The Fourth Net

by All-Round Excellence, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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There were four nets at the stadium in Mohali, and the net bowlers bowled in the fourth one. Nobody told us this. We worked it out on the first morning from where the bags had been put down.

There were six of us. Two left-arm spinners from Patiala who knew each other from school, a tall boy from Ludhiana who bowled off-breaks and said he had been to an IPL trial, a medium-pacer from Jalandhar, a leg-spinner of about thirty who did not tell anybody where he came from, and me. I am from a village outside Ropar, and from Monday to Saturday I work in my uncle's tractor workshop on the Nangal road, and on Sundays I bowl for a club that plays on matting at the ITI ground. The club secretary knew Dhaliwal sir, the state side's bowling coach, from their own playing days, and that is the only reason I was there. I want to be clear about that. Nobody had seen me bowl and asked for me.

The state side had a Ranji quarter-final on the Saturday. We were wanted for three days of practice before it, from Tuesday. Five hundred rupees a day, cash, and lunch.

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On the Tuesday it was foggy until ten. We sat on the steps of the pavilion with our kit between our feet and watched the groundstaff take the covers off the practice strips, and the dew ran off the covers in lines. Dhaliwal sir came out at quarter past ten with a clipboard and gave us the rules. Bowl at the stumps. No bouncers to the batsmen in nets one and two. If a batsman says stop, you stop. Use the balls in the blue bag, not the red bag.

The balls in the blue bag were old SG balls, brown, soft at the seam, one of them with a split in the leather you could put a fingernail in. The red bag had six new ones and was for the state side's own bowlers.

The first three nets were for the side. The senior batsmen took the first two, with their own bowlers, and a man with a sidearm thrower in the third, and there were two television cameras on tripods behind net one. In the fourth net were the young ones, the eighteen-year-olds who were in the squad of fifteen but would not play on Saturday, and us.

I bowled at a boy called Navneet for most of that day. He was polite, and he said "well bowled" when I beat him, which was often, and "sorry, bhaji" when he hit me back past the stumps, which was twice. At lunch there was rajma and rice and a cucumber salad that nobody touched. At five o'clock a man from the association office sat at a folding table by the gate with a cash box and a register, and we each signed for five hundred rupees in an envelope. On my envelope, in ballpoint, it said NB Ropar. On the leg-spinner's it said NB Leg.

I went home on the bus with my shoulder aching, the good ache, and was in the workshop at eight the next morning to fit a clutch plate before I went back.

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On the Wednesday Pritpal Grewal came to the fourth net.

You will not have heard of him unless you follow the Ranji Trophy, and then you have. He had batted four for the state side for nine seasons. He had a stomach now, and two kinds of grey in his beard, and he wore a helmet with a grille that had been bent and straightened again. In the last three matches he had scored four, eleven and nought. I know because the Patiala spinners had been talking about it on the pavilion steps that morning, and I know they were right because I looked it up myself on my phone while they talked.

He did not say why he had come down to our end. The cameras stayed at net one. He took guard in the fourth net, and Dhaliwal sir came and stood at the back of it with his clipboard, and he looked at the six of us and pointed at me.

"Ropar. You."

I had found something in the blue bag the day before: one of the old balls was harder than the others, and the shine side still had a little shine on it. I had kept it in my pocket overnight. It was not a rule that I couldn't.

I bowled him with the third ball. It pitched outside off, a little short of a length, and came back off the seam, and he played for the line it started on. The stumps in the nets are on a metal frame and they do not fall over. They shake. They shook.

Nobody said anything. Grewal looked at the stumps and tapped the crease twice and took guard again.

In the next over I got him with the same ball, and in the one after that he edged one that would have gone to second slip, if there had been a second slip, and I ran down the net and picked it up from where it had stopped against the netting and walked back to my mark. I did not look at him. I did not look at Dhaliwal sir. I was not thinking about him. I was thinking about my front foot, which was landing too far across.

Dhaliwal sir called me to the back of the net.

He took me by the elbow, away from where Grewal could hear, by the roller.

"Listen," he said. "Pitch it up for him. Half-volleys. Let him hit some. He has Saturday. You do not have Saturday."

I said, "Ji, sir."

He was right. I am not saying he was wrong. A man who has made four, eleven and nought does not need a boy from a tractor workshop knocking his frame over three days before a quarter-final, in front of the juniors. I know that now and I knew it then.

So I pitched it up. The next over was six half-volleys, and Grewal drove five of them back past me into the netting at the far end, very sweetly, and the sixth one he did not drive. He let it go past him and hit the frame, and the frame shook, and he stood there with the bat on his shoulder.

Then he walked down the net. He took his helmet off as he came, which I have since learnt is something a batsman does when he wants you to see his face, and he stopped in front of me and not in front of Dhaliwal sir.

"What was that?" he said.

I did not answer him. I did not know what the right answer was.

"Bowl what you were bowling," he said.

Dhaliwal sir, at the back of the net, opened his mouth and then shut it. He looked at Grewal's back for a while, and then he made a mark on his clipboard, and went over to net two.

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For the rest of that day I bowled at Pritpal Grewal and he batted against me, and I am going to tell it honestly, because I have heard it told in Ropar since and it gets better every time, and it was not better. It was what it was.

I got him four more times before lunch. Twice bowled, twice edged. He hit me for what would have been three fours and one six over the bowler's head that went into the roof of the net and came down on my side of it. After lunch he got better. He stopped playing at the ball that came back. He stood still on off stump and watched it and let it go past, and when I bowled the one that came back he played it with a straight bat, very late, under his eyes. I got him once more after lunch, with a slower ball, which I had never bowled to anybody good, and which I think he did not expect from me any more than I did. He laughed at that. Then he did not let me get him again.

At four Dhaliwal sir called time. Grewal took his gloves off and pushed them into his helmet and walked out of the net without saying anything to me, and I signed for my envelope and went home.

On the bus a man asked me if I played for Punjab, because of the bag. I said no.

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The Thursday was the last day. It rained in the night, and the groundstaff did not get the covers off the practice strips until after nine, and the outfield behind the nets was still wet. The ball skidded on. My hard ball from the blue bag went soft by noon.

Grewal came to the fourth net at ten and, except for lunch, stayed there until half past two. He did not go to net one at all.

He had a thing he did now. Before every ball he touched the peak of his helmet and then the top of his bat, and then he stood still. He left everything outside off stump that was not going to hit him, even the ones he could have driven, even the half-volleys when I tried one to see. He left so many that the leg-spinner, who was waiting his turn at the back, started counting them out loud, and Grewal heard and did not mind.

He was not trying to hit me. He was trying to see me.

I tried everything I had. The one that comes back. The one I hold across the seam, which does nothing, and which I bowl so that the batsman will think about the one that comes back. The slower ball, which he waited for and hit into the side netting. A yorker that I got right once in eight tries, and he dug it out the once. A bouncer, which was against the rules in nets one and two but this was the fourth net and nobody had said anything about the fourth net. He swayed under it and did not look at me.

I did not get him on Thursday.

At half past two Dhaliwal sir came and said that the side was having a meeting, and Grewal took his helmet off and stood in the net for a moment looking at the strip, at the marks my front foot had made, which were too far across, still.

He said, "Saturday, the new ball, they have a boy from Uttarakhand who does that. Brings it back."

I said, "Ji."

He said, "Not as quick as you."

That was all. He went to the meeting. I picked the balls up off the outfield and put them back in the blue bag, and the hard one I put back too, because it was soft now and of no use to anybody.

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I did not go to the match. On the Saturday there was a Swaraj in the workshop with a cracked hydraulic pipe that the farmer needed back by Sunday for the wheat, and my uncle does not care about the Ranji Trophy. The match was streamed on the board's website. I propped my phone against a diesel can on the bench, with no sound, and looked at it when I came out from under the tractor.

They lost the toss and fielded. They bowled the other side out on the second morning for two hundred and seventy-one, and then on the second afternoon Pritpal Grewal came in at sixty-two for two.

I did not see the whole innings. I saw some of it in pieces, on a five-inch screen with a crack across one corner, between fittings. What I saw was him leaving it. The boy from Uttarakhand bowled at him for most of an hour with the new ball and the ball came back off the seam, more than mine, and Grewal stood there on off stump with his bat up and let it go, over after over, and in the bottom of the picture the graphic counted the dot balls.

He made sixty-eight. He was out to the boy from Uttarakhand, lbw, to the one that came back. He played for the line it started on.

I laughed out loud in the workshop, and my uncle came out from the office to see what was funny, and I did not know how to tell him.

Sixty-eight is not a hundred. I want to say that because I have heard people in the club at the ITI ground say he made a hundred, and he did not. It was not the innings that won the match. They took the first-innings lead on the fourth day because the number eight and the number ten put on seventy-four together, and the number ten was a left-arm spinner who did not have a batting average worth mentioning before that day. The newspaper in Chandigarh put those two in the headline, and that was the right thing. Grewal was in the fourth paragraph, which is where sixty-eight belongs.

They lost the semi-final to Karnataka. I did not watch that one. There was no reason to.

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I still have the envelopes, the three of them, with NB Ropar on them in ballpoint. I did not keep them for any special reason. They are in the drawer of the workbench with the feeler gauges, because I put them there that week and nobody has moved them.

The next Sunday at the ITI ground, a boy in our club who bats at four, who works at the Hero showroom and is very proud of his cover drive, asked me if I would bowl at him before the match, in the corner of the ground where we have one net with a hole in it.

I said yes. I had the old ball in my pocket, the one I use for the club, which is not hard and has no shine. I walked back eleven steps from the stumps and scraped the mark, and he took guard, and I watched where he put his feet.

I ran in and bowled him the one that comes back.

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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