A middle-aged man from a ‘respectable family’, drunk out of his mind, ran down the street screaming ‘Maradona is my baba!’ completely naked. Every family in every house came out to see and immediately turned around and went back, trying to unsee. His wife chased him shouting in Bengali, ‘What exactly are you doing?!’ a question the whole neighborhood had.
Maradona lifted the World Cup. My street and the city celebrated like we had lifted the cup. Not only did we not have any historical, geographical or colonial links with Argentina, at that point the country didn’t even have an embassy in India. Within a few months, the naked man sold his house and moved, unable to reconcile his local shame with his drunken Argentinian desires.
Years later, Maradona visited Calcutta, by now Kolkata, for an event. The organisers had planned to have him on a bus. But it was mobbed to such an extent that El Diego, while watching a couple of Bengali fans trying to set themselves on fire to get his attention, remarked, ‘These people are insane.’ This from a retired great, now on drugs and mentally unwell.
In the photograph in the newspaper the next day, I noticed a photo of my streaker neighbour, now much older, in the mob, in tears. Again shirtless. Maradona was clearly an addiction he couldn’t kick.
Years later, I ran into him at a stand-up show. He was quite a senior executive at a big Indian bank now, with salt and pepper hair and gravitas that time, and the beating of life, bring. He came up to me to ask me if I lived on his street in the mid-1980s. I said I did. Neither of us brought up the incident but we both had ‘Maradona’ in our heads. He knew that I knew and he shuffled away, embarrassed.
That night, I got a friend request from him on Facebook. It had no message. 14 years passed and I got a news flash on a black cold London night, at the height of Covid, that Maradona had died. In 4 minutes, I got a Facebook message from the same Bengali gent. It had one teardrop emoji. I never heard from him again.
In West Bengal – and I’ve heard in Kerala, the Northeast, Goa and some pockets of India – when the World Cup happens, a religious frenzy takes over. We’re suddenly Europeans or South Americans, the local language football commentary sounds like the commentator is in the middle of childbirth, a hysteria that leaves the rest of India utterly confused. Apart from city slickers in the big cities who have found a passion for the English Premier League, football is bewildering to the masses, no matter how many billionaires and movie stars try to promote it with ISL.
The goal is noble – to get us a World Cup team. Yet somehow, large parts of India treat football, as irony would have it, the way the British treat cricket – a niche sport for the elite, a nostalgic colonial remnant. Continuing with the irony, the British see football as the sport of the masses. It’s the exact opposite here.
No matter how much optimism I can conjure up for the future of Indian football, and no matter how many billions are poured into ‘Let’s Football’ ISL ads, it is unlikely that in my lifetime, I’ll see India playing in a World Cup.
So how do we bide the time till then? With Bengali and Malayali obsession with Messi. A commentator after the Croatia game declared, in all his neutral objectivity, ‘If Messi does not score, we will all have to kill ourselves’. He scored, and luckily, the commentator – and the rest of us – are alive to watch the great man play his last World Cup game tonight.