WHY PLAY TO A DIFFERENT GALLERY?

would offer over the next two months. As a North Indian carrying an onerous secondhand burden of Partition, I was in a country we’d been told we must be very scared of, surrounded by people we should be very wary of.

But Pakistan 2004 was an epic eyeopener because what the Indian team, and the small entourage that accompanied it, found across the border was a warm welcome that slowly mutated into lasting friendships. We would get extra helpings at restaurants; taxi drivers would refuse to take money when they learnt we were “mehmaans” (guests); paan was fed directly into our mouths at night markets; someone even sent one of our touring party a Persian carpet to take back home. Every time politics was discussed, the locals would say “koi masla nahi hai” (there is no issue), so much so, that it became our “takiya kalam” (hard to translate – loosely, a habitual phrase used without relevance) during the trip.

The tour was a perfect example of sport’s power to overcome the boundaries imposed by politics. We had gone there for the cricket, but returned as people who had forever overcome an irrational prejudice that stemmed from a line on a map.

Even at the worst of times – sometimes in tiny little ways, and sometimes in a hugely significant manner – sport has played the role of a healer despite the war metaphors that are freely attached to it.

Whether it was the camaraderie between Jesse Owens and Luz Long at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (which this column referred to a few weeks ago in a different context) that