by Arunabha Sengupta
25 June 1983.
Time had frozen in mid-air, crystallised into tantalising standstill. The 25,000 who had flocked to Lord’s for the Prudential Cup Final saw the ball swirling in the air, making for the great open spaces in the outfield. Hearts thudded in tense unison — no matter which team one rooted for.
For the millions of Indians back home, many bleary eyed due to the late hour, glued to this novelty of live telecast from the Ole Blighty, there were pangs of apprehension. Even as the ball hovered in the air, there remained the threat of the microwave link going down yet again, and the images from Lord’s giving way to file-shots of a suit-clad Mohammad Rafi singing his evergreen hits in a concert.
The score was 57 for 2, and Viv Richards had raced to 33. As he had tucked into the Indian bowling with gusto, the puny target of 184 had looked just about an hour away. Sandhu had been hooked for four, Kapil driven through the off and flicked past square-leg. Madan Lal’s innocuous offerings had been attacked with ominous panache. Multiple drives had scorched across the turf.
Skipper Kapil Dev had stood there at mid-wicket, most of the on side full of wide open spaces. Planned? One is not sure. Madan Lal had proceeded to bounce and Richards had swivelled and pulled. He had not got it off the middle, but the ball was anyway heading for the vast stretches of no-man’s land in the country. Richards called for two, and Desmond Haynes, running for captain Clive Lloyd, responded. The television camera focused on the deep-midwicket fence, with the man at deep square-leg running around.
And then the stadium erupted. Somehow Kapil had run back from his position, eating up the distance with long, lithe, athletic strides. The long arms had been extended, the eyes never left the ball. After spending what seemed to be aeons in the air, the cherry had come searing down and landed in the palms of the great man.
Viv Richards walked back, dismissed for 33, which we now know was scored in just 28 balls. Back in those days, commentators were still fitting the Test match-measurement of minutes to gauge the quickness of the cameo. The 42 minutes had hinted at a swift and majestic trot to the third World Cup in a row.
Now, with the score 57 for 3 and Lloyd limping with a strained groin, the question of their win was not so rhetoric any more. The rank outsiders who had started the tournament with one win in the previous two editions, at odds of 66 to 1, were in with a definite chance.
It had been a Kapil Dev miracle that had hauled India out of desperate straits at 17 for 5 against Zimbabwe, and had breathed the spirit of indomitability into the team. Now, it was this second Kapil miracle that brought them right back into the reckoning.
It is not too much of a stretch to say that the catch turned the tide of the final and won them the Cup.
India —a nation that loves its fairy tales and mythology. They like to create them out of thin parochial air. Stories about brave helmet-less men crushing fearsome fast bowlers in their backyard, of magical spinners weaving mysterious webs around the greatest of batsmen in distant lands, of stylish artists always responding like medieval knights to calls of crisis, of leaders with esoteric powers changing the complexion of matches by waving their hands from mid-off. Most often the facts have to be stretched, twisted, disfigured, failures ignored, figures distrusted as science is by religious zealots, statistics shoved aside and palpable counter-evidence shouted down in a chorus of tribal veneration — to ensure that miracles find their way into mass memory and fossilise there into history. We are much more at home with word of mouth wonders than counter-intuitive statistics, unflattering scorecards and cold hard facts. Nostalgia is a drug to us and its deluge and overdose can often turn putrid and nauseating for the bit more fact-oriented.
However, this was a miracle that needed no embellishment. The Cup was plucked out of thin air by a magic hand, almost like the catch that Kapil Dev took that day.
37 years of retelling has not been really able to contort the facts into unrecognisably fantastic, turn retelling revoltingly jarring. It still manages to remain on the right side of the irritation threshold.
Because it was already unrecognisably fantastic as it happened. It was indeed a fairy tale, but a real one.