‘Tendulkar only whacks when he knows he can control the ball—it is a controlled whack, not a wild whack, Acca.’ He spat on the ball as he walked back up the pitch, rubbing it vigorously, leaving brown streaks on his clean shorts. His clothes were too big for him.

‘You remember I’m not Tendulkar, right?’ she asked as he stamped his foot, like a miniature tusker.

‘Om, om,’ he shouted back, nodding his head sideways before running as fast as he could. The ball left his hand high and she instinctively ducked as it bounced short and spun towards her head.

‘I thought you were bowling to me, not at me!’ she shouted, dropping her bat and chasing the bowler. Niri ran, laughing as she caught him and wrestled him into a quick embrace. They both collapsed on the dusty field and looked up at the early evening sky.

‘You should have gone to watch him play.’ He reprimanded her again. ‘If I lived in Colombo, I would go to watch cricket every day. I would wait by the gate and shake his hand as he left the field. I would ask him to sign my bat, and my shirt, and my schoolbooks. I would ask him to sign everything I owned.’

She turned her head and looked at him as he looked at the sky but only saw Sachin Tendulkar. On this trip, she had brought him and his friends the Kookaburra bats that Nala had sent from Sydney. He had hugged her tightly before remembering himself and giving her a more formal, ‘Thank you, Acca.’ He was inseparable from his bat, except when he allowed her to use it against his impressive bowling skills.

Tendulkar, the Little Master, had scored his first century in a one-day international game in Colombo last week. He had played at the Premadasa Stadium, which had recently been renamed in honour of the assassinated president. Tendulkar was only twenty-one. By Niri’s age, Tendulkar had already been identified as a prodigy and was playing professionally. Niri often sighed when he talked about his hero, rattling off his biography and batting stats as though they were his own.

The boy woke up every morning at five o’clock with his friends. After a gruelling ninety minutes of warm-up exercises, the children had breakfast, morning ablutions and two hours of lessons. This was followed by more skills training until lunchtime. The midday meal was served in a mess hall, comprised of a green and brown tarpaulin hoisted over several portable gas cookers. The children sat on the ground and ate from banana leaves. When the afternoon heat was unbearable, they were given more training challenges to complete. The coaches’ philosophy was that the children should learn to perform properly under the harshest of circumstances. They were given an hour of rest time before dinner, which Niri used to play more cricket with his friends.