Thursday, 15th April
Heat. Dust. Sweat. Dreams.
We built a cricket pitch today. Well, not today—it took five days. But today, under the merciless sun, I finally have the chance to sit and write this down, my hands still cracked from the red soil.
The soil came from Daya Uncle’s fields—far away, brought in by tractors in roaring, dust-choked loads. Red. Rich. The kind of earth that promises bounce, even if we didn’t quite know how to get it.
Dinesh Uncle was our chief architect. No prior experience. Not a single pitch made before. But he stood there like a general surveying a battlefield, pointing fingers, waving arms, commanding. We—my brothers Ankit, Balram, Narendra(youngest one) , and uncle Virendra—were just labourers. Hands and backs. No questions asked.
Friends came too. Hariram, Photu, Abhishek (Buchhi), and a swarm of children who just wanted to be part of something. Even the little ones carried water, or stood holding ropes, or simply watched with wide eyes. Everyone shared a hand in the heat.
The instruments of our madness:
Manjha – to label the ground, mark the sandy strip that would become sacred.
Gurmala – to smooth the surface, to give it that polished lie.
A 15-foot iron pipe, heavy as sin—35 kg. We rolled it back and forth, back and forth, a rope tied through both ends, pulling like bullocks on a grinding wheel. That pipe was to press the pitch, to make it stay longer. Our legs burned. Our palms blistered.
Water came from Dinesh Uncle’s house, through a pipe stretched all the way to the ground. A big drum stood at the site—a reservoir for when electricity failed, which it did, often. We didn’t stop. We couldn’t.
People passing by on the road… they stared. Some stopped their bikes, rolled down windows, squinted. A few figured out what we were doing—building a pitch, from scratch, with nothing but willpower and village engineering—and their faces lit up with something like wonder. “These boys,” they seemed to say, “they really love their cricket.”
Others laughed. Called us fools. Said we were ruining our time and effort. Immature studs, one man muttered. Wasting your youth in the sun. I wanted to tell him that youth is exactly for this—for building things that won’t last, for sweating with your brothers, for the joy of rolling a 35-kg pipe across red mud under a burning sky just so you can bowl a yorker next week.
But I just smiled. Let him think what he wants.
Five days. From first tractor load to last roll of the pipe. Five days of sun, water drum refills, rope burns, and Dinesh Uncle barking orders like he’d built a hundred pitches. Not a single one of us complained.
Tonight, the pitch lies there. Rough still. Honest. Red as the earth it came from. We haven’t played on it yet. Tomorrow, maybe. Or the day after. But standing here, looking at it—this patch of ground we pressed with our hands, our weight, our stubbornness—I feel something I can’t name.
Pride, maybe. Or the simple truth: cricket is not played in stadiums. It’s played on pitches built by uncles with no experience, brothers with sore backs, and friends who show up just because you asked.
We built this.
Let them call us fools.
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