As Karun Nair fixed his cap, stroked the stubbled chin and smiled into the cameras mounted near the stairway to the dressing room, Kerala captain Sachin Baby, striding onto the ground, yipped at the reporters queuing up to shoot questions: “Avanod Malayalathil utharam parayan para!” Ask him to give the answers in Malayalam. Karun flashed a hearty smile and retorted: “Seri, aykotte! Roughly translated as “ok, let it be.”
It’s been a dreamy season for Karun’s Vidarbha, and Baby’s Kerala. Now the two teams will be vying for the Ranji Trophy. There is a bit of history; in 2017-18, Vidarbha had steamrollered Kerala in the quarterfinals enroute to their first championship title. Around 20-25 journalists from Kerala are at Nagpur, sniffing a chance to report history.
For the next half an hour after, Karun patiently answered their questions, often indulging in one-on-one sessions, forced to hear the same questions about his ties with Kerala and give similar answers. Like, “how often do you visit Kerala? What’s your favourite cuisine? Do you speak Malayalam at home? Will you play for Kerala if offered a chance? But he showed no displeasure, even if he could not resist giggling at times, and spoke sparkling Malayalam for someone raised in Bengaluru.
Later, relieved that someone is asking him questions in English, he says: “I don’t think I have given so many interviews in Malayalam in my entire life.” Here, the Malayalam vernacular media that had turned up in droves was trying to dust up his Malayali roots, which his surname makes ubiquitous.
A few yards away, a different reunion was playing out. The moment some Vidarbha Cricket Association office bearers spotted Aditya Sarwate, who moved to Kerala at the start of this season, they rushed and hugged him. Some of his ex-teammates huddled around him, raved about his new tattoo on his forearms and invited him home. Sarwate would tell this daily: “My phone has not stopped ringing ever since I landed here. They want to meet me, have dinner or lunch and things like that. After all, we had been teammates all these years, won and lost together.”
He walked away from the crowd and glanced wistfully at the ground that made him. “Obviously, I felt emotional. I am back to the ground where I grew up, made my first steps in the game, and I am very proud of my achievements with… them.” The “them” chokes somewhere in his throat. Until last year, it was “us.” “Kya kare, we have to move on, and my heart is 100 percent with Kerala.”
Sarwate, like Karun, is an outsider in his team. But both have not only revived their careers, but also emerged as indispensable parts of their teams in the trek to the finals. Sarwate conspired Gujarat’s dramatic collapse on the final day in Ahmedabad, besides being the second-highest wicket-taker for his side (30 at 17.50). Karun amassed 642 runs at 45 to continue his domestic renaissance that scaled its crescendo in the Vijay Hazare tournament.
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Before the move they were battling mental demons. Karun was without a team for a year, after he was axed from Karnataka the year before. “Those were difficult days. I was uncertain about everything, like whether my career has ended, or if I would ever play competitive cricket. I am not an extrovert, so I can’t really express in words how sad I felt during that time. So when I got the Vidarbha, I jumped on it and ensured that I wouldn’t make them regret the decision,” says Karun, who had coincidentally scored a match-winning hundred against Vidarbha in a Ranji final.
Similarly, Sarwate was hurt when talks floated within the coaching staff that he was past his sell-by-date after the tragic final against Mumbai last year. Murmurs of his flailing fitness and commitment hurt one of the tireless servants of Vidarbha, one of the protagonists of the back-to-back title-winning seasons.
Even in his supposedly ordinary season, in 2023-24, he has snaffled 40 scalps at 18.87. “I felt hurt, but I thought it is for my own good to come out of my comfort zone and prove that I am still good enough at this level to take wickets. I was extremely motivated to win games for Kerala,” says Sarwate, whose decade-long domestic career has fetched 306 first-class wickets at 19.25 apiece, besides the two hundreds.
The 35-year-old from Nagpur has faced tougher crises in his life. He was in his teens when his father got bed-ridden and whom he used to bathe and feed. It broke their financial robustness, so he ensured that he completed his graduation and acquired a diploma in financial management that he topped. In case cricket failed him, he had something to lean back on.
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Both—multiple Ranji winners and one-team horses for much of their career—have seamlessly adjusted to the cultures of their new teams. “They all speak Hindi quite well, and I have known some of them for several years. They have been very warm towards me, which has reflected on my performances,” says Karun.
Not many in the Kerala team speak Hindi, but language barrier has not hindered Sarwate’s bond with his teammates. “Most of them speak English, some Hindi too. Then there is Jalaj bhai, with whom I have made a strong friendship. I can understand a bit of Malayalam here and there too, but not in the slang some of them speak,” he says.
The two outsiders would ensure that the opponents can’t freely talk tactics in their mother tongue (Marathi and Malayalam) either. A local groundsman has one parting message for Sarwate: “Paanche lo!” Take a five-for. He smiles and flicks a thumbs up. A KCA official, after taking a selfie with Karun, mutters that he “god, he should fail in at least this game”.