Among the spectators was to be Ummar Aziz, who had no place to hide in India and who, rumour had it, had been living around here in a mansion with a swimming pool for the last three years. He had expertly orchestrated a series of explosions in Bombay in 1993, bombs that had gone off in the Air India Building and in Prabhadevi, not to speak of eleven other places. He strenuously denied it, but from this safe haven; and indeed the charge might be a fiction dreamed up by the police. It was heard that he was coming not so much because of his love of cricket, which was considerable, or of the Indian or Pakistani teams (the Pakistani side was a depleted one, with its main bowlers discredited and removed), but because of his fascination with Urmila Deshpande, the star of Ishq and Jaadu, who was also going to be present. Ummar Aziz had been watching Hindi films since he’d been an orphan child of the Bombay streets.

The team practised nimbly, without exhausting themselves. Now and then a reporter or a television crew came and asked them questions. When Azharuddin answered the questions, you could see the others in the background, throwing their arms about, Tendulkar doing exercises, his glasses so dark they bore no reflection. When he spoke, you had to look at his mouth because of the challenge his dark glasses threw you.

The English were the first to wilt. Ganguly hit the winning shot, a six that saw the ball take flight in a way unlike any bird in these surroundings. Then, the desert sun long set, he got the first Man of the Match award of the tour.

Watching him ascend the crowded podium on a small Sony television, and talk with some assurance, Khatau, who’d just returned from a hard day in the tenements in South Bombay, commented to his colleague Mohammed Yusuf that Ummar Aziz didn’t seem to have come to watch the game.

“He certainly wasn’t in the crowd; otherwise they would have shown him.” Khatau and Mohammed Yusuf were policemen who regretted the way Aziz had, one day, slipped like sand through their fingers. All those explosions; they hadn’t been able to do anything about it. Here they were four years later, on their sofas, watching Ganguly under the floodlights.

“Arrey, he won’t go to these small-fry games,” Yusuf said, shaking his head slowly and with great conviction, while looking at an English player waiting tentatively in the background. Ganguly was shaking hands with Ravi Shastri. Yusuf wasn’t looking at them but staring at the screen and thinking. “He’ll come to the big one,” he concluded; or words to that effect.