The Boy and His Cricket Dream

The boy loved to play cricket. Beginning from the first day he held a cricket bat, his love for the game only grew deeper. So, when selection sessions were scheduled for under-13 cricket team at school, it was natural that he badly wanted to make the cut. He started to have dreams of the big day. He practiced bowling every evening he came home from school. Little did he know that cricket had also become much needed medicine for his young soul tormented by the endless grind of coursework. He often wondered why he was supposed to learn so many subjects at school, and how someone managed to come up with such a ridiculous system where a single student was expected to excel in the content taught by many teachers each of whom only knew their particular subject. It was only rarely he ever saw the same teacher teaching two or more subjects, and it was very much clear to him they did not teach other subjects because they lacked the knowledge. Besides, not many teachers in his school ever even talked about the subjects apart from the one they taught, save for the times one of them asked which subject the class was to have next, requesting the time-table. And most of such inquiries only lead to the said teacher continuing their lesson through the next period if the teacher in charge of said subject was absent or happened to be late to class, in which case they were asked when they finally showed up if it was okay to take their period for continuing the lesson currently being taught.

The boy threw the ball to a wall back home, and batted to the ball that bounced off it. For bowling practice, he fixed two wickets in the middle of the road to his home, and bowled from one end while imagining a batsman at the other crease trying to hit as hard as they could to the incoming delivery. Each time the ball didn’t hit the wicket, the boy had to walk all the way to pick it up and come back to the bowling end to continue, the road was so it was only possible to bowl from one end. It didn’t bother him to do this though, he was happy he could just play. He attended cricket practices at school too. Though at school, he did not have to practice alone. He practiced with two of his best friends. One was the same age as he was, and the other an year his senior. The trio played good cricket. The boy was good at bowling; he bowled right-arm off-spin. His cricket idol was the highest test wicket taker in the history of international test cricket, Muttiah Muralitharan, whom he tried to imitate in his bowling action. One of his friends was a good fast bowler, the other had a talent for batting well. A fair bond of friendship was cultivated between them, or so thought the boy. The three friends talked about the players in their national cricket teams. The older kid, the one who is good at batting, was a foreign national, and he told the other two how cricket was regarded much highly as a sport in his country. The trio helped each other increase their skills in the sport they loved, and had a lot of fun in the process. Everyday they practiced, which happened twice a week, they laughed to silly jokes while cooling-down after a demanding practice session.

When the selection day finally came, the boy was very much happy. He believed he would be selected to play for the school cricket team, and he hoped his friends too would make it through the selections. But at the day’s end, the boy was alone in his room, looking at the distant horizon out the window. He was not crying, but he was sad. He had not been selected. However, both of his friends have been. That night, the boy had a dream of playing in the school cricket team with his friends—he was really happy in the dream. The next evening, he went to cricket practices at school. The two friends whom he thought were his best acted as if the boy was invisible. Both of them kept ignoring the boy. The boy finally asked why they were doing it, and they said because he was not selected to the school team, they cannot remain friends any longer. A few more words were exchanged between them, until the boy finally walked away and started playing with a different group of kids.