Owais Mughal
I grew up playing tape ball cricket on Karachi streets. Every evening, I was usually the first one to put a broken chair as wickets in the center of the street, put tape on the balls, mark creases with a chalk, and put a stone as the bowling mark.
(Photo to the right is of a street cricket player from Chitral, Pakistan.)
Slowly other boys from the neighbor hood would come out and the game would start. In those early minutes of set up, a boy from the neighborhood helped me a lot. He was a domestic helper in one of the homes and used to get a permanently bald cut from the local barber. So people started calling him ‘ganjay’. And some with lesser formal education started calling him ‘takloo.’
After a Hajj season our cricket team suddenly got some more bald players who had recently became one after performing the holy ritual.
This caused a big confusion in our local team on how to distinguish between so many bald players.
After serious deliberation in a local ‘shoora’ (cabinet) meeting of neighborhood boys it was unanimously decided to name our original ganja guy as ‘Tikanjoo’.
The logic behind this nomenclature was:
Ganja + Takloo = Tikanjoo
Other guys also got some creative names like Ganja II, Kojak, Bald Eagle etc.
(Photo to the left is from Quetta, Pakistan and it shows ingenuity of players who have built the cricket wicket by stacking up stones.)
Now Tikanjoo had great passion for cricket. Sometimes I used to see him waiting for me to put wickets on the street so that he can get a break from his employers and come out to play. I would then send him to other houses in neighborhood to ring call bells and ask the ‘V.I.P cricketers’ who needed a daily invitation to play cricket to come out.
Tikanjoo bowled really fast jerk balls. He had a perfectly smooth run up of a fast bowler. He would run his 32 steps, jump in his stride but then throw tape ball like a stone released from a catapult with out circling his arm over. To get a better picture, imagine Shoaib Akhter bowling in a fluttering ‘shalwar qameez’ and wearing Bata’s ‘hawai chappal’ (flat open slip-ons.) But man o man, Tikanjoo was fast!
(I took this photograph in June 2005. Temperature at that time was 45 degree centigrade in Islamabad. It shows the passion of cricket. These players are using a trash can as the wicket.)
Poet Zameer Jaffri once said a ‘sher’ (couplet) about the West Indian fast bowler Wes Hall which perfectly fits the way Tikanjoo used to bowl in our steet. It goes like this:
shor utha ke Hall aata hai, khel ka intaqaal aata hai
Hall se pehle ball aati hai, ball se pehle Hall aata hai
If any batsman didn’t get out with technically correct bowling then we used to bring out our secret weapon. the Tikanjoo. Due to incorrect bowling action of Tikanjoo, batsmen would complain but in street cricket it was to no avail. After ‘Tikanjoo’ was unleashed then more often than not, he would get the wicket of the well set batsman.
As a rule of street cricket, a direct hit in neighbourhood homes is considered out.
(Photo to the right is from Quetta, Pakistan. It shows multiple cricket games going on at the same street.)
If someone got out in such manner, we used to request Tikanjoo to be a useful member of the team and prove his loyalty by bringing back the ball. He would then climb walls, pipes, windows, anything and reach roofs in no time and retrieve the ball for us.
Then one day Tikanjoo found work in another neighborhood and left our locality. He was talked about for few days and then everyone forgot about him. We grew up into our current roles of life. Nobody knows what happened to Tikanjoo after few months.
I hope wherever Tikanjoo is, he is fine and enjoying the cricket as much as he did in our childhood. He must be close to 50 years of age in 2018. At this moment I don’t even recall his real name but I just thought about him and it brought a smile to me and thus I wanted to share above lines with you.
(Photo to the above left is our street in Federal-B-Area, Karachi — where Tikanjoo used to bowl his super fast throws. The street looks deserted without a cricket wicket in the center and all the care free boys of yesteryears having grown up into men with responsibilities.)
Before ending this post, I also want to share a ‘sher’ which my friend Amjad Hussain first shared with me:
jab cricket khela karte the,
osay wicket banaya karte the
hum jis se pani peete the,
woh matka aakhir toot gaya
Nice post. Reminds me of the good old days when I could play cricket.
I did not play much street cricket except when I went to my khalla’s place where my cousins and I would usually play minus two in their street.
In case you are wondering, minus two means every one bats for a fixed number of overs regardless of whether he gets out, but everytime he is dismissed, two runs are subtracted from his score. Later, we decided that the deduction would be 2 runs on the first dismissal, but then increase as 4, 6, 8, 10 and continue to be 10 thereafter.
There was also a rather unfriendly old gentleman in the street who would get mad at us whenever the ball landed in his lawn. One day he said to me while I was balling “aap aissi ball karain keh vo idhar maar hee na sakay” As if I was deliberately feeding lose balls to the batsman.
Fortunately, the other people in the neighbourhood were nicer. Something inside me tells me that the ball used to land in his place more than other houses, or may be it’s just that I only remember it mostly going to his place because of the difficulty in retreiving it and getting scolded on a few ocasions.
Interesting post dude,
I just noticed one interesting thing about the images which is the short selections of the players and playing away from the body…
Typical Pakistani players :)…and might be future of Pakistan’s cricket.
Reading your article makes me feel nostalgic. I spent my childhood playing cricket, hockey and football in the streets as well, much to the annoyance of many of the neighbours. We had far too many nicknames for each other to list here. From what I hear, gali cricket is dead on my street now. That makes me sad.
Tikanjoos and Gittaks of our streets (with their technical errors corrected) may improve our national side if they ever get a chance to show their skills. But the photographs make me wonder that will we ever give the required respect that our historical heritage and sites deserve! But, these pictures do show the passion that we have for cricket. And another positive indication is that we have found a useful function for the dust bin.
and your post bought a smile to my face.
i spend my youth doing much the same – our Tikanjoo was Gittak – named after his diminutive stature – who jerked bowled the finest leg-breaks ever seen and who was the first to put up the boundary flags on league match days.
May he be watching and playing cricket even as I sit here, trapped.
Thanks,