The Man Who Kept Our Cricket Balls

Every colony has one, and in Shanti Enclave it was Colonel Uncle: ground floor, corner flat, garden with a low wall that ate cricket balls.

The rules of his legend were known to every kid in the building. He confiscated on sight. He did not negotiate. Appeals — even polite ones, even with folded hands, even the time Ishita cried real tears — bounced off the door. Eleven balls this season alone had cleared the wall and vanished into enemy territory, including the new season ball the boys had pooled birthday money for, gone on its third delivery. The colony kids’ collected intelligence on him ran as follows: he was mean, he was probably ex-army because someone’s father had once called him Colonel Sahib, he hated children, he hated cricket, and he definitely, definitely enjoyed it.

Dev was sent to the door on a Saturday in October — not by choice, but because his mother had a parcel delivered wrongly to their flat with the Colonel’s name on it, and mothers do not accept “he eats cricket balls” as grounds for refusing an errand.

Dev rang the bell the way you’d touch a hot iron.

The door opened the whole way — which was the first surprise, since legend said it only ever opened a suspicious crack — and Colonel Uncle looked down at him: tall, very straight, slippers and reading glasses, older up close than over the wall.

“Parcel came to us by mistake,” Dev said, at speed, holding it out like a shield.

The Colonel took it, read the label, and then did the thing that rearranged everything: he said, “You’ll have water,” and turned and walked inside, leaving the door open behind him — which is not a question in that generation, as Dev knew from his own grandfather, but a settled fact about what happens next.

Which is how Dev came to be standing in Colonel Uncle’s drawing room, waiting, alone, when he saw the shelf.

It ran along the wall by the window, wooden and polished, the kind meant for trophies. And on it, spaced with parade-ground precision, sat cricket balls. Eleven of them. Dev counted without meaning to — tennis balls sun-bleached to different vintages of green, and at the end, barely scuffed, the pooled-birthday-money season ball.

Not in a bin. Not in a cupboard. Displayed. Dusted, by the look of it.

And above the shelf, photographs. A young man in an army uniform, laughing at something outside the frame. The same man younger still, a teenager in whites, holding up a bat at some long-ago crease. The same face again as a small boy, gap-toothed, sitting on the shoulders of a much younger Colonel Uncle on what was unmistakably the colony lawn, back when the trees were half their height.

“My son,” said Colonel Uncle, from the doorway, with the steel tumbler of water.

Dev took the water and did not know where to put his eyes.

“Sandeep. He grew up on that lawn of yours. Opening bat — proper one, not your T20 slogging.” A pause with a whole career inside it. “He’s in Toronto now. Two children. They visit —” and here the sentence, which had been marching in a straight line like everything else about him, wavered for just a step, ”— when they can. It’s far, and leave is short. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s far.”

He straightened a photograph one millimetre.

“The balls come over the wall,” he said, in the tone of a man deciding, mid-sentence, to say a true thing instead of a convenient one, “and I know I should throw them back. But then it’s loud again on that side for a while — the shouting, the howzat, the arguing about lbw, exactly the same arguments, you people haven’t invented a single new argument in thirty years —” he stopped. Looked at the shelf, and then out the window at the lawn.

“And someone rings my bell,” he said, quietly. “You’re the twelfth this season. I count.”

Dev stood in that room and felt the whole colony legend come apart in his hands. Mean. Hates children. Hates cricket. Enjoys it. They’d had every fact and gotten every one of them wrong, because they’d only ever had the facts you can collect from the far side of a wall — the same way, it occurred to him with an uncomfortable jolt, Colonel Uncle had only ever been given the doorbell version of them: a rotating cast of kids who wanted their ball back and were gone in forty seconds.

Everyone had been visiting nobody, for years.

The next Saturday, Dev rang the bell with no parcel and no errand. Colonel Uncle looked at his empty hands and understood the difference immediately — Dev watched him understand it — and if you want to know what became of it: the boys got their season ball back, and lost it over the wall again within the month, which no longer mattered, because retrieval was now a fixture. You went in twos, you had your water, you heard about Sandeep’s cover drive or the time the regiment team beat the officers, and Colonel Uncle came to stand at his gate on Sunday mornings — never on the lawn, that was too far to travel in one season — but at the gate, arms folded, issuing unsolicited and immediately contested lbw verdicts.

The shelf stayed full, though the balls on it rotated. Dev asked him once why he still kept them up there, now that everyone just came and asked.

“Habit,” said Colonel Uncle, straightening one. And then, in his other voice, the true-thing voice: “They look like company.”