IT was the moment 19-year-old Ginny had waited for a long time. Glued to the TV since last Thursday morning, her upcoming BA second-year exams were the least of her concerns. For, there were bigger tensions. Her brother Sonu had done it in the morning with the ball. Now it was his turn with the bat. Elder brother Kartar—a badminton coach and a journo with a local Jalandhar newspaper—was tense; homemaker mother Avtar Kaur was feeling ‘weak’, and elder sister Amrit just couldn’t see her brother Harbhajan Singh face the bouncers of McGrath and Gillespie.
And then the unexpected happened—there was a power failure! The uncertainty was killing. "It was very cruel. We had to settle for the radio commentary. We wanted to see Sonu hit those two runs so badly," says Ginny. Later in the evening, the family was once again in front of the TV, watching the replay of the final day’s play—in between attending to the steady stream of guests arriving with congratulatory messages.
An introvert in more ways than one, Harbhajan doesn’t really have too many friends in Jalandhar. After his initial years in the local government school, he joined the mgn School, Adarsh Nagar for his 12th class, only to leave it soon after he was selected to the Pace Academy in Chandigarh. Says Kartar: "He’s not really interested in anything other than cricket. Even when he’s sitting idle, he’d play with the ball. And when there was no ball available, he’d simply keep repeating his action. So many times I’ve had to admonish him for this." An avid pop and Punjabi music fan, there was a time when Harbhajan even toyed with the idea of taking up badminton, judo and even bhangra seriously! Says his brother: "He was very confused in the early ’90s. He just didn’t know what to do then."
Says Kartar, "I can never forget those days when there were all those controversies around his bowling action. It was really tough for him, and that was also the time when our father passed away (a nuts-and-valves dealer, he died of hepatitis last August). That was a terrible blow for him. But he never allowed all those setbacks bog him down. He was always sure of staging a comeback. But, believe me, none of us ever thought that this is the kind of comeback he’d planned."
Harbhajan is a star now. But, for the handful of his friends, he still remains the boy next door. Says Surinder Sharma, his childhood friend who also plays minor county for Baisely, England: "I still remember those days when we used to go to the local stadium in Jalandhar toplay cricket. Sonu then used to have a ladies bicycle and he would pick me up everyday. When he started playing Ranji cricket, he graduated to a scooter and when he started playing for India, the scooter gave way to a car. But he always remained the person he was—down to earth and never proud of his feats. He still looks like the same aggressive cricketer he used to be when we used to play together."