It was an inter-district match at Saurashtra’s Bhavnagar in 2006. Rajkot had lost the match. It ended by lunch on the last day and an 18-year-old Cheteshwar Pujara quickly called up his mother Reena after boarding a Rajkot-bound bus. It was sometime in the afternoon. “Mom, we have lost and by evening I will reach Rajkot. Tell daddy that he should pick me up from the stand,” he informed his mother.
That was the last time Cheteshwar heard Reena Pujara’s voice.
He reached Rajkot in the evening but his father was nowhere around to pick him up. “Those who went to receive Cheteshwar broke the news to him. It was difficult for him to believe that the person he loved most was no more. He was devastated for a few days. It was trauma of a very different kind, something he had never experienced,” there was a pause at the other end of the telephone. Arvind Pujara still finds it difficult to recollect the day.
Reena was a breast cancer survivor and well on her road to recovery. “She suffered a cardiac attack. I didn’t want anyone to inform him about the tragedy when he was on his way back to Rajkot,” Pujara senior said.
But then he won’t be Cheteshwar Pujara – India’s very own ‘Man of Steel’ — if he would have allowed the tragedy to force him enter a dark zone. He didn’t shed a single tear and that’s something that started bothering Arvind even more. And on the fifth day, he was in Mumbai for a U-19 game for Saurashtra.
“All I told the team manager was that ‘keep an eye on my son’. He shouldn’t be left alone at any point when he is in his hotel room. I was myself dealing with the tragedy, but my concern was Cheteshwar didn’t cry even once. He had internalized the tragedy and he was just 18.” It’s been 15 years since but scars of that tragedy still seem fresh.
He scored a zero in that game but a million more in showing the heart to deal with grief.
He might not have consciously thought about it but crushing the pain barriers — mental or physical — became Cheteshwar’s calling card during the illustrious 13 years in the Indian jersey, the highest point being January 19, 2021, in Australia.
In fact, the twin tours of Australia will always be the Pujara tours when recollecting a career which has seen incredible highs and stories of resilience.
In Australia in January 2021, each time it had come to putting in line both mind and body, the man from Rajkot was second to none. On January 19, he knew he had to survive the first two hours at the Gabba if India wanted to turn what till then looked like an improbable victory into a reality. To add to his challenges, on one side of the track there were cracks, which had been created as the match had gone on and the deliveries had started misbehaving frequently.
“It was tough, but I knew I had a job at hand. My game plan was simple on Day 5. We didn’t want to lose wickets in the first session because if Australia had to win the Test, they needed early wickets. It’s okay to be hit, for to stay on that pitch you needed to take those body blows. One particular end had variable bounce, and the ball misbehaved if it hit the cracks. If I tried to get on top of the ball like we do in normal circumstances, it could fly off the glove or the bat handle towards slips or gully,” Pujara explained during the course of an interaction at the end of the tour.
More than Brisbane, it was the third Test in Sydney that made the difference for Pujara. “I had started to find my groove in Sydney. In the second innings I had started to play my shots also, and the partnership with Rishabh (Pant) was special. He played some outstanding shots, and I hardly ever told him to curb his instincts. Unless I felt he could get out, I let him be, and he was simply brilliant. I got out at a very wrong time. Had I not, we could well have won the game. (Hanuma) Vihari had a hamstring injury and that meant he couldn’t run and that constrained us more, making my dismissal that much more important. The partnership between Vihari and (Ravichandran) Ashwin was heroic, and I am glad they managed to save the game and give us a chance going into Brisbane,” he argued.
And then he said something that left us both stunned. “The choice was between taking some blows on the body and getting out. To tell you bluntly, I had to choose between being in pain and getting out. I chose pain for I needed to be out there for India and help my team either draw or win the game.”
Once Cheteshwar reached home, Arvind could hardly believe what he saw. “When he removed his T-shirt, I saw black spots everywhere. Those were blood clots and he could still manage a smile. My boy has always been a tough cookie,” he said.
Since he knew that the balls rearing inwards had danger written all over, he chose the ugly route. For his fans, it was an alpha-male act, and for sceptics — lack of range.
As I argued before, for every Lionel Messi with the aura and grace that he exhibited one needed a Jordi Alba; for every Robert Lewandowski that Bayern Munich recruited, the balance was brought by a Joshua Kimmich.
For India, Cheteshwar brought that balance.
In football, there are defensive midfielders, often playing the role of linkmen between defence and offence. Cheteshwar can be termed as Alba or Kimmich’s cricketing equivalent. Man for all seasons, man for all reasons, who could do it the ugly way but still managed to garner enormous respect from fans.
Also Read: Cheteshwar Pujara – Always Damned by the Dravid Comparisons