The brave little prince

Gundappa Ranganath Viswanath glided into my life (or half-cut-half-drove his way into it) in the winter of 1974. Down 0-2 in the series, India were playing West Indies at Calcutta. Viswanath made 52 in the first innings. And then his 139 in the second helped set up a memorable - and in those days rare - Test victory. I followed that Test at my grandparents' house in Calcutta. My grandmother told me all about it.

It was one of those cavernous, many-winged old Calcutta mansions, filled with unexpected alleyways, stone-paved courtyards, and cool, marbled corridors. It was also one of those households in which nearly every adult was a member of the Cricket Association of Bengal and had a ticket to the annual Test match. Every winter, come a game at the Eden Gardens, everyone would troop off to the stadium for a five-day-long picnic.

Only the very young and the infirm were left behind. I was five then. My grandmother was dying of cancer. So there we were, my Dida and I. My grandmother listened to the radio and read the papers and constructed for me a narrative of the match. I heard from her of this valiant, triumphant little man who was fearlessly taking on gigantic, fierce bowlers, and defeating them. This image - that of a small man rising to the occasion, taking on giants, giving joy - stayed with me.

I wasn't aware of how much it had stayed with me until only recently. This summer, while in London for the publication of my book, I was being interviewed on BBC radio. "Viswanath was your favourite Indian cricketer," the interviewer said. "Did you identify with him because he was, like you, a very short man?" Well, I hadn't ever quite thought of it that way. But later, after the interview, I did. And perhaps there was more than a little in it.

For a stick-thin, very short boy who was shunted from one school to another in the early part of his childhood, there probably was something magical in a five-foot-two batsman standing up to bowlers who were often more than a foot higher than him; in his leaping in the air to play them square off the wicket; in the polite, charming disdain with which he faced up to them and caressed them to all parts of the ground.

But that wasn't all, of course.

Viswanath's allure took hold as I grew older. It was the manner in which he played his cricket that really enchanted me. Of course there were many match-winning innings: the 97 not out against West Indies at Chennai in 1975; the 112 against West Indies in a historic run-chase at Port-of-Spain in 1976; the 114 against Australia in Melbourne in 1981. On his day Vishy could easily murder any bowling attack in the world. But what I loved most was that he never left a drop of blood on the carpet.

Vishy's wrists seemed to be made of something more elastic than mere flesh and bone. His flicks on the leg side, his cuts and drives - and his trademark half-cut-half-drive - on the off, his late cut (so late, so fine) behind the wicket, were all played with an impish puckishness. There was audacity in them, and there was poise; but most of all, perhaps, there was a sense of enjoyment. You could imagine that he was humming as he worked.

Vishy could be a magical marauder. But he could just as well be infuriating, with a suicidal waft outside the off stump. It was the waft that was too often the problem, the reason why, even with his talent, he never ended up with no more than 14 Test hundreds and an average no healthier than 41.93 - more than decent in the 1970s, but not quite as staggering as it could have been.

But then Viswanath was never particularly driven or ambitious. He was humble, polite, he eschewed controversy, and he seemed happy to remain in the shadow of his friend and much more famous brother-in-law Sunil Gavaskar. My mates and cousins in those days were nearly all Gavaskar fans. Gavaskar made more hundreds, he broke more records: he was the obvious choice. Viswanath was fallible: just as capable of being divine as of being fickle. He was my mascot of the counterculture.

There was one incident that typified Vishy. During the 1980 Test against England in Bombay, he recalled Bob Taylor, whom the umpire had given out caught behind. Taylor and Ian Botham added 171 runs. India lost the game.

I can't imagine him in today's professional sporting world. Viswanath communicated such a sense of sheer joy in his play, such elegance and good nature, that it is impossible to imagine him fettered by the mundane, commercial world of endorsements and image-building.

I loved him most because he conformed to my notion of the game. He epitomised the schoolboy's idea of what cricket ought to be like. Cricket isn't all about heroism, sacrifice, artistry and joy. It wasn't, even during Viswanath's career. But how could I not adore someone who made it look as though it was?