In Belfast this week, men with measuring tapes have been solving a small construction problem. India needed a second dressing room. Not the usual common where the great professionals uncover their utensils and discuss their hammers, but different, because one of the Indian cricketer has brought to Ireland with fifteen years, and the law takes small thoughts to share the change of place with big men.So he built a room for him. Stop there, because that’s the whole story of being pressed into being a carpenter. The richest sports organization has ordered a special room for a young man who has not chosen yet. The clothes are being sewn while the selectors are still, behind closed doors, debating whether the coronation should happen at all. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, from Tajpur in Bihar’s Mithila district, may or may not make his debut for India against Ireland tomorrow. He could go out and become, at the age of fifteen, the last man to play for India, demoting Tendulkar to second place in the history that dates back to 1989, when the boy’s parents were still children. Or he can sit in his fancy new room and watch, because the selectors will have done the cool math and decided that the side that just won the T20 World Cup didn’t want to mess up quickly on a damp Belfast evening. Both are true at the same time, and holding both is the only honest way to look at him.Think about what he is. The IPL numbers read like mistakes: 776 runs, a strike rate of 237, Gayle’s record of sixes in a season broken by a child who wasn’t even alive when the league started. Cricket men, who are technically not averse to hyperbole, have reached for a term that is often confined to them. The bat speed was almost invisible. Sobers photo pushback. Great men who have dedicated their lives to left-handed bowling are, in a word, lovely, funny and helpless. This is not the language of promises. It is the language of arrival.
Vaibhav Sooryavanshi with the Player of the Match trophy after a blast of 94 in the final Tri-Nation Series in Sri Lanka. (Photo: BCCI)
And yet, cricket is not a meritocracy as the posters promote; it’s a complicated and mathematical meritocracy. India’s opening with Sanju Samson is Abhishek Sharmawhich are not problems to be solved but men who have found their place, one of them the Player of the tournament of India has just won. Shreyas Iyer, the new captain, wants a middleman. Mathematics has no seat left. To put down a prodigy you have to put down a man who has done nothing wrong except to be quiet, and there is something cruel about how success is quietly incomplete when a prodigy enters.This is the part that dream entrepreneurs leave behind. We like to keep our talent stories low-key, gathering pace: small town, bat, notes, inevitable blue jersey, cue ropes. But the highlight of Sooryavanshi week is not inevitable. It’s an argument. He’s at once too good to get out and too confusing to get in, and the way the controversy unfolds will tell us less about him than about the people holding the pen on the team sheet. The boy has done his part. He, in the only sentence that the chairman of the selectors can oversee, chose himself. What remains is that the authorities have the power to act, or wait, in tact, for a limited time against a sympathetic enemy.I find that I don’t really care how it goes. If he plays and controls Ireland’s attack, we will have seen something. If he waits, the room he built will work for a few days, and the record will keep, just like records do. What I mean is the manipulation into myth, the reduction of a strange and irreplaceable moment into the common water of a dream come true.A boy from Bihar has threatened a group to build a room for him. Whether they are allowed to be in it tomorrow, in the end, a smaller question than the one whose arrival has already answered: that the next one of them, the quick-small-small one that we promise, is not coming. Here it is, the age of fifteen, fixed, waiting on the idea that should have been under it.