Rahul Bhattacharya has done it again. The Indian cricket writer and novelist, who was so intrigued by our country during a cricket tour by India that he returned to spend a year among us and wrote The Sly Company of People Who Care (2011), has now written for the November edition of the new online magazine, The Cricket Monthly, a wonderful tribute to one of our favourite native sons, Shivnarine Chanderpaul.
Readers will remember The Sly Company as a travelogue cum novel, through which Mr Bhattacharya held a mirror up to Guyana and depicted, more fondly than not, some of the more colourful elements of our society, warts and all. Now, in his article, ‘Shiv on the Shore,’ with his eye already accustomed to the simple beauty of Guyanese life and his ear finely attuned to our Creolese cadences, he paints a vivid, fascinating and sympathetic portrait of the inelegant but brilliant artist as a young man, as a father and now, at 40, the senior West Indies Test batsman.
The story is told of the nurturing by father, Khemraj, Uncle Munilal and the village of Unity; the support of Georgetown Cricket Club president, the late Neil Singh, gym owner Rudy Persaud and the Jodha family of Regent Street; the kindness of the late Lester ‘Uncle Les’ Armagoon, the Trinidadian businessman who became famous for following the West Indies on tour around the world; the tutoring of Andaiye; the counsel of teammates Jimmy Adams and Carl Hooper; and the physical conditioning of former West Indies physiotherapist Steven Partridge. To all, Shivnarine Chanderpaul is immensely grateful for the part they played in his rise to the top of his craft.
The narrative traces, mainly through anecdotes that would resonate with most Guyanese for the manner of their telling and their seeming familiarity, the development of the young cricketer and his almost fairytale debut against England at his beloved home ground, Bourda, in 1994, in front of an adoring crowd; it relates his apprenticeship in a team in decline and his personal challenges along the way; it speaks of his strong religious faith and his belief in family; and, of course, it culminates in his emergence as the rock of West Indies batting and a true great of West Indies and world cricket. Throughout, we feel as if we are in the presence of a man who has not forgotten his humble origins and the people who helped him along the path of greatness. Indeed, one of the writer’s triumphs is that we even feel that we are in the company of ‘one of us,’ save for the subject’s exceptional feats of batsmanship.
As Mr Bhattacharya contemplates the life and career of Shivnarine Chanderpaul, he tells a tale of “West Indian community” and the attainment of “the West Indian maroon” as “a badge of ultimate honour, of highest cultural expression, an audition for a starring part in the Caribbean epic in which every man, woman and child from the vagrant on the street up to high office saw him and herself reflected.” The fact that this may no longer hold true for some of today’s players is not lost on the author, keen observer of our West Indian cricketing culture that he is.
Nonetheless, Mr Bhattacharya also recognises the “symbolic space in the West Indies” occupied by Mr Chanderpaul: “The great sportsperson, more so the great West Indian cricketer, is a cultural phenomenon. He imbibes from the essential character of his society and/or his sport, embodies some aspect of it, and breathes new inspiration into it. In his different avatars, Chanderpaul has come to symbolise the hope of precocious talent, of racial harmony, and finally a transcending resilience: all of which hold the promise, this is how far we can go.”
Mr Bhattacharya makes no effort to disguise his admiration and the end result is something very much akin to what older readers would remember as a Boys’ Own story, the stuff of schoolboy dreams made real in the heroic epic of the man known variously and simply as Shiv, Chandra, Chanders and, of course, Tiger.
At the same time, Mr Bhattacharya manages expertly to convey some of the charm and constraints of Guyanese life in the 1980s and early 1990s, practically a bygone age. Moreover, ‘Shiv on the Shore’ is arguably a tighter, better written work than The Sly Company, perhaps because its subject is himself so compelling in his humanity and humility. Where The Sly Company perhaps suffered from offering sketches of almost picaresque characters, this piece presents a masterful narrative and a fully drawn portrait of an authentic Guyanese hero, “a genius developed from scarcity,” as the writer so superbly puts it, which inspires, warms the heart and may even leave some readers teary-eyed.
