Gaps Like Scripture

I am not sure where my Sri Lankan cricket fandom currently is. It's somewhere in the seven stages of grief. But last night, that didn't matter. Last night, fandom felt too small a word. Last night, Pathum Nissanka brought down the walls of the most cynical of the cynics. He transcended the grim, the mediocre and the mundane we have grown accustomed to.

In those final overs, he seemed to see the ball not as a tiny sphere of leather and seam, but as a celestial body. A great asteroid hurtling toward earth - giant, luminous and inevitable. And he met it not with panic, not with calculation, but with the serenity of someone entrusted with the final act of a species. He middled the ball as though this were the last time a human being would ever middle one. As though the craft of batting had to be displayed in its perfect form one last time before the curtain fell.

You could have enjoyed some of the spectacle with your eyes closed. The sound alone was enough. That crisp repeated kiss of leather against willow, is the music every true cricket lover can't get enough of.

Of late, Nissanka has built a reputation for these bursts. Sudden, incandescent stretches where he assumes a God complex and gaps open themselves to him like scripture. He is one of those short kings, who seem to carry in their compact frames, a private rebellion against proportion. And when he enters full flow, it doesn't look like he is going to stop.

We have seen this archetype before. Aravinda de Silva. Sachin Tendulkar (you can't tell me that you didn't get reminded of Sachin when he jumped out to the leg side and then scythed it over backward point for a six). These were men who stood closer to the earth yet somehow had a special relationship with the sky. There is something almost mythic about the vertically challenged batter in full command. It violates an instinct we did not know we possessed — that power must look a certain way, that dominance must arrive in more muscular form.

You know, rationally, what they are capable of. You have the statistics. You have the highlight reels. And yet each time when one of them, with that small, self-contained build, swivels and sends a fast bowler fifteen rows back, it feels like some kind of a violation. As though some sacred law of universe has been broken. And it feels delicious.

And then there was that pull.

Marcus Stoinis, no villain, no amateur, charging in with all the professionalism of medium pace — and Nissanka, rocking back ever so slightly, unhurried, carving that short ball into memory of everybody watching. A moment, whose only residue was pure awe.

Some of us will carry that shot to our graves.