, and I continued in SBI for four or five more years, achieved belated recognition, and became a national level player, things really looking up for me. But, as Bertie Wooster repeatedly assures you, fate has this nasty habit of having a go at you when you least expect it. My boss and his boss took an intense dislike to my face, and launched a merry campaign of psychological harassment against me. Picture this scenario: Superboss wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, and reads the gloomy news of the Prime Minister’s disappointment with his bank’s progress in her 20-point Economic Programme and the unreasonable resistance of unpatriotic Indians to such noble measures as nasbandi and slum demolition, and asks himself, ‘What can I do to brighten my day today?’ Two cups of tea later, he has a brainwave, and calls his underling, the Boss. “I say, when did you last send a nasty memo to that cricketer blighter Ramnarayan? Last week? No, no, this won’t do at all. Draft a juicy one today, no two, better still let’s send him three today. And if and when he replies, fling counter no. 123 at him. Use words like unsatisfactory and unacceptable. What, spelling? Ask your steno Venkateswarlu. Spelling was never my strong point.” 

This game went on for a year, and wonder of wonders, miserable as I was, I could do nothing wrong in cricket. My first season in first class cricket was quite successful, and with help from my all rounder friend Jyotiprasad and his boss CS Shamlal, I joined Andhra Bank as a senior officer after answering a newspaper advertisement. Amazingly, I reported for duty, not at the office, but at the Osmania University ground, where the bank’s team was playing a visiting Ceylon Tobacco Board XI, which had quite a few Sri Lanka players in its line-up. In a fairytale debut, I took eight wickets that day.

The match was made equally memorable by our batsmen, openers Chandran and Inder Raj, both champion hookers (in a strictly cricketing sense) and pullers, not to mention their abilty to drive on the up, and devil-may-care attitude to batting. One of the visitors' new ball bowlers, Ranjan Gunatilleke, was genuinely quick, but ‘Inder and Chander’ were unstoppable.  They hammered him and the other bowlers including left arm spinner Arjuna Ranasinghe to all parts of the ground, taking advantage of the pace and bounce of the matting wicket.

Chandran and I met every day for the next five years, as we worked in the same department of the bank in its Central Office. Both of us reported to Shamlal, who managed the affairs of the bank’s cricket team, one of the strongest in our part of the world. Our work kept us busy, but the load was manageable, and we could leave for net practice at 3 pm. We also enjoyed doing crossword puzzles together and, with his husky voice, Chandran entertained the cricket team with a very decent imitation of John Arlott’s commentary.

We were both involved in two traumatic experiences connected to cricket. In the first of them, we were both on the same side, and Chandran’s team spirit came to the fore. Andhra Bank was given entry into the Moin-ud-Dowla Gold Cup, but with the proviso that we must field four Test players. Our management was very keen on participation, but the players were not, as it would mean dropping four of our regular players. Vijay Paul was our captain in the absence of our only Test player M Narasimha Rao, away playing league cricket in the UK. Our protests went unheard, and the management went ahead and invited S Venkataraghavan, Aunshuman Gaekwad, Surinder Amarnath, Duleep Mendis and non-Test cricketer Ved Raj to turn out for us. The whole experience was eminently forgettable, and Chandran, the vice-captain, dropped himself. I tried my best to dissuade him, offering to stand down myself, but Chandran convinced me otherwise. He warned me that as an off spinner, I could easily be misunderstood to be objecting to India off spinner Venkat’s appointment as captain. It was one of the most wretched days in our cricket, with plots and sub plots being hatched against a team merely wanting to play cricket.

The whole mega plan bombed. Andhra Bank collapsed for 136, with the last wicket partnership the highest in the innings (D Meher Baba 38, V Ramnarayan 18 not out). Angry and unhappy, I batted beyond my ability, especially determined not to lose my wicket to off spinner Shivlal Yadav, soon to play for India, and eventually replace me in the Hyderabad team—in that order! In the course of that innings, I swept Shivlal hard on to short leg L Rajan’s knee, rendering him hors’ d’ combat for the rest of the match. Rajan was replaced at the top of the batting order by skipper P Krishnamurti who hammered us for 126 thrilling runs. I bowled well without luck, but the long and the short of the story was that we got thrashed by a raw young side.

Not long afterwards, I was thrust right into the middle of a huge, unsavoury fight between players and the administration, and this time, Chandran was an establishment man, and I was on the players’ side. Very briefly, the whole Hyderabad team was dropped on the morning of a match against Mafatlal XI in the Moin-ud-Dowla Gold Cup (that tournament again), and a brand new team led by Chandran took the field on the opening day. We were all banned from playing any cricket until further notice, and the events that followed the ban were straight out of a political thriller. I am not going into the details now, but the saddest part of it all was that my ‘best friends’ Krishnamurti and Chandran and I took up adversarial positions. I was angry with myself for things I said in the heat of the moment, but all’s well that ends well, with my friends showing great magnanimity, and we hugged and made up soon afterwards. I could never have forgiven myself if that had not happened, for neither Chandran nor Murti lived much longer.