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
My dear Owais , I guess these kind of characters exist in every community and neighborhood but still when I look back, I really enjoy even thinking of those times and the ‘dant’ that she used to give us even though we use to make our pitch much away from her house.
I wonder if kids of today enjoy as much as we used to, cuz I dont know but I feel that people’s attitudes have also changed and the sincerity and affection is gone!
Dear Zakoota. I enjoyed reading your description of ‘ainkoN wali’ lady. We also had similar character who would never return our cricket ball. Once she even used a knife to cut the tennis ball into two pieces and then throw the two pieces out of the wall onto the road, where we shouting for her to return our ball :)
Our street was basically ‘bowler gali’. We made all effort to provide extra advantage to bowlers so that more and more batsmen could get to bat (because of numbering). Therefore we used to keep ‘jhirri’ on tape ball to get swing and keep the batsman-bowler distance to 16-18 human steps which is much closer that standard 22 yards cricket pitch length.
The wierdest thing that we ever did to give bowlers extra advanage was to play with an oval ball. We wrapped tape on the ball so hard that it became oval (anda) shape. Batsman could never guess which way the ball would turn because oval shape leaves swing/turn all to a chance. This practise didn’t last long b/c batsmen complained and bowlers also didn’t like that swing/turn was left to chance instead of their own controlled swing.
Dear Aqil Sajjad. To get swing out of tape ball we deliberately kept a slit (we called it ‘jhirri’ in Urdu) open where there was no tape. After sometime bowlers in our street had perfected the art of swing bowling by keeping the ‘jhirri’ either on the right or left. If we turned the ‘jhirri’ backwards, the ball started reverse swing. You gotta try it if haven’t already.
I am sure Pakistan is one of the major markets for Nitto electrical tape even though half the country has no electricity :-)
When the tape ball revolution began in early 80’s I was a little kid but I vividly remember that at first there were only a couple of colors available in tape. By early 90’s Nitto was marketing tape in several colors and the most interesting of all was white that was used in the night tournaments.