Taking pride in land of my father

My father was a cricket fanatic whose love for the game was enthusiastically adopted by his children at an early age. He was also Indian, which makes tomorrow's India v England Test in Chennai, the first since his death, between the country of his birth and the one he chose to live in for more than 50 years, a resonant one for me.
Being what was most politely known as an Anglo-Indian 30 years ago, it was easy to find heroes for the British half of my ancestry but the only Indians I was interested in were cricketers. My father would bang on about Rabindranath Tagore or Satyajit Ray and I would impatiently try to steer the conversation back to Vinoo Mankad and Vijay Merchant.
I wanted to hear about people whose feats might impress my 12-year-old peers. This, remember, was still a time when what we would now call casual racism was rife. Some of it, like coming up to you full of bonhomie and singing "Cadburys take 'em and they cover them with chocolate" ad infinitum, was seen as having a cracking sense of humour instead of being abusive.
Another tack taken by a bumptious boss-eyed evangelist of the master race in our year at school was to appear to state an argument that no logic could destroy. "Just because, right," he would say, "a cat is born in a kipper box, it doesn't make it a fish." Before you could even respond with a risky "Hail, Spode!", he would wobble his Weeble frame across the playground with a look of smug triumph on his face to satisfy his craving for a ninth lunchtime bag of Seabrook's crinkle-cut.
There were others who sought common cause, the type who would preface every derogatory remark with, "No offence, but …" before unveiling their best Peter Sellers accent, usually more Welsh than sub-continental. Their conclusion, provided you didn't show a "sense of humour failure", was invariably along the lines of, "You're all right, you. At least your dad works for a living. It's them other buggers I'm on about." Little wonder, then, that when India toured England in 1979 I was desperate for them to do well and puncture the prejudices of the pre-teen "send 'em back" brigade.
At Headingley I got my chance to see India in the flesh and my first impressions were far from favourable. Only a year before Iqbal Qasim had been skelped by a Bob Willis bouncer and looking at these apparently frail men — short in stature, some bespectacled and the majority irredeemably square when compared to England's young cavaliers, Ian Botham and David Gower — I feared for their safety.
I need not have worried. Sunil Gavaskar, Anshuman Gaekwad and Mohinder Amarnath had faced far worse than Willis and Mike Hendrick on a damp pitch. In Jamaica in 1976 Michael Holding and Wayne Daniel unleashed a concerted assault that included a string of beamers and yet all three had shown formidable courage in those pre-helmet days before their captain, Bishan Bedi, had to surrender with five batsmen absent hurt in the second innings.
The Leeds Test was ruined by rain and by a wag on the long-leg boundary who greeted an approaching Indian fielder with a raucous "It stinks of curry round here now". This from a man whose only experience of such cuisine was dehydrated Vesta or the luminous gloop that fish shops sold to moisten the chips. He may have ventured into a curry house once but probably ended up ordering "eight of them big crisps".
Four years later at the 1983 World Cup the atmosphere had changed. There were more brown faces in the crowds and goodwill towards the Indian team after they defeated England in the semi‑final to face the seemingly unbeatable West Indies at Lord's.
A hat-trick of victories for Clive Lloyd's team looked inevitable after India scored only 183 in their innings but when Kapil Dev sprinted to catch a swirling Vivian Richards mis-hit, I don't think I have been as excited by a cricket match before or since. Kapil was in his pomp but it was Amarnath, Madan Lal and Roger Binny who did the damage with seam and swing. It was a nice twist that India became world champions by exploiting the "English conditions".
Their victory didn't make the team the pride of the Indian immigrant community, they had always had that honour, but it was a massive boost to the self-esteem, even to those of us who had passed the Tebbit test before it had been invented and supported England.
Getting older makes it harder to get up at 3.30am to watch the first session of matches played in India but I'll do it tomorrow because I know that someone to whom a love of this game is the least I owe would not have wanted to miss it.