The cobbler’s son who bowled to India

Kumar grew up in Jalalabad playing tennis ball cricket, which in Punjab means tournaments almost every day, a day rate, a bus journey. “Lage Phage siga, (It was hit and try)”he says .Some months he played 20-22 days. Some months nothing. On the good days he earned five to six thousand rupees. What he had, in the absence of formal coaching or leather ball training, was the action. He had studied Sunil Narine on television until he understood the grip, the bent middle finger, the carrom ball rotation. He was tall, which gave him pace on the ball. In the tennis ball circuit of Punjab, where mystery spinners who can also hit sixes are valued above most things, Kumar became a name. The moniker arrived naturally: Narine Jalalabadiya.

In 2021 he played for Moga district, was called to the Punjab senior camp, and his training videos reached KKR assistant coach Abhishek Nair through Indian cricketer Gurkeerat Mann. At the 2022 IPL Mega Auction, KKR picked him up for Rs 20 lakh. A cobbler’s son from Jalalabad had a franchise. He had no idea what came next.

The first thing he did when he walked into the KKR camp was touch Narine’s feet. He could not speak English and Narine could not speak Punjabi, but the gesture needed no translation. Kumar had spent years bowling with a bent middle finger trying to be this man from Trinidad. Now here was Narine himself, in the same room. Narine, he was told later through Abhishek Nair, was happy about it.

He did not play a single match that season. KKR won three of their first four games and then lost five in succession, never finding the right moment to hand a debut to a 24-year-old left-arm mystery spinner from the tennis ball circuit. Kumar understood the arithmetic – “It was not like we lost 7-8 matches at the start or won many in the first half,” he says.

He watched from the boundary and learned other things instead. Varun Chakravarthy explained the carrom ball. Narine showed him how to use the seam for grip. Andre Russell told him that a man with his height should stay in the crease and hit through the line. Shreyas Iyer, the captain, told him in practice matches to trust his mystery ball and make it better. He was in a classroom that most cricketers in Punjab will never enter.

There was one afternoon he returns to unprompted. KKR arranged a golf round. Kumar, who had never held a golf club, found himself on the course with Pat Cummins, Sam Billings, Brendon McCullum, KKR CEO Venky Mysore and Sachin Tendulkar. A rural Punjabi bowler on a golf course with the Australia Test captain and the man who had defined the game for a generation. “That’s what cricket gave me,” he says, and does not elaborate.

With the Rs 20 lakh from the IPL he got his family a new home and the appliances to fill it. He left tennis ball cricket, learned to bowl spin with leather, went to Australia where he earned 400-500 dollars a match playing club cricket for Melbourne Pirates, came back and worked as a net bowler for Gujarat Titans, Delhi Capitals, Punjab Kings and now the Indian national team. He still plans to play district cricket for Moga this season. He still thinks about the match that did not come in 2022 – “who knows it would have been my moment” – the way a man thinks about a door that was closed before he could reach it.

At home in Jalalabad, on the wall, is the KKR jersey. Framed. Seeing it, he says, still ignites the desire to play in the IPL someday. The jersey is not a memorial. It is a reminder.