In India, you’re never far from cricket — or death

The heartbreaking scenes in India are difficult to comprehend and the correct course of action for cricketers difficult to divine.

Family members prepare funeral pyres at a makeshift crematorium in New Delhi

The proximity, almost intimacy, Indians have with death is confronting and intriguing to those of us brought up in the West, where the process has become so processed, so sterilised.

Not that far from the maidans and cricket stadiums of Mumbai, birds of prey feast on body parts in the Parsi tower of silence. In recent decades, the vultures themselves proved unable to meet the demand as their flocks thinned because of an anti-inflamattory drug used in cattle that had entered their food chain. Another issue arose as the well-heeled residents of nearby suburbs became upset with body parts being dropped by birds into their gardens.

Some time before this difficult century arrived, I stayed in a small hotel near the Ganges in Varanasi where they burn the bodies on wooden pyres by the river — Varanasi was the ultimate bucket list destination for Hindus at the end of their mortal tether.

A nearby hotel proudly displayed a sign beckoning would-be residents to “stay and die”. The poor simply took up residence on the banks and had their feet dipped in it as they breathed their last.

Not far from where the IPL matches were played in Delhi this week, there are dozens of funeral pyres burning to keep up with the dead.

It would be no surprise if matches were played with the smoke lingering over the grounds.

In India you are never far from a crematorium. Just as you are never far from cricket. Or death, as noted.

The messages from and conversations with Indian friends this week have been disturbing.

There’s a sense of guilt and impotency among those trapped here far from family members and something similar from those who are trapped there amid the tragedy.

Some are struggling and in a very dark place.

“We are dead,” says one on WhatsApp and in conversation he insists it is morning when it is clearly after 6pm where he is when we speak. Later I wonder if he meant “mourning”.

Four of his former work colleagues had died in the past 48 hours.

“This is life,” he said.

Indians have long lived in a smoke haze, whether from village fires, forest burns or worse, but India is suffocating now like so many of her people.

Sharda Ugra is one of the best cricket writers in her country, a woman of empathy and intelligence given not to emotional response. She spoke this week during a debate on the IPL conducting its business in cities where people are dying on the footpaths.

“The IPL taking place in Delhi at this time is completely inappropriate, it is insensitive,” she said. “There were two venues as a contingency in case it needed to be moved, they were Hyderabad and Indore.

“And, you know, I want to ask: in which civilised country would live sport like this be allowed if there were people dying on the roads and cremation grounds lit up at the same time as your cricket grounds are?”

Another friend is dealing with the grief of a close friend whose mother died last week.

An Australian born there, she says she finds herself for the first time in the “snow dome looking out”, when her life experience here has always been to look from a distance as others less fortunate endure disaster of this scale.

“To be honest Pete,” she wrote. “We would all be lost without the IPL right now.”

The cricket is a distraction. A relief. A vestige of the old world before this incomprehensible tragedy visited a country so dear to so many of us.

Ugra’s argument was to let the IPL continue, but not in the cities that cannot find oxygen for those who struggle to breathe or wood to burn those who have lost that struggle.

This week the forest department granted permission to South Delhi Municipal Corporation to chop nearly 200 dead or dry trees for cremations.

The situation is, as the images emerging in recent weeks suggest, far worse than the government(s) will admit to.

Another friend has an aunt who was lucky enough to make it into a hospital but they lost all contact with her as health officials remove all patients’ phones to ensure no videos or photographs of the situation emerge.

Such images may contradict the claims of a government.

One of the central government’s more decisive actions in response to the crisis has been to demand social media companies remove accounts from critics whose reporting on the situation does not sit well with their triumphalist version of events.

This is the same government that claimed it had achieved victory over the virus.

The IPL and many of its senior participants are submissive to the government’s will and the real obscenity has been the relative silence from franchises and senior cricket figures. Several players’ parents are ill but they do not — or dare not — speak of it.

The Australian coaches, players and commentators who remain in India have their focus on the job at hand. Even if they wished to leave now they could not, as their government has made the extraordinary move of denying entry to its own citizens.

The propriety and morality of the situation is not clear cut. Providing entertainment is a small gesture, something like making a cup of tea for or delivering a casserole to the bereaved — an act my mother’s generation insisted upon and one not without merit.

Donating money, as some have, is critical. It will never be enough to quiet the critics, but any charity will tell you they will take what they can and that the motives of the donor are generally irrelevant. Surely it can’t hurt, hopefully it will help.

There was a thought among backpackers that the East could be so challenging to those raised in the West that equilibrium was often lost and madness took its place. There is a sense that this wretched situation is so great a mind from either place could not process or cope with it.

What needs to be done is obvious, what should be is not so.