Remembering Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Hector’s Salvaging

An Unassuming Love(When Once Terror Entered Cricket)

Yes. There was/is West Indian cricket and Indian cricket, the India which became British India in the Nineteenth Century. Since its independence on August 15, 1947, It’s India with cities such as Delhi, New Delhi and Bombay now Mumbai.

When I started this Traveloguer in November 2008, there was tension in Mumbai — even as I wrote the top floor of Mumbai’s magnificent Taj Mahal was on fire from a November 26, 2008 attack.

An Unassuming Love …

Matthias Williams writing out of New Delhi on behalf of Reuters reported on December 13, 2008. “Fire, water, shooting and grenade blasts during the 60-hour siege damaged the hotel, which was crowded with fine art, sculptures, chandeliers, photographs, and visitors’ books signed by kings, rock stars, business barons and heads of state.” http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE4BC18Z20081213

India’s January cricket tour to Pakistan was in doubt, even in early December. Cricket was being drawn into terrorism — the England team was to stay at the Taj in Mumbai.

… And just when this was sufficient for the archives, Tuesday March 3, 2009 saw settling of another score. In Lahore, Pakistan, at least a dozen men ambushed Sri Lanka’s cricket team with rifles, grenades and rocket launchers.

The Associated Press story was written by Rizwan Ali with joint contributions from Krishan Francis and Ravi Nessman in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Zarar Khan and Asif Shahzad in Islamabad, and Babar Dogar in Lahore.

They wrote, “Seven players, an umpire and a coach were wounded, none with life-threatening injuries, but six policemen and a driver died.”

Seven players and an umpire wounded in a West Indian city would hurt, and while such sentiments could not be transported by paper in Associated Press, not even when appropriate words were carefully selected, the death of six policemen and a driver ran deep into community and communion among friends, loved-ones, wives, Mothers and Fathers anywhere in the sporting world and Third World yards, unearthing painful memories.

“The attackers struck as a convoy carrying the squad and match officials reached a traffic circle 300 yards (meters) from the main sports stadium in the eastern city of Lahore, triggering a 15-minute gun-battle with police guarding the vehicles.” Police were guarding the vehicles? I guess, considering what had happened in Mumbai in November.

Black Memory, A Traveloguer & Cricket …

Players might’ve been gathering up thoughts, those in love with cricket, as they approached their favourite site and play space. They would soon be out of traffic, in an area surrounded and presumably protected. The exogenous shock was perfect.

“The assault, just ahead of a match, was one of the worst terrorist attacks on a sports team since Palestinian militants killed 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.” Wow, look how far they went to find traces, memories of this one, one fitting clearly into the terror narrative gripping globalism.

“By attacking South Asia’s most popular sport, the gunmen guaranteed themselves tremendous international attention while demonstrating Pakistan’s struggle to provide its 170 million people with basic security as it battles a raging Islamist militancy.”

Pakistan did not expect an attack on a cricket team. There was an unspoken silence touching cricket’s neutrality – it was the place where we argued and agreed to agree. This was South Asia’s most popular sport.

It was the same in the West indies, tearing us apart or bringing us together, causing us to smile to remember, to historicize, to use battle metaphors but never meaning guns, grenades, knives, bazookas etcetera.

In that fifteen minute battle how many bullets were fired? What is the cost of a bullet produced in such large manufacturing concerns in Pakistan, Israel or the States?

“The bus driver, Mohammad Khalil, accelerated as bullets ripped into the vehicle and explosions rocked the air, steering the team to the safety of the stadium. The players — some of them wounded — ducked down and shouted ‘Go! Go!’ as he drove through the ambush.”

City Police Chief Haji Habibur Rehman said the attackers melted into the city hustle and buzz abandoning their “machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and plastic explosives, backpacks stuffed with dried fruit, mineral water and walkie-talkies.”

Rizman Ali et al continued. “Tuesday’s attack in Pakistan came three months after the Mumbai terror strikes .… Both were coordinated, used multiple gunmen, apparently in teams of two, who were armed with explosives and assault rifles and apparently had little fear of death or capture …. Authorities canceled the test match against Pakistan’s national team, and Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa ordered his foreign minister to immediately travel to Pakistan to help assist in the team’s evacuation …” http://www.myfoxla.com/dpp/news/dpg_Gunmen_Attack_Sri_Lankan_Cricket_Team2223058

Could you imagine India batting against an enemy in its neighboring land, both well-known politically, to be loaded nuclear? West Indian nuclear energy and history of concentration resided in souls, minds and bodies of Clive Lloyd, Viv Richards, Lawrence Rowe, Desmond Haynes, Gordon Greenidge, Colin Croft, Joel Garner, Andy Roberts, Michael Holding and Deryck Murray. Those are the precious ones, memories of whom, conjure pride at Lord’s or anywhere else inside and outside the West Indies.

At home, it is an intellectual exercise too, almost as if the game was in a text-book with its own concepts, hypotheses, ontology and other forms of praxis. Antigua and Barbuda’s Leonard Tim Hector reminds us “… it is necessary to state, that no body of persons deserve our respect, our unlimited praise, more than our cricketers. Our politics pales into insignificance against our cricket. Our economics fares even worse. In science and technology we have done little of note. In literature and music alone, do we have achievements matching our cricketers. The Literature, unfortunately, though great, has not yet seized hold of the popular imagination. The music, in my view, is still nascent, however popular. But in cricket we have a solid body of achievement, which gave and gives to the West Indian people a sense of a home and a habitation, a sense of belonging and an identity like nothing else has.” http://www.candw.ag/~jardinea/ffhtm/ff971212.htm

Cricket’s data was carried in different measure in hearts and minds of women and men; they died with them. Were that someone could come to their site and do the impossible — unearth that memory of Brian Lara scoring 375 in Antigua; observe where that memory was lodged, if possible, scoop traces of that emotion’s chemistry from bone, observe how it fired, which organ responded anxiously to a six, four or just an indescribable cover-drive executed by the consummate Lara when he was in flight and invincible. Was there a tensed enlarging, an unusual coloring in their mid-brain, in the left one, or creatively spotted for identification sake in the right? I gather a forensic anthropologist would need tissued evidence; collected at the autopsy site and even through unearthing.

Archaeology as metaphor is enchanting like Mathematics when talking about memory that is both individual and community, non-tangible, formed yet having no form in an object that can be weighed, costed and sold. But one does not have to go this far. Look at Tim Hector’s sayings, left for our contemplation, for our memories anointing!

  • Excerpt from Steinberg Henry’s “An Unassuming Love: Blak Memory, A Traveloguer & Cricket” (Chapter 13, 2011). amazon.com —.

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1 Comment

  1. LawieBawie
    April 15, 2015

    Very nice. Nostalgic.

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