Time For Some Gully Cricket!

There's a general tendency among people taking to a particular sport when it's at its pinnacle or is in news for some exploits by any sportsperson. Roger Federer displays his silken touch on the court, the Tennis courts are full from the very next day; Steven Gerrard scores a scorcher, guys start searching for their studs and Club memorabilia; Sachin displays his vintage self, and the ground is packed to the hilt with a pool of white-shirts! I'm no different. Be it Tennis, Cricket, Badminton or Football (I fail at it miserably, so I limit myself to just dribbling the ball) - never have I missed a chance to try my hand at them. After the recent exploits in the world of cricket, more importantly for The Men in Blue, who're basking in a Purple Patch (the phrase I mean!) currently, it’s was time to revisit those days which were solely reserved for playing gully cricket! :-D Now, it’s been almost three years since I held a bat in my hand and played the game, and today - early Sunday morning, it was back to the basics than to the bed! The amount of space in our Society to play Cricket in is quite meagre, but then, that's where lies the essence of gully cricket, doesn't it? And when we were still young, innocent kids, the entire compound got together to play. I learned how to play the game here, right in front of my house, and yesterday, I walked down memory lane again. I brought a tennis ball (we never ever BOUGHT a ball, I was a 'provider' of the same during those times too :-P) and dusted my old bat and coaxed my Chaddi-Buddies to abandon their tasks and join me in the memory-lane. We started playing the all-time hit form of the game - 'Ek Tappa Out'! We played for nearly three hours...with old pals chipping in. Déjà vu! It was like staging a old-pals-reunion on our 'Cricket-field'. So much so that the ajji-ajobas, returning from their morning-walks, were quite dumbstruck seeing all the 'kids' play with the same élan, as they once used to do (Sigh! Nostalgic I'm) I had almost forgotten the quirky little things like calling out “Ball, please!” to passers by, whenever the ball went out of the gate and on to the main road; the common "Aaahhs!” whenever the ball missed the bat; refusing to give up my wicket unless there was hard evidence that the ball had hit the makeshift wicket; running behind the ball trying to prevent it from reaching the other end of the compound for a boundary (more importantly, not letting it bounce into the garden of one of our own 'Joshi kaku' :-P) and all the other funny little things that kids do when they play cricket. We reminisced about the time when cricket in the gully was a major event - kids from all over the neighborhood joining us, having Inter-Society matches... We once had installed a 60-Watt bulb through some very ingenious engineering and played through the night - our very own version of floodlight cricket! :-D Oh, those were the days!