Stand Where I Put You

by All-Round Excellence, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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We were all out for ninety-six with ten balls of the innings left. I was the last man out, caught at long-on trying to hit one into the cane yard, so whatever anybody said about that total afterwards, they said it about me first.

The match is played every year on the last Sunday before the crushing starts: the Bhaini Cooperative Sugar Mill against the canal division of the Irrigation Department. Twenty overs a side. The pitch is matting pegged down over clay, and one boundary is the yard where the tractor trolleys queue once the season opens, two kilometres of them on some nights, with the drivers asleep on top of the cane. In October the yard is empty. A ball that goes in there is four, not six, because a manager decided that in some year nobody remembers, and nobody has changed it.

The canal side had won four years running. Last year they made a hundred and fifty-one. They have an assistant engineer called Kulvinder who once went to Ranji trials in Patiala and still talks about it, and behind their rest house they have a practice strip with a proper roller. We roll our strip with an oil drum that the boiler section fills with water.

From November to April I sit in the weighbridge cabin and write down what every trolley weighs full and what it weighs empty, and the farmer is paid for the difference. In October I am captain of the cricket, because I was captain the year before and nobody else asked for it.

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Tea at the break came from the canteen in steel glasses, with pakoras that Pappu's mother had fried that morning. Pappu is seventeen and washes the canteen pots. He was our fifth bowler, because we have only five men who can bowl, and in the practice before the match he had bowled two wides in one over.

Sunita keeps our book. She works in the mill laboratory, testing the juice for sugar, and she writes the score in pencil first and goes over it in ink when the innings is finished. She sat down on the bench beside me with the book open on her knees.

"They need ninety-seven off a hundred and twenty balls," she said. "Four point eight five an over. Last year they scored at seven and a half."

"Last year we made a hundred and twelve," said Satbir. He had opened and made thirty-one of our ninety-six, and their umpire had given him run out by the length of a bat when he was in by the length of a shoe. He had not finished being angry about it.

Nobody else said anything. Om Prakash, whom everyone calls Tau, a fitter from the centrifugal section and fifty-one years old, was sitting on the grass with one shoe off, shaking gravel out of it. Rajbir was eating his third pakora. The scoreboard is a blackboard nailed to the wall of the pump house, and somebody from their side had already chalked the target under our total: 97.

"Ninety-six," I said. "So they have to make ninety-seven."

Sunita waited for the rest of it. There was no rest of it.

Then I gave the instructions. I have been told since that this is the part people talk about at the mill, and that they still do not agree on what I meant. I can only say what I said.

"Rajbir, you bowl straight. Every ball. If they miss, it hits."

"Pappu, you take the ball when I give it to you."

"Tau, you stand where I put you. Don't move."

"Satbir, stop shouting at the umpire."

"Sunita, count properly."

Satbir said, "That's it?"

I said that was it, and I went to look at the matting, because one corner had lifted at the bowler's end and I wanted it pegged before their openers came out. Behind me I could hear them start.

"Where's he putting him?"

"He means Tau can't run."

"Tau can run."

"He means don't move. He said don't move."

"Count properly. What else is she going to do, count badly?"

Tau said nothing. He put his shoe back on and tied it twice.

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Rajbir bowled the first over from the pump house end, and he bowled it straight. He is not quick. He works on the cane carrier, where the chains pull the cane up into the knives, and he has the shoulders for it but not the run-up. Six balls at the stumps, two runs off the over, and on the fourth ball the opener played all round one and heard it hit the pad. Our umpire is Ramesh, the timekeeper from the main gate, who does not like giving decisions in the mill's favour, because he does not want to be accused of it. He thought about it for a long time and then put his finger up.

Four for one.

Then Kulvinder came in, and for six overs he showed us why he talks about Patiala. He did not slog. He waited for the short ones and put them away square, and when Dinesh pitched up to him he drove him over the bowler's head into the road, where a boy on a bicycle had to stop and throw it back. I gave Pappu the fourth over, because he had to bowl sometime, and it went for fourteen: two fours, a single, and a wide that ran away into the cane yard for five. Sunita called the score to me at the end of every over, nothing more, just the numbers. Forty-four for one after six.

In the seventh over the other opener pushed one to cover and called for a run that was not there. Satbir picked it up one-handed and threw down the stumps at the bowler's end with nobody backing up. He turned round to their umpire with his arms out, and then he remembered, and put his arms down, and walked back to cover without a word. Their umpire gave it. He had to; the stumps were lying on the matting.

Fifty-one for two. In the ninth over Rajbir came back and bowled their number four with one that kept low, which on our pitch is most of them, if you bowl straight. Sixty-three for three after ten.

"They need thirty-four," Sunita called. "Sixty balls. Three point four."

Kulvinder had thirty-eight. He took his helmet off between overs and drank water from a bottle somebody brought out to him, and the canal men under the neem tree were laughing at something. I was going to give the eleventh over to Rajbir, who had one left, and keep Pappu out of it altogether.

Pappu came up from fine leg. He did not say anything at first. The ball had gone back to the umpire at the end of the over, and Pappu had gone and taken it from Ramesh's hand and was rubbing it on his trouser leg, the old shine side, which had no shine left. Then he walked past me to the top of the bowler's run, scraped a mark in the dust with his heel, and paced back from it, nine steps, and scraped another one.

"Bhaiya," he said. "Give me this over."

From her chair at square leg Sunita called out, "His over went for fourteen." She was not being unkind. She was reading it out of the book, which is what I had asked her to do.

I looked at Pappu. He had marked his run. He was standing on the mark with the ball in his hand, as if the over had already started and the rest of us were late for it.

I gave it to him.

Then I took Tau by the elbow and walked him off short fine leg, where he had stood for ten overs and touched the ball once, to deep midwicket. There is a place there in front of the pump house where the ground goes soft, because the pipe under it leaks, and a fielder who runs on it slips. I stood him on the dry ground just short of it.

"Here," I said.

"Here?"

"Stand here. Don't move."

He looked at the wet patch behind him and at Kulvinder, and said, "All right."

Pappu's first ball was a full toss and Kulvinder hit it over long-off for six, into the road again. The boy on the bicycle had waited, and threw it back. The second was short and went for four through the covers, and the canal men stood up under the neem tree to watch. Sunita wrote. Seventy-three for three. Twenty-four needed. Pappu walked back to his mark and stood on it.

The third ball was no better than the first two. It was short and outside off, and Kulvinder, who could have hit it anywhere, wanted to hit it into the pump house. He went across it and got it high on the bat, and it went up very high towards midwicket.

Everybody on our side shouted "Tau!" at the same time. Satbir shouted it from cover, I shouted it from mid-on, Pappu shouted it with his hands on his head, and Sunita, who is supposed to be neutral, stood up out of her chair and shouted it too.

Tau did not move. He had both hands up in front of his chest, the way you hold them when somebody throws you a spanner down from a gantry, and the ball came down into them and stopped, and he closed his hands on it and kept them closed. He did not throw it up. He stood there holding it until Pappu reached him and hugged him round the waist and nearly knocked both of them into the wet patch.

Afterwards he told everybody that he never saw it until the very end. He said he heard eleven people shouting his name and thought he had done something wrong.

It was not a good ball. I have said so to Pappu and he agrees. Kulvinder got out to a bad ball, and to Tau standing still, and to Satbir, who had said nothing to the umpire for eleven overs and had not said one word to Kulvinder about Patiala either, which must have been a strain. Kulvinder walked off without looking at anybody, and Pappu bowled the last three balls of the over for two runs.

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After that they had to make twenty-two from fifty-four balls with six wickets in hand, and on any other day they would have done it. They are a better side than us. They have been for four years, and they will probably be next year. But their middle order had been sitting under the neem tree expecting Kulvinder to finish it, and now they had to bat on our matting, which keeps low, against Rajbir, who bowls straight.

Rajbir bowled his last over and they took three off it. Dinesh bowled two, and they hit him for eleven, and the second time it went into the cane yard Dinesh stood in the middle of the pitch with his hands on his hips and looked at me as if I had planted the yard there myself. I bowled two and got a man caught at slip by Satbir, who was standing there because I had run out of places to put him. Pappu came back and took a wicket with a ball that bounced twice, I am not going to pretend otherwise, and the batsman swung at it before it arrived and was still waiting for it when it hit the stumps. Two more of them were run out, calling for runs that were not there, because by then they had to. Sunita read the numbers out at the end of every over and did not tell me what any of them meant. She did not need to. Eighty-eight for eight after nineteen. Nine to win off the last over.

Rajbir had bowled his four. I gave the last over to Dinesh, who had gone for eleven in his last two and could not believe it.

"Straight," I said.

"I'm not Rajbir."

"Today you are."

The first ball he bowled straight and the batsman blocked it. The second he bowled straight and the batsman edged it past the keeper for four. Ninety-two. The third went for a single. Ninety-three, four needed from three balls, and the canal men were all standing up again. The fourth ball Dinesh bowled at the stumps, and the other batsman swung across it as hard as he could and missed, and it hit. Their number eleven came out, and the fifth ball went through to our keeper, who fumbled it, and they ran a bye. Ninety-four for nine. Three to win off the last ball, two to tie.

I did not say anything to Dinesh. He knew.

He bowled it straight. The batsman hit it hard, back down the ground, and Dinesh put a hand down in his follow-through and the ball hit his palm and spun away to mid-off. They ran one. They turned for the second, and Satbir was already coming in from cover, and the batsman at the far end looked at him and decided not to. Satbir did not say anything to anybody.

Ninety-five for nine. Mill won by one run.

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Nobody from the newspapers comes to this match, and the mill does not take photographs, so there is nothing to show from that day except Sunita's book, and the chalk on the pump house wall, which the rain took off in December.

The crushing started nine days later, on a Tuesday. The manager broke a coconut on the carrier and the priest put a tilak on the first trolley, and the farmer who had driven it from Mohra since three in the morning stood beside it, very tired, waiting to be paid. I was in the cabin by then. Pinned above my desk, next to the circular with the State Advised Price for the season, was a sheet Sunita had brought round the evening of the match: the two totals in ink, the overs, the result, and under them, in pencil, two words in her small handwriting.

Counted twice.

The first trolley rolled up onto the scale. I waited for the needle to settle, wrote down the gross weight, and waved the driver on to the carrier, and the next trolley came up the ramp behind him.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā simulācrō All-Round Excellence per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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All-Round Excellence, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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