1996. Eden Gardens. Kolkata. World Cup semi-final between India and Sri Lanka. In the run-up to the match, all talk centred on the exploits of Lankan opening pair of Sanath Jayasuriya and Romesh Kaluwitharna. The two, specifically Jayasuriya, had blown away the bowling attack of almost all opponents by audacious stroke play. Every Indian cricket fan—and, no doubt, the Indian team as revealed by Sanjay Manjrekar in his book Imperfect and quoted by author Chandresh Narayanan here - debated animatedly how to get rid of the two openers.
The two were dismissed in the opening overs without troubling the scorers much and this was celebrated by the audience and the Indian team as if India had won the World Cup itself. But India lost the match ignominiously with Jayasuriya taking the wicket of Sachin Tendulkar which led to crowd trouble and subsequent loss.
This long introduction was necessary as that match illustrated the aura of Jayasuriya and his impact on the cricketing world. For Indian fan more so as Jayasuriya’s favourite whipping team in the late nineties was India. So, when you pick up Narayanan’s biography of the Matara Mauler, you expect to read about what made Jayasuriya the cricketer he was and how he developed into the destroyer of bowling attacks around the world. Unfortunately, you get only disappointment. Apart from a single sentence repeated a number of times—‘Jayasuriya had powerful forearms because he used to climb coconut trees when he was a child’ -you get no other insight into the Lankan opener’s virtuosity.
What you get instead is recounting of the highlights of Jayasuriya’s career. So you know that in what game in what year Jayasuriya made the world notice him, where he hit a century, against which opposition he blossomed, etc. But you get no clue to the factors that led Jayasuriya to those heights. The early life—where normally the seeds of future are laid—is dealt with in a rather perfunctory way.
The left-hander opener’s on-pitch chemistry with the pint-sized Kaluwitharana—the partnership that changed the very way that one-day cricket was played earlier—finds meagre words; Arjuna Ranatunga’s role in helping Jayasuriya create a niche for himself just finds a mention; and, interplay between players of the world-conquering Lankan team finds no place at all.
To make matters worse, the narration moves up and down decades in such a chaotic way that at some places it becomes difficult to recollect what one had read a page earlier. Not only that, many events and descriptions are repeated through chapters making the muddle more muddled. The last three chapters are devoted to Jayasuriya’s political career and his small forays into the entertainment world. These pages do help the reader get an idea about how cricket and politics are enmeshed in the island nation. But this is somewhat interesting because a non-Lankan reader would have not known much about the politics of cricket in Lanka and Jayasuriya’s role in it.
These chapters though suffer from the same malaise that afflicts the cricketing section, they seem to have been put on paper in bullet points and then expanded later. The best part of the book is the poem right at the beginning of the book, titled ‘The Cyclone Sanath’ by Renuka. It is a beautiful poem that describes the Matara Mauler’s cricketing exploits in Singapore. But it too hangs as a free strand and is placed under no context; the author does not even explain who is Renuka, whose poem spreads over the first five pages of the book. Therein lies the tale!