Goyal Intercity is your typical middle-class apartment in your typical Indian urban centre. It could have been in Mumbai or New Delhi or Bengaluru but cosmic machinations somehow chose to have it spring up in Ahmedabad. There are the pleasantly courteous security guards, that one elderly resident who’s always staring suspiciously at you and workers, smeared in paint from head to toe, trooping in to finish the job on that one section that is always being renovated at such apartments. A couple of kids, bat, ball and a stack of tyres for wickets, complete the scene. Typical, your brain whispers.
One of the kids musters whatever run-up the limited space can afford him and the other one shows impressive technique to play it with extremely soft hands, but the yellow-brown walls are probably not impressed. They, like every conglomeration of middle-class families in an Indian city, have seen a lot of cricket. These two kids, and the three or four others who will join them later in the day, are far from the first cricket gang to come together within these walls.
This story concerns someone from another such gang who once played on that same concrete. They first bonded over a frenzied analysis of India’s defeat of Pakistan in the 2003 World Cup and then spent the next 5-6 years of their life playing cricket here, breaking windows and windshields. They’re all adults now and have their respective careers to tend to, but still get together for sessions of FIFA on PlayStation when time permits.
Of them, Preet Mehta now works for an IT company while his brother Meet runs his own factory. Another brother Jeet is a doctor. Sunny Bhatia is a real estate agent while Jilai Shah is a jeweler. The last one plays cricket for a living. He goes by the name of Jasprit Bumrah. Like the apartment that he grew up in, Bumrah, at first glance, seems typical. That harmless vibe he exudes, his quirky run-up and quirkier action, how many times over the years have we seen that? Typical Indian military medium!
Then the ball whizzes past before you could finish rolling your eyes and finds that half-a-millimetre between the batsman’s toes and his bat and sends a stump flying. And your brain screams: “what the hell!”
Born to bowl
There’s a common theme to the answers when you ask someone in Ahmedabad about Bumrah. “Most people don’t even know he is from Ahmedabad,” they say. “They think he’s from Mumbai.”Indeed, the world stumbled upon Bumrah when he turned up for Mumbai Indians. His IPL debut in 2013 against Bangalore, when he took three wickets amidst a Chris Gayle blitzkrieg, is now more or less accepted as the moment of genesis.
But Jasprit Jasbirsingh Bumrah wasn’t made in Mumbai. Bits and pieces of whatever made him are still scattered all across Ahmedabad, on those invisible rubber ball marks at the parking lot of his childhood flat, in those stories of broken wickets at the Nirman High School where he once studied, and at the Motera Stadium where his spirit was nearly broken by selectors who insisted on squinting past the obvious.
Perhaps, chasing these bits and pieces is a futile task for you’re never going to decipher Bumrah with them. He is what happens when God gets distracted while engaged in the act of creation. Nobody, even kids who he played with when he was ten, remember a time when he wasn’t bowling freakishly fast.
“We used to take turns at batting; when one kid got out, another got the turn to bat,” says Preet Mehta, one of his childhood friends. “But Jasprit never wanted to bat. He would bowl and bowl for hours and hours. His action then was a lot simpler but he used to be as fast. There were times when he would break tail lights of cars with a rubber ball!
“The first time we went for a cricket camp, in the vacations after eighth standard, the coach saw him bowl and sent him straight to play with the seniors.”Maybe hurling the ball really fast was subconscious release, for Bumrah’s childhood wasn’t ideal. It is well documented how, after his father passed away early, his mother, a schoolteacher, struggled to keep the family afloat. The adjectives that people use when describing him from back then have a dark, muted tone — introverted, shy, frustrated.
“He was always shy,” says Preet. “But once he started opening up, he would become the life of the party. He used to memorise these Bollywood dialogues. The funny ones, Rajpal Yadav or Paresh Rawal.”The gang at Goyal Intercity played together for a few years, taking on teams from other societies, playing into midnight under the glow of a solitary bulb and pleading with the occasional tenant who would refuse to return a ball hit into their balcony. But it played an important role in shaping Bumrah, both the cricketer and the man.
“This is the space that we had for a run-up,” Preet says, pointing to a stretch of concrete that could not have been longer than four or five steps. Maybe that explains his stunted approach to the crease. His action was a lot different from what we see these days but another anecdote sheds light on its evolution. Bumrah apparently used to love mimicking bowling actions. Mkhaya Ntini, Brett Lee, Shahid Afridi. Maybe his muscles never completely forgot a twitch from here, a twist from there. There’s one for his yorkers as well — apparently a young Bumrah used to aim for the floor skirting so as to not disturb his mother’s afternoon naps.
As for Bumrah the man, there is no better vindication of how Goyal Intercity raised him than the fact that he still lives there, in the same small flat that he shared with his mother and sister, back when he was just a kid who could bowl really fast.
Frustration, vindication
If something had gone differently on that fateful day, when the Gujarat selectors decided to pick an untested Bumrah for the 2013 Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy, he might so easily have ended up like Parth Shah, the wicketkeeper of his school team. Parth and Bumrah may have little in common now, apart from being in a couple of old team photos pasted on the notice board of the Nirman School. But once, they were travellers together in the same boat of insecurity and frustration, that almost every young cricketer in India is a passenger of, at some point.
Parth is now a clerk in a local bank and is so disillusioned with the game, that promised him much but gave him so very little, that he can’t bring himself to watch it. “Generally, I hate the sport. Eventually, when you don’t get selected, you have these things in your head,” he says, confessing that he did not see much of the World Cup. “Every six of us had the same dream but we knew that not everyone would make it. Eventually, people were going to have their dreams ended.”
Around 2012, Bumrah too thought he was one of them. His disillusionment with how his career was progressing had grown so much that he was considering quitting the game altogether and shifting to Canada. The state selectors were ignoring him, mostly because his stats weren’t that impressive. “By now, his reputation had spread and batsmen knew he was the danger man,” says Parth. “So they would try see him out and take risks against the bowler at the other end.”
“He was often very frustrated during this time,” says Arth Naik, another of his Nirman teammates. “He had quite the temper too. If we ended up dropping a catch off his bowling, he would get really frustrated.”Yet doubt was a malady that seemed to afflict only Bumrah for everyone else around him seemed convinced that the boy was headed somewhere.
His coaches at Nirman, Kishor Trivedi — father of former Rajasthan Royals bowler Siddharth — and Ketul Purohit both knew he was special. “When he first came to me, he was somewhat indisciplined,” Trivedi remembers. “His mother, who was vice-principal at Nirman, came and asked me what she was going to do with him, that he wasn’t doing well in his studies. I reassured her that if he sticks to practising properly, I could make him a state-level player at the very least.”
Purohit had a rather unique yardstick to measure the young Bumrah’s exceptional pace — balls per broken wickets. “He used to break wickets all the time,” he says. “I got so fed up of it that I got someone to carve three wickets out of really sturdy wood and I challenged him to break it. Thankfully, he couldn’t.”
For his teammates, there was a match that removed whatever doubts they harboured about his ability. In a clash against a visiting team from Rajasthan, Bumrah took five wickets in six balls, four of them in the same over. One of the opposing batsmen went back to the pavilion with a cracked rib. “He used to come to my house from time to time,” says Arth. “And my mother once told him that regardless of anyone else making it, he would definitely get somewhere in the cricketing world. She told him that one day, she would watch him on her TV. And now she does exactly that.”
Back in 2012, Bumrah seemed as far as he could from anybody’s television screen. His coach Purohit was talking up his protege to any state selector he came across but none seemed to be paying attention. With him on the edge of his wits, Bumrah found himself in the district team for a four-game tournament that was essentially trials for the state team.
“After 2-3 games of not getting updates from him, I called him up to see how he was doing,” says Purohit. “That was when I came to know that he wasn’t being picked in the starting eleven. I immediately talked to a selector I know, asked him to give the boy at least one chance to play. Jasprit ended up taking a lot of wickets and made the state team.”
There started a whirlwind six months that segued into the story that everyone is now familiar with. His exploits in the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy caught the eye of John Wright, then Mumbai Indians coach. A couple of weeks later, Bumrah, still six months away from his Ranji debut, had an IPL contract.
Less than three years after that, he would make his ODI and T20I debuts within a space of three days. And now, ICC’s ODI rankings proclaim him to be the best bowler in the world.Bumrah still has long to go. But for all we know, the boy who began on a patch of concrete in Ahmedabad might end up taking his place among the pantheon of cricketing greats.