SURIYAWAN (BHADOHI): Suriyawan is not a town that can be said to have sports in its genes. With no playground worth the name, only two schools for its less than 2,000 inhabitants and no pedigree, it can hardly qualify to be the cradle of sportsmen.
Rather, with its haphazardly built two and three-storey houses, many of them with unplastered walls, and overhead electricity wires strung dangerously close to balconies, it bears clear stamp of a town bereft of prosperity.
Yet, it has recently carved out a name for itself on the world map. Chasing his cricketing dreams, a 10-year-old boy from this back of the beyond town in eastern Uttar Pradesh reached Mumbai seven years ago and has now smashed his way into record books.
As the mandarins of the game sit up and take notice, his lower-middle-class family and his hometown cannot contain their excitement.
Soon after Yashasvi Jaiswal, now 17, emerged as the hottest new star on Mumbai’s cricketing horizon with his knock of 203 against Jharkhand in the Vijay Hazare Trophy on Wednesday, giant hoardings hailing the son of the soil came up across Suriyawan. ‘Suriyawan ke lal, Yashasvi kaa kamaal… One-day mein ek aur dohra shatak (Suriyawan’s son Yashasvi’s feat…One more double ton in a one-day match)’ reads a hoarding put up by the BPMG Public School, where Yashasvi had studied for some time.
It congratulates the teenager for his historic knock which made him the youngest player in the world to hit a List-A double century.
A day later, when this newspaper caught up with his overjoyed father Bhupendra Jaiswal, there was a beeline of neighbours and other residents to narrate the tales of Yashasvi’s feats at local dusty grounds before he left for Mumbai.
After all, it’s not every day that they get a chance to bask in the glory of a local boy.
At his small paint-cum hardware shop, named after his elder son Tejasvi, the proud father has prominently displayed a poster on Yashasvi’s latest triumph, replacing an old one which talked about his double accomplishment of an unbeaten 319 and 13/99 in the Giles Shield school match in January 2014, when he was just 12.
About 100 metres away is the single-storey house where the family lives. With both sons following cricket pursuits in Mumbai and Delhi — where Tejasvi is training at Madan Lal Academy — and elder daughter married, Bhupendra lives here with his wife Kanchan and younger daughter, a teacher. The house has four rooms and one has to climb a few steps to enter. The outer walls aren’t even plastered.
But a small patch of land in front of the house was where Bhupendra’s two sons honed their cricketing skills before they moved to the metros to pursue their dreams. Bhupendra turned this piece of land into a mini cricket ground and installed halogen lights so that his sons could practise till late. So, cricket it was from dawn till well beyond dusk for the two brothers, five years apart in age.
“At 5, when children usually have to be supervised even when they brush their teeth, Yashasvi would wake up and get ready for practice before sunrise without bothering me,” says his mother as she emotionally talks about her son’s passion for the game.
Neighbours eagerly testify to that. “Yashasvi was not more than five when he used to face leather balls from grown-up bowlers,” says Neeraj Kumar, a neighbour. Bhupendra would often leave his shop unattended to oversee his sons practise.
Nicknamed Guddan, he was himself an all-rounder with some reputation in the district in his younger days. In winters, when local clubs in Bhadohi would play matches, Guddan would be a terror for rival batsmen and earned the sobriquet of ‘Zahar Khan’ for his ‘poisonous’, unplayable swings.
“Every season, our team would win 95 per cent of local tournaments, thanks to Guddan,” says Rakesh Kumar. With no mentor or guiding light, nor the resources, to reach the next level, his heroics remained confined to Bhadohi. But the devoted father wasn’t ready to see the talent of his sons go wasted.
Send me to Mumbai, I will play like Sachin, Yashasvi told father
YASHASVI’S reputation in local tournaments was matching his father’s; he was destroying bowlers more than double his age. “I soon realised that district tournaments are not his destination,” Bhupendra recalls. The turning point came in 2012, when Yashaswi was not even 10. One day, while watching Sachin Tendulkar play, the father just prodded him, “Watch how he plays”.
Yashasvi said, “Mujhe bhi Mumbai bhej do, main bhi aisa hi kheloonga (Send me to Mumbai, I will also play like him).”
The boy’s resolve helped Bhupendra take a quick decision. A few weeks later, the father and son were on a train to Mumbai. Their only acquaintance in the city was Bhupendra’s cousin running a bakery shop. Their destination was the fabled Azad Maidan.
“I thought he would stay around and join any of the coaches imparting training there,” Bhupendra says.
With a family of six to support in his meager income, Bhupendra couldn’t stay long with his son there, nor could he do much financially for Yashasvi. This was the beginning of the young boy’s struggles in the city. How he overcame them with his talent and grit is a story that’s now well-known. Yashasvi had to move from his uncle’s one-room chawl to a dairy, which he left for skipping his ‘cleaning’ assignment because of cricket practice.
This was a blessing in disguise as he landed at Azad Maidan. There were tents at Azad Maidan where groundsmen used to live. His uncle requested the owner of Muslim United Club, which owned those tents, to allow the boy to stay at one of those tents. He agreed on the condition that Yashasvi would play for the club and score century in the next league match.
That was easy for the young boy and the Azad Maidan tents were his home for the next three years. Surviving by selling paani-puri and doing other odd jobs while continuing with his game, luck shone on Yashasvi when Jwala Singh took him under his wings after his 319-run knock in the school match.
Many years ago, Singh had also come from Gorakhpur in UP to Mumbai as a 13-year-old to make it big and ended up finding his destiny in cricket coaching. In Yashasvi he saw a spark and the teenager not only became part of Singh’s academy, but also started staying with his family.
Since then, the budding cricketer has showed remarkable progress by leaps and bounds, leading up to a stellar start with two centuries and a double ton and in a fivematch List-A career.