“Sorry I’m late, but traffic was insane this morning,” I moaned to Anil, my tennis coach. I left my water bottle and towel on a bench and walked across the clay court to greet him. He was staring through the chain link fence, past the bleachers, but he turned with a smile and replied, “I know, I got stuck, too. So many big trucks. That’s why air is so bad.” His eyes darted back beyond the fence, and then, distractedly, he pointed at the net where two baskets of tennis balls awaited. “Warm up,” he said.
We both stood on the same side, with Anil at the net and me at the baseline. He tossed balls to my forehand and backhand, and I attempted to hit them to the other side. Each hit elicited a comment:
“Beautiful, girl!”
“Nice try, girl!”
“Amazing form!”
“That’s your stroke!”
And so on. This is how my weekly lessons usually start. Very much still a beginner, I revel in Anil’s consistent praise and positive attitude. He has a bright genuine smile, and his cheerleading boosts my spirits. But on this day, he seemed fixated on something and his words fell flat.
When the baskets emptied, he picked one up, flipped the metal legs around to serve as handles and handed it to me to scoop up the balls scattered around the clay court. Usually, he would take the other basket to help, but instead he looked exasperated.
“What is that?” he asked. I followed his gaze but saw nothing unusual.
“What is what?” I asked.
“That sound!” he cried.
I set down my basket and paused to listen. Typical sounds in Delhi including drumming, honking, barking, mooing and shouting, the shrill sawing of rebar and clattering of bricks at construction sites, auto rickshaws revving, car alarms shrieking, random bells ringing, more honking, more barking and more, more, more, often all at the same time.
Yet, weirdly, all I heard was the chirp of a lone cricket.
“It’s just a cricket,” I laughed and resumed by ball collecting.
Anil stomped over the to the fence, a cloud of red dust in his wake. Suddenly, silence. He turned and smiled, “It stopped,” he said, relieved.
“It will start again,” I said, popping the basket onto a ball. “Haven’t you ever had a cricket in your house? They chirp and drive you crazy, but then they stop so you can’t ever find them.”
Anil shook his head in frustration. I handed him the basket of balls, and sure enough. Chirp, chirp, chirp. My kind, patient coach smacked the metal fence with his hand, quieting the cricket once again.
“Rally,” Anil said, his smile tighter than usual, his voice edgy. He walked to the other side of the net and hit a ball to me, counting aloud how many times I hit it back. At one point, he let my return zip by him. He grabbed a ball from the basket and whacked it at the fence. “It’s making me crazy!” he said with a forced laugh. I hadn’t even noticed the cricket’s encore.
Soon, a young man named Sandeep showed up. “This is new ball boy,” Anil said. Sandeep hung out behind the baseline on Anil’s side, sprinting back and forth, trying to catch the balls I hit across the net. I’m pretty new to tennis, but that didn’t seem like typical ball boy strategy. After awhile, Anil stopped, called to me, “One minute!” and then turned to Sandeep for a spirited conversation in Hindi. He pointed his racquet toward the fence, and Sandeep started to move in that direction, abandoning his ball boy duties.
Incredulous, I slowly and sarcastically asked the obvious question, “Did you just tell Sandeep to go find the cricket?”
“I can’t stand it!” Anil said. We both cracked up.
I tried to explain the irony to Anil. I tried to express how expats desperately seek out the sounds of nature in Delhi. I tried to make him see the silliness inherent in his obsession with an insect. But he just let that big smile spread across his face and squinted a bit, suggesting nonverbally that I wasn’t making any sense.
Driving home at the end of the day, I sat in traffic, enveloped in the discordant sounds of a developing city – street children rapping on my window with their relentless heartbreaking pleas for money, the bleating blaring blasting horns of vehicles pinned to the sides of my car, the rumbling cough of diesel bursting out of overloaded teetering trucks, the whiny tinny tunes erupting from open taxi windows, the reverberatating jackhammer of metro construction sending waves through my feet and up to my teeth. No way to escape it. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do, but take a deep breath and channel that cricket.
