The night Sachin came to my room

“Your room? Is that alright with you?” - Sachin Tendulkar on being made an offer he didn’t refuse.

Telford Vice / Cape Town

THE man from the BBC was quite certain what he wanted. “All we need, old boy,” he crackled down the line from London, pipe, slippers, smoking jacket, hot potato, and all, “is for you to get Sachin Tendulkar on the telephone so that we can interview the little fellow.” How about I prove instead that JFK is alive and well and sharing a hash pipe with Confucius and Van Gogh in Morocco? That would be far easier.

It was September, 1998 in Bulawayo. I was on my second Test tour as a cricketwriter. By then, Tendulkar had played 61 Tests and 198 one-day internationals. He was 25, and no longer the cherubic messiah who had strolled onto the world stage like the rest of us might have wandered onto a misty beach. In the nine years since he had made his debut, he had grown into a man. And not just any man. He was Sa-chin ... Sa-chin …

I was simply me. Get him on the phone? Are you mad?

I didn’t say that to the man from the BBC. I said, “Shouldn’t be a problem.”

As a breed, team managers are blazered bumptiousness in old man’s trousers and sensible shoes. They exist in some strange place where things are important because they say they are. The manager of the Indian team that toured Zimbabwe in 1998-99 had a masters degree in bumptiousness.

“You want what?” he growled through his moustache, arching an eyebrow at me in recognition of my existence.

“An interview with Tendulkar, sir,” I replied, as respectfully as I could manage.

Instantly, his eyebrow unarched and he lowered his moustache, along with the rest of his face, back to his newspaper, flicked his fingers at me as if he was dismissing an insect from his presence, and said, “Mmm ... Delhi.”

Of course, he meant I needed permission from the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). Which was based, as it is now, in Mumbai. They’re a tricky bunch, managers.

“We need to talk to the BCCI,” I told the man from the BBC.

He didn’t blink: “BCCI, eh? Jolly good. Roger that. Wilco.”

Two days later, he was back on the line: “Sorted, old thing. BCCI are happy campers.”

Back I went to the manager, who was where I had left him three days before, still reading the same page of the same newspaper.

“BCCI say it’s fine for us to interview Tendulkar, sir,” I said, trying hard to mask any hint of triumph.

His eyebrow was cleared for take-off. The bristles of his moustache were pointed straight at me. “Delhi says it’s fine?” It was more of an involuntary gulp than a question.

“Yes, sir.”

He held up a single, important finger - “Wait.”

Then he slapped his paper onto the arm of his chair and got on the phone to the BCCI in Mumbai: “Hello? Delhi?”

The BCCI, bless them, told him that, yes, a man from the BBC had called. And, yes, they had given their permission for Tendulkar to be interviewed.

With slow, deliberate gentleness, the manager, now ashen-faced, put down the receiver. His eyes were fixed on far pavilions as he said, “Seven o’clock tonight. Squash court.”

The Bulawayo Holiday Inn is deficient of much that touring cricket teams take for granted - sometimes eggs, other times water both hot and cold - but it used to have a well-maintained squash court. At 6.55pm that evening I made my way there to find a crowd of around 100 staring through the glass back wall at Tendulkar, racquet in hand, swatting a ball about with a teammate whose name has long since escaped my memory.

I found a spot on the bleachers and waited - but not for long before Tendulkar spotted me, and said loud enough for all to hear, “BBC?”

I nodded.

“One moment, please,” he said, holding up an index finger and tilting his head to the side.

I nodded again, and smiled.

Tendulkar returned his attention to the game for a minute or two. Then he shook hands with his opponent, opened the glass door and stepped off the court, grabbed a towel, walked towards me, and asked, “Where are we going to do this?”

Which is when things might have become awkward.

“Excellent, what,” the man from the BBC had chortled when I told him that I should be able to have Tendulkar on the phone by 7.05pm that night. “We’ll call you in your hotel room at that time. Tally-ho.”

Why the arrangement was not to call Tendulkar in his room, or the manager in his room with Tendulkar at his elbow, I will never know. But who was I to question a man from the BBC?

“Umm, the call will be to my room ... We need to go there,” I told Tendulkar, and waited for him to laugh in my face and return to his game of squash.

His surprise was obvious.

“Your room? Is that alright with you?”

I managed another nod.

“Fine. Let’s go.”

With that, we started walking, side by side, the 200 or so metres from the squash court to my room on the ground floor. We were not alone: the people who had been watching Tendulkar play squash were not going to have the object of their adoration plucked from their midst so easily.

They buzzed around us like bees as we made our way. For those few moments, I was given an inkling of what it was like to be Tendulkar. He was the nucleus of a giant atom, generating the energy to simultaneously keep the chattering crowd moving as well as to keep it a respectable distance from him. This seemed a tenuous arrangement that had to implode any moment now, swamping us in frenzy. I glanced at Tendulkar’s face for reassurance. It was a picture of calm. This - 101 people squashed into a hotel corridor in polite pursuit of the 102nd - was how he lived much of his life.

Which is not to say he was immune to the effects of constant scrutiny. A few evenings previously, I happened to be at the same restaurant where Tendulkar and a few of his teammates were headed. The sound of the door of an expensive car closing caught my attention - there are not many flash cars in Zimbabwe - and I looked up to see Tendulkar standing on the pavement opposite and glancing around furtively for signs of a mob. Having satisfied himself that none would gather, he sighed and crossed the road with a light, carefree step.

That same step brought us to my room. I moved to unlock the door. Tendulkar motioned for me to stop.

He turned around to face his impromptu entourage: “Please, you must wait here.”

Then he nodded to me. I unlocked the door and he and I went inside. Closing the door behind us, I looked up into many pairs of questioning eyes.

I gestured towards the bed, near the telephone. Tendulkar sat down, and within 10 seconds of him doing so ringing filled the void - when the BBC say they will call at 7.05pm, they don’t mean 7.06pm.

“Yes, this is Sachin. Good evening.”

For the next 10 minutes I watched and listened as Tendulkar answered questions, several of which dealt with the 127 not out he had scored in his most recent innings. It was his 18th one-day century, which took him past Desmond Haynes’ record. Tendulkar spoke calmly, with good manners and with understated insight. If he understood all the fuss and bother, he wasn’t letting on that he did. To have been able to think that he would play another 265 ODIs and score another 31 centuries in the format would have done my head in. That he would become the first player to win 200 test caps? Even the man from the BBC wouldn’t have believed that.

“Thank you. Goodbye.”

Tendulkar replaced the receiver, stood up, and used his hands to smooth the bed cover where he had sat.

“I’m so sorry to invade your space like this,” he said, extending a hand.

This time, I couldn’t find the brainpower required to nod. I simply stood there and stared. Did I shake hands with him? Can’t remember. Possibly not.

Quite who and what I was staring at I was no longer certain. I thought I had been in the company of a rarefied being from a galaxy far, far away. Instead, he was just another bloke on the phone, trying to make his way home.

Tendulkar was, after everything, human. But what kind of human doesn’t blink at being followed around by a crowd of people who look on him as a god made flesh?

Perhaps, after everything, he wasn’t human. Surely not, because he went willingly to the closed door, turned the nob, smiled a farewell at me over his shoulder, and stepped back out into the madness.

Yes, the crowd was still there. Waiting …

ESPNCricinfo 2013 and Sachin Tendulkar: The Man Cricket Loved Back (Penguin 2014).