Pataudi- Nawab of Cricket

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Tiger Pataudi taught me to keep my eye on the ball. I must have been nine or ten, and it was at a match in Bangalore's Central College ground. I was there more than an hour before the start, and there wasn't much of a crowd as the players came out to warm up. As Tiger walked past, I tentatively opened my autograph book, and to my surprise he signed in it. Surprise because an earlier attempt to get a player's signature had failed.

Then he asked a couple of us boys to come to the field to take some catches. Thanking all the gods whose names I could remember and in particular an uncle who had provided the pass close to the dressing room, I ran out. We stood a few metres away as Tiger threw the ball to us in turn. We held the gentle catches. And then he looked up as if making to throw the ball in the air. So did I. But it was a trick; Tiger threw the ball at the same, low, gentle trajectory, and by following his head rather than the ball, I dropped the catch.

'Watch the ball, watch the ball.' He smiled. Everything else that happened that day and the next several days was wiped out from my mind. Already a cricket fan, I was now cricket obsessive. If you paid a psychoanalyst enough, he might even say that that was the moment when my future career as a cricket writer was decided. Perhaps.

Everybody, even those who didn't know him (perhaps especially those who didn't know him), has a favourite Tiger Pataudi story. Many are in this anthology whose driving force has been his wife Sharmila Tagore.

It came together during a lunch in Bangalore's Koshy's restaurant, with V.K. Karthika, Chief Editor and Publisher of HarperCollins India. A list of writers was drawn up, deadlines were worked out, and before dessert arrived we knew exactly what we wanted. Karthika's has been the guiding hand. My thanks to her.

Her colleague Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri has been a virtual co- editor of this book, and responsible for flattening out the bumps between conception and execution. My thanks to him and to the design team at HarperCollins, including Shuka Jain and Arijit Ganguly, for a wonderful cover and a a gorgeous photo insert.

'I had loved Tiger for forty- seven years, was married to him for almost forty-three. We didn't make it to fifty. But it was a memorable partnership; certainly, an enriching one for me.

27th December 2011 would have been our forty-third wedding anniversary. But we didn't make it. We ran out of time on 22nd September. On that day I stepped into a strange new world. Everything was familiar and yet everything was different. After forty-seven magical years of being together, Tiger left.

I deeply mourned his absence but I could also feel his lasting presence.

Tiger has not gone away; he continues to fill my life. He is around for me in many ways I did not expect. He may not be with me when I sit down for a meal or next to me when I put my feet up for a movie, nor do I see him when I wake up morning. Yet he is here. Much as I feel deprived, I do not feel alone.

In that matter-of-fact way of his, he has given a stability, a sense of rectitude and a lot of cheer to our home and life. And in our life it will stay. I feel sure of it somehow. I think of this as an enduring blessing, a priceless gift and not just as a temporary consolation. That i why putting 15 together this book is not only cathartic, but a welcome idea. It gives me another opportunity to relive all those moments we spent together often exciting, fulfilling, troubling and triumphant and once in a while even blissfully sublime.

I first met him a few weeks before my twenty-first birthday. He was three years and eleven months older. What instantly attracted me to him was his sense of humour and his innate gentleness. I felt that I could trust him implicitly. He was, even at that young age, the same person he was till the end of his life-mature, calm, responsible, with the strongest sense of self. I, on the other hand, was impulsive and quite unschooled in the ways of the world. I guess we complemented each other.

When I think back on some of Tiger's attitudes, actions and reactions that were so uniquely his own, I realize how he was an excellent mix of multiple cultural influences. He had an orthodox upbringing at home, where he learnt Urdu and Arabic and imbibed the ways of the manor to which he was born. His father, who played the sitar beautifully, introduced him to the richness and beauty of Indian classical music.