In Belfast this week, men with measuring tapes solved a small architectural problem. India needed a second dressing room. It is not the usual communal affair where grown professionals peel their bearings and discuss their hamstrings, but a separate one, because one of the cricketers that India brought to Ireland is fifteen years old, and the law takes a dark view of a minor who shares a changing space with grown men.So they built him a room. Pause on that, because it’s the whole story compressed into an act of carpentry. The richest councilor in the sport commissioned a private room for a boy who has not yet decided to choose. The dresses are being sewn while the selectors are still, behind closed doors, debating whether the coronation should happen. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, from Tajpur in Bihar’s Mithila region, may or may not make his India debut against Ireland tomorrow. He can go out and become, at fifteen, the youngest man ever to play for India, demoting Tendulkar to second place in a record held since 1989, when this boy’s parents were children themselves. Or he can sit in his nice new room and watch, because the selectors have done the cold arithmetic and decided that the side that just won the T20 World Cup has no urgent need, on a wet evening in Belfast, to bother. Both are true at once, and holding both is the only honest way to look at it.Consider what it is. The IPL numbers read like a misprint: 776 runs, a strike rate of 237, Gayle’s record for six in a season broken by a child who wasn’t alive when the league started. Cricket men, professionals allergic to hyperbole, have come up with words they normally keep locked away. Batting speed almost invisible before. A return to grainy Sobers footage. Grown men who have given their lives to bowling have been left, to put it mildly, bewildered and helpless. This is not the language of promise. It is the language of arrival.
Vaibhav Sooryavanshi with the Player of the Match Trophy after his explosive 94 in the final of the Tri-Nation Series in Sri Lanka. (Photo credit: BCCI)
However, cricket is not a meritocracy in the way the posters insist; it is a meritocracy complicated by arithmetic. India open with Sanju Samson and Abhishek Sharmawhich are not problems to be solved, but the men who have earned their places, one of them the Player of a tournament India just won. Shreyas Iyer, the new captain, wants the middle. Mathematics does not have a spare chair. To put the prodigy, you have to arrange someone who has done nothing wrong, except to be a sensation, and there is something almost cruel in the way that excellence can be quietly insufficient when a phenomenon enters.This is the part that dream traders leave out. We like our talent stories to run downhill, picking up speed: the small town, the bat, the records, the inevitable blue jersey, cue strings. But the interesting thing about Sooryavanshi week is not the inevitability. It’s the friction. He is both too good to leave out and too disruptive to put in, and how the tension is resolved will tell us less about him than about the people holding the pen over the team sheet. The boy did his part. He, in the only sentence that the chairman of the selectors could manage, chose himself. What remains is whether the adults have the nerve to act on it, or whether they will wait, prudently, for a softer opportunity against a gentler opponent.I find I don’t really care which way it goes. If he plays and cuts the Irish attack, we will see something. If he waits, the room they built will hold his breath for a few more days, and the record will be kept, like the records. What I mean is the flattening of it into a fairy tale, the reduction of a strange and unresolved moment into the usual syrup about dreams coming true.A boy from Bihar scarified a table to make him a room. If he is allowed to sit in it tomorrow is, in the end, a smaller question than the one that his arrival has already answered: that the next of them, the fastest-strongest-young that we promise, will not come. Here she is, fifteen years old, stuffed, waiting for a decision that should be below.