Rahul Dravid and Our Now

I really like the word “ineffable.”

According to my handy dictionary (and by “my” I really mean the first slightly shady-looking result that pops up on my online searches) it means “beyond words.” In essence, it’s really a cop-out word, a word that tells you that whatever it is you are trying to express in words cannot, in fact, be expressed in words.

I thought about this when reading Brian Phillips’s excellent sorta-eulogy of Roger Federer after his shock Wimbledon defeat last year at the hands of the irrepressible Jo-Wilfried/Willie Tsonga (poor Brian, as good a writer as he is, in the category of Roger Federer articles, everyone is fighting for show after Calvin Tomkins placed, and the G*d that is David Foster Wallace definitely, and perhaps definitively even, won). Now, Brian didn’t actually use that word, but I realized that if and when I did write my own (definitively inconsequential) appraisal of Fed, it would be about the ineffable sadness I have always felt watching him, and the great Rahul Dravid, perform.

I don’t like the words “one” and “day” especially when used together: “one day …” (of course, I’m not entirely sure if the ellipsis, or is that ellipses?, count(s) as a word, or how I would express a unit of punctuation … sigh, where is DFW when you need him?).

You see, when one is young, one always has the “one day …” in one’s back pocket. As in, “one day I’ll play cricket for India.” Or, “one day I’ll win Wimbledon.” Or even “one day I’ll win the British Open” (sorry, it really is way too pretentious to refer to it as just the Open). Perhaps even “one day I’ll win the World Cup for Argentina” (and no, I won’t even attempt to explain how that might be possible). “One day I’ll play basketball with Dr. J.” “One day I’ll play free safety for the Steelers” (well no, but I’m on a roll, so just roll with me). And so on and so forth (hey, another use for those ellipses …).

These all seem to have one thing in common: they all involve sports of some kind or another (as opposed to, what, games?, again where’s DFW when you need him?). They also all involve the all-consuming belief in the endless possibilities of our futures that is the prerogative of youth. As long as your sports heroes are doing what they are doing out there, then the life you have always dreamt (dreamed? DFW …) of is also out there. That belief, faith perhaps, is the calming balm that helps counterbalance the roiling confusion that is, you know, youth. No matter what, your real life, the life that you have always dreamt/dreamed of leading is out there waiting for you, as soon as you get through whatever it is you have to get through first (homework, girls, the SAT, the school play, girls, essays, sports, girls, college, finals, tuitions, girls, graduation, girls).

Then, as it must, somewhere along the way the out there becomes the now. You haven’t quite reached that Lennon-quote-about-life-to-end-all-quotes-about-life stage yet, but you have reached the now. Maybe it’s when you go back home to visit the extended family and all your little cousins have become young cousins, and your aunts and uncles, once so excited about what you were doing, or more importantly, going to do, shift their focus away (always politely, of course) to them, and their Class XII exams, their plans for college, and what they want to do. The young cousins, once so glad to sit at your knee to listen to your possibilities, are now wrapped up in their own (exams, girls, the SAT, girls, ellipsis/ellipses). Now your own possibilities are about marriage (the aunts and uncles all need to find you a nice girl), career (the aunts and uncles all need to know where you work), housing (the aunts and uncles all need you to buy yourself a nice house), transportation (aunts, uncles, nice cars) and all the mundane things that will become the stultifying paraphernalia of adulthood (children!). These will make up your now, not all at once, but incrementally, and perhaps most terrifying of all, imperceptibly. 

Your sports heroes, meanwhile, are experiencing their own now. The time for “young” or “developing” or “potential” or whatever other euphemism for you-still-have-time you want to use is over. Now is the time to win. Now is the time to fulfill that potential that we had all seen in you. Now is what we, your fans, have been waiting for. 

The future is past. It is time for now!

It’s always rather challenging to know when the now is for our sports heroes. You know before it happens (“he/she has the potential to win”), you don’t have time to reflect while it is happening (“but can he/she win another one”), and you know it when it’s starting to be over, when the wave has just been crested (“his/her best days are behind him/her”). 

With Rahul Dravid, his now was always difficult to appreciate. He couldn’t have burst on to the scene with that 95 on debut at Lord’s (Lord’s, come on, how perfect, in retrospect, was that?). Dravid never burst on to, out of, off of, anything. And, what would become the recurring theme to us Dravid acolytes the world over, he was overshadowed. Overshadowed by another debutante who just happened to score that century he couldn’t, Sourav Ganguly, overshadowed even by an umpire’s retirement, Dickie Bird, overshadowed, ultimately, by the mere existence of Sachin Tendulkar (who, it seems, has always, right from the very start, and will, right to the very end, existed in his own, unimpeachable, now).

And thus (thusly? DFW …), in our collective consciousness Dravid simply floated through his now. And perhaps it was this that made appreciating him such a melancholy endeavor (there’s another one that I like, “languid melancholy,” Christian Ryan used it in an almost throwaway fashion while sorta-eulogizing VVS Laxman, whose own impenetrable legacy is a tome unto itself). To appreciate Dravid was to acknowledge the caveat inherent in the appreciation, that we were essentially giving him kudos for not getting the kudos we thought he deserved. His actual contribution, his actual brilliance, his actual everything, was, as it was from the beginning, overshadowed. Sachin, Sourav, Sehwag (hey, the “Three S’s”!), Srinath (“Four”!), Azhar’s unfortunate match-fixing allegations, Bhaji, Dhoni, Zaheer, India’s growing place in the world, the IPL, VVS (imagine that, he was overshadowed by VVS, who will have the “os” mentioned every 15 seconds when his time rolls around!), Kumble even (overshadowed by Kumble!, who was given his due appreciation at the very end for having been, you know, “os”-ed his whole life), his failure as captain, Twenty20, India’s rousing and eventual World Cup win, everything.

And, just like that, his now was over. We were not sure when it happened exactly, we only knew that it had happened. We know this because he was now in past tense, even as he carried on playing in the present. He was still capable, still worthy, but his greatness, now that it was finally being recognized, was being referred to quite firmly as something that had occurred, not something that was occurring. Luckily for us (i.e. Dravid acolytes), he had that moment in England, when everything around him fell, and he stood his ground, just like he always had. Only this time, we applauded.

Finally, he had his own moment in the Sun, the moment that we (Dravid acolytes) had all been waiting for. 

And, wouldn’t you know it, there was that ineffable sadness.

Because, you see, we knew that this was the end. That, even as we were hailing him for being who he had been this whole time, we were doing it with the full knowledge that the curtain had all but been drawn. Even in his moment, there was no absolute victory given that the tour was characterized by India’s failure, and his own impending end.

He should have left then, but that would have been too triumphant for Dravid. No, he carried on as he knew he must, as we knew he would, and it all whimpered out in Australia. 

And now, he’s gone.

Now, we will miss him. Now, we will tell him how great he was. Now, we will hoist him on our shoulders, and pat him on the back, and everyone else will step back for a moment. Now that he is no longer there, will we realize how much we needed him, still need him.

Now that he’s gone, you realize that he will never play for India again. That whole glorious moment encapsulated by his time with the team is over. And with this absolute passage of time, our now is irretrievably over. There is no more “one day ...” Whatever we wanted to be has been replaced by what we are. The time of future possibilities is past, the prerogative of youth has been replaced by the minutiae of adulthood. Our now, too, is gone. 

There will be other retirements. There will be deaths. There will be other events that we will use to mark mortality. But, and here is the crucial difference, these are all others. The world-shattering importance of each event, another prerogative of youth, will be diminished by our growing realization of the nature of time, of the passage of life, of the ultimate scope of the world we inhabit. We will come across it in the newspaper (ha, right!), pause a second to reminisce, shake our head at how fast time seems to tick, and then turn the page. What would have shaken us to our core, has now become another marker in the onwardness of everything. There are other things to focus on. Marriage. Career. Housing. Transportation Children. We are now grown up.

And that was the ineffable sadness always hanging in the air. Like our future possibilities, Rahul Dravid will be defined by his absence, rather than his presence.