Preface

I watched cricket for the first time when I was seven years old.

My father took me to a local ground, the kind that smells of cut grass and old leather, where the boundary rope is frayed and the scoreboard is updated by hand. I did not understand the rules. I still barely do. But I understood the waiting. The long, particular silence of a cricket crowd between deliveries — that collective held breath — felt like something I had known before in another form. Like prayer. Like grief. Like love waiting to be acknowledged.

This story grew from that afternoon.

It is not autobiographical, but it is true.