Wijedasa Gamini Karunasena, takes immense pride in the initials of his name, which were also those of the first great cricketer, the legendary WG Grace. Karunasena is a semi-retired cricket journalist, but truth to be said, he is subsumed by that strange ailment that affects many from the former colonies of the British Empire. He is a Cricket Tragic, a phrase that if you have to ask for the meaning of, you certainly are not deserving of. Not that you would want to be one either, perhaps. WG, for one, has named his son Garfield, after Garfield Sobers, the greatest all-round cricketer there has ever been.
WG’s has a lifetime of watching cricket in Sri Lanka, local, national and international. And a lifetime of heavy drinking of cheap local liquor. He is one of those cantankerous, persnickety old men who are living through a life of reluctant retirement and general dissatisfaction — whose lives haven’t exactly amounted to nothing, but neither have they eventually added up to much of what they had envisioned. And now it is too late.
And it is too late for WG Karunasena. He has a year more to live if he continues with the alcohol abuse. Maybe a couple more if he cuts down to two pegs a day. And as any self-respecting journalist knows, “There is nothing that is more inspiring than one solid deadline”.
WG decides to leave behind something for posterity. He knows that sports matter. As he says — “In 30 years, the world will not care about how I lived… But in a 100 years, Bulgarians will still talk of Letchkov and how he expelled the mighty Germans from the 1994 World Cup with a simple header.” He decides to do a documentary on Sri Lankan cricket.
He will track down the enigma that was Pradeep Mathew, the left-arm (and sometimes ambidextrous) mystery spinner who was perhaps the greatest exponent of spin bowling of all time. He has played a couple of Tests and One-day Internationals for Sri Lanka, performed none too badly, and then just disappeared from the team and from the public eye. Somehow, nobody seems to mention him at all anymore — it was as if he did not exist. Even his name and his stellar records have been carefully scrubbed off the score-books and public records.
Why was he dropped? Was it merely because he was Tamil, a minority in the war-torn isles? Was is because he had had a fight against authority figures? Was it because he fixed matches? Or is there something more mysterious that lies in wait?
Thus starts perhaps the greatest novel on sports that has come out of our subcontinent. Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew by Shehan Karunatilaka is expansive like a glorious Gower cover drive, bright and joyous like a Sehwag flash above extra cover, and yet, somehow, has the gravitas of a steady-the-ship Kumar Sangakkara innings in a tricky track against excellent bowling. It is a must-read. Very highly recommended.
Shom Biswas
Twitter@spinstripe
The writer is a business development executive in Hyderabad