By Chloe Saltau
LONG before he found a special place in Australian hearts, a place reserved mostly for loathing, Indian spinner Harbhajan Singh was known to have a quick temper, a wicked one-liner and a problem with authority.
Still the depth of the Australians' dislike of Harbhajan, who has been central to almost every controversy during this most acrimonious of summers, has been baffling those who know him.
A young man with a rebellious streak, he once stormed into the cafeteria of India's National Cricket Academy and tore a dietary chart from the wall. He had, depending on which version of events you hear, found a cockroach or a hair in his food and was fed up (literally, as it turned out) with meals containing none of the nutritional virtues promoted in the menu.
The teenaged Harbhajan was by then already one of the best spinners in India, but his outburst in the dining hall was enough to get him booted out of the academy.
He already had a reputation for speaking his mind and refusing to tolerate insults, qualities that might ordinarily engender respect from Australians.
Instead, the 27-year-old is public enemy No. 1, with Matthew Hayden's "little obnoxious weed" remark among the more polite things said about him in the Australian dressing room.
It is not surprising that those close to Harbhajan believe the Australians have got him all wrong; nor do they defend his intemperance.
They say he is a product of his lower-middle class upbringing in the industrial town of Jalandhar in the north of India, where his father ran a modest metalworking business.
When Harbhajan was 18 his father died of cancer, leaving him as the only breadwinner with the duty of caring for his ageing mother and finding husbands for his five sisters.
While his devotion to his family is unwavering, he is said to have no political consciousness whatsoever and therefore little understanding of how his words and actions will be perceived in the context of tense Australia-India relations.
"He stands up for you and speaks his mind. He is forthright, and some people don't like that. They like diplomatic people, and he is not one of them," said Murali Kartik, the left-arm spinner who is a longtime friend of Harbhajan and attended the academy with him before the infamous meal-time tantrum.
"There were lots of fingers being pointed and a lot of people having a go at him. People were talking about an attitude problem but his dad had just died. It was probably the lowest ebb in his life."
Kartik has firm friends in the Australian team, including Hayden and Andrew Symonds, who were his drinking partners after a game in Mumbai during last year's heated one-day series. He has a theory on why Harbhajan is so unloved by the Australians.
"The general Australian mentality is to have a go at somebody who you think is the most threatening in the team and see if he reacts," Kartik said. "I have lots of friends in the Australian team but I think they have a special liking for Harbhajan, I don't know why. But he gives it back. He says what he thinks and I think that is a fantastic quality."
Australia's epic tour of India in 2001 was a life-changing experience for the off-spinner, who took 32 wickets in the series and established a hold on Ricky Ponting that endures seven years later.
He was still coping with the death of his father, his ejection from the academy and controversy about his action, and considered giving up cricket to follow the path taken by many Punjabi youths in seeking a new life and livelihood in America, Canada or Australia.
"It's not like when you are 18 you can go and do whatever you want to do," he said in a recent interview with Channel Nine. "At one stage I was thinking of leaving the cricket and going away."
When the 2001 series was won, Harbhajan hugged India's New Zealand-born coach John Wright, and cried. While Sourav Ganguly was the captain who got the most out of Harbhajan, he also shared a warm if sometimes turbulent relationship with Wright, who is said once to have locked the impulsive spinner out of the dressing room after he played a dumb shot, leaving Harbhajan to bang on the door pleading to be allowed in.
"I was the first foreign coach, and we both had our critics. We had that in common," Wright said.
"We had some robust and honest discussions, but he always played for me. He is one of the best kids I have worked with, that's all I can say.
"He may be the type of player who can upset and annoy the opposition, but he is fiercely proud and he gave the team something I thought we lacked and needed. Sometimes that surprises people."
The quality Wright craved, and saw in Harbhajan, was a willingness to meet the Australians' gaze, and a refusal to be bullied. "He is not going to take a backward step," Wright said.
"There are situations where certain guys don't get on, and that can be inflamed when certain things happen on the field. But I hope Harbhajan is not judged by how he gets along with one or two of the Australian blokes."
Nor did Harbhajan get along with Wright's successor, former Australian captain Greg Chappell, and he fell out of the team while Chappell and Rahul Dravid were in charge. But one of his closest friends in the team is Sachin Tendulkar.
Tendulkar treats Harbhajan like a younger brother or son, and staunchly defended him when he was accused of racially abusing Symonds during the fractious Sydney Test by allegedly calling Australia's only black player a monkey.
Therein, of course, lies the main reason for the Australians' intense dislike of Harbhajan. They believe he is more than a hot-head and that he has been allowed to get away with racial abuse despite being a repeat offender. Indeed, the NZ high court judge who heard his appeal, Justice John Hansen, probably would have suspended him on a lesser charge if the International Cricket Council had furnished him with details of his long list of priors.
The trauma of the racism hearing and its aftermath does not appear to have dulled Harbhajan's instinct to bite back, and in Wright's words he has always been "a bit quick on the trigger". During the recent one-day international in Adelaide, Ponting challenged him to "show me what you've got, show me what you've got", leading Harbhajan to retort that he had done more than Ponting in the series so far.
In other circumstances the exchange might have passed without notice, but in the emotion-charged context of the series the pair was pictured in animated post-game discussion and the public feud continued.
During the Sydney Test, Harbhajan launched into an extravagant roll when he dismissed the Australian captain, and according to Indian sources knew exactly how much his over-the-top celebration would infuriate Ponting.
When at home in Jalandhar, Harbhajan leads a simple life, content sitting in his rooftop garden overlooking the narrow street where he learned the game singing Punjabi songs or in the gardens eating fruit.
While he has a long history of confrontation and provocation, Harbhajan's friends say his moodiness is offset by honesty. His anger usually flashes, then dissipates quickly and he does not hold grudges. The Australians, judging by their reaction to him, do.