Good reads: Miracle Makers by Bharat Sundaresan with Gaurav Joshi

That pun was a low-hanging fruit, and I was hungry.

Perfection can be vague. As we trek through life, searching for experiences to cherish and remember our journey by, we come across moments that are so good they feel scripted. We stretch for descriptions and often land on the word perfect. After stumbling upon a few such experiences, we discover that perfection can also be measurable and compared. Some moments are just more perfect than others. Maybe inexplicably so, but in our minds, nothing in the sequence of events could be changed for something better. 

The Border Gavaskar Trophy of 2020-21 was perfect; more perfect than other Test series.

Scorecards and highlight-packages would never suffice as the story of India's tour to Australia in 2020. Not even two documentaries, which, while doing an important job, never really do it properly. Someone had to sit down and speak about this entire series at length. Bharat Sundaresan's new book, Miracle Makers: Indian Cricket's Greatest Epic, written with Gaurav Joshi, fills that much-needed pocket of space.

Over the last few years, Bharat has built a reputation for bringing deep dives and long, ponderous exploration into cricket stories. So, while regular programming might serve us a peek into Nathan Lyon's evolution as a spinner through a change in biomechanics or tactics, Bharat visited his hometown, Young, and dug for the roots that made Lyon the person. Besides the Australian base that placed him at a vantage point for observing this tour, Bharat's inclination to peek beneath the curtains made him the perfect candidate to write the story of a series that, even twenty-six months later, defies belief.

Do you remember 2020? Yes, that year. It seems so far away yet so unforgettable. Barricades, borders, chalk-marked standing zones at departmental stores. Friends, who lived two lanes away and met me multiple times every week, were only reachable through a video call on Zoom. Nothing that happened in 2020 can be explained without the context of Covid and its impact on our personal atmospheres. Bharat does due justice to this story by telling us about the situation in Australia at that time. The first two chapters map out the strict border rules imposed in Australia to combat the spread of the virus, and how a cricket team had to navigate those lines to compete in probably the most anticipated series in the cricket circuit. From the venues available, to the hotels that could host the touring party, down to the distant fields where some could practice, Bharat illustrates this otherwise ancillary information with painstaking detail.

The third chapter, too, delves into the organisation of this tour, which itself took a long time to get a complete green light. The Indian group spent their first fourteen days in Australia in locked hotel corridors, and their suffocation is apparent through the messages some of them passed to the writer. There was also a realisation that the conditions are challenging for Australian citizens too. This quote from the book highlights what it was like for Australians: “At the time of the Indian team's arrival, close to 30000 Australians were still waiting to get back home with no guarantees as to when.” By the time a reader emerges from these chapters, she knows that the series was unusual from the get-go. In the middle of a ravaging pandemic, it was a near miracle that we were getting a full white-ball leg and a four-match Test series between India and Australia.

“This will be the most unique tour since the Second World War. I've told the boys to suck it up for fourteen days. It might feel like a prison, but after that you'll be free birds.”

Bharat begins the second chapter with these soaring lines, said to him by Ravi Shastri, head coach of India. Right from this point to the last page of the book, the story of this tour is given depth and texture by quotes from Ravi Shastri and Bharat Arun, often taken immediately after an eventful day. This privileged access to the coaching staff elevates the reading experience, almost planting us as a fly on the wall inside the environs of an elite athletic team. How many times have we wished, after seeing something significant, to get one minute inside the dressing room? For example, what must it have been like at Lord's after Mohinder Amarnath dismissed Michael Holding on 25th June 1983? This book doesn't quite get us video footage, but it gets immediate bytes from the two most involved people who seem tremendously generous with their time and insights.

Over the following chapters, Bharat takes you through some key protagonists of the tour. Bharat's perspective makes this book unique because he doesn't bother reading out how many fours Ajinkya Rahane hit during his century at Melbourne. Instead, he delves into the veins of Rahane the leader and batter, and paints the backdrop to our vivid memory of his knock. There are chapters dedicated to Bharat Arun, Virat Kohli, Ravi Shastri, and of course, the hero of the finale, Rishabh Pant.

One of the most significant such sections is dedicated to Mohammed Siraj. His spirit in continuing on tour even after his father's demise, and his bravery in pointing out the racist abuse hurled at him by fans at the Sydney Cricket Ground, left many of us fans moved. Bharat also outlines Siraj's story with some experiences he has endured as an Indian in Australia. The dignity with which Bharat has written about such a critical subject will make readers pause and reflect.

Each chapter leaves new insights and many broken myths — a sign of a good story. As Bharat weaves the personal journeys of players and coaches into the tapestry of the series, a reader begins to appreciate the infinite moving parts that need to work for a team to perform well in conditions utterly alien to their comfort zone.

Australia has a unique space in the hearts of Indian cricket fans of a particular vintage. We have looked towards that country with a lot of envy. And through that envy, came an admiration. We looked up to them. Their grounds were beautiful, bigger, and greener. Their cricketers were bigger, stronger, and fitter. Even their crowds seemed to catch better than some of our fielders. Until the 2003-04 tour, sending a competitive team to their backyard was a pipe dream. Over the following decade, Indian teams toured significantly better. A draw here, a win there. In the two years and two months between December 2018 and January 2021, India have won two Test series in Australia. The latest of those was unlikely to even happen, then had a nightmarish start with that 36 all out in Adelaide, and took a hard right into something most of us wouldn't have dreamt of.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said, “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it to recount it.” While our memories will, for a long time, do an excellent job of the former, Miracle Makers does a perfect job of the latter.