Behind the derisory nicknames is a loyal young man who has made the most of life's hard knocks.
There is an instructive story about the origins of Jamnagar, and it could well be a myth. After Jam Rawal, the ruling prince of Kutch, avenged his father Jam Lakha's murder at the hands of his greedy and scheming cousins, he dreamt that the goddess Ashapura asked him to cross the waters and take his kingdom into Kathiawar, a peninsula on the Arabian Sea between Kutch and Khambhat. And so Jam Rawal moved, and began to look for a capital. On a hunt one day, he saw a hare fight tenaciously against wild dogs. The Jam is said to have thought: if this land can bear such brave hares, how brave might its men be? The place became his capital, Nawanagar, now known as Jamnagar, close to the Gulf of Kutch.
One of the Jam's father's cousins was a Jadeja, from a princely warrior clan that continued to rule parts of Kutch until India's independence. The Jadejas were an example of the sort of men Nawanagar produced, the kind the Jam had imagined back in 1540.
The days of kings and warrior princes are long gone in the world's largest democracy, but the yearning for lost splendour, the retention of certain historical quirks, and the remnants of royalty have made for great literature and cinema.
"You wander outside, I will hit. You so much as look outside, I will hit. I want Cricket Bunglow, home and studies. That's it" - JADEJA'S FIRST COACH.
Yet it was unlikely when in the Jamnagar of the 1990s, Anirudhsinh Jadeja, a father of two girls and a boy, an occasional security guard without a fixed income, let his youngest child, Ravindrasinh Jadeja, take up the royal sport of cricket, once played there by such personages as Jam Ranjitsinhji and Jam Duleepsinhji.
Cricket was not young Ravindra's pastime; it was his escape, his answer to everything in life that didn't make sense. Even before he hit adulthood, Jadeja knew as much, and had it inscribed on his first car, a black Hyundai Accent he bought with his match earnings as an Under-19 cricketer. "Life is cricket," it said, as it roared on the highway between Jamnagar and Rajkot on hot Saurashtra afternoons, carrying the man who would become one of the fascinating characters of modern Indian cricket.
Life was tough for the children of Anirudhsinh and Lataben Jadeja. They lived in a one-room employee flat allotted to their mother, a nurse in a government hospital. In that regard this Jadeja family was modern. It used to be considered against the honour of the men of the Jadeja clan to have women go outside to work. Their oldest daughter, Naina, who now runs the restaurant Jaddu's Food Field in Rajkot, says their mother, Lata, was a sportsperson herself. She doesn't know what sport her mother played; she also remembers hearing from older folk in the family that Lata used to sing on the radio. Naina says whenever she asked Lata about those days, she never got a straight answer.
Jump, they said: Jadeja didn't quite shine in the 2009 World T20 against England Ian Kington / © AFP
The Lata that Naina knew provided for the family. Whatever Anirudh brought home through his sporadic jobs was a bonus. Lata was a woman worn down by the effort of living. Naina remembers fondly how much she and Ravindra would get beaten by their mother. The middle sister, Padmini, would somehow escape by hiding at strategic times. All Naina says about her father is: "He was strict." "Strict" here implies more fear than discipline, more punishment than parenting.
The only son was a darling of mother and sisters alike. Lata made Ravindra sleep next to her, arm in arm. That's how she realised he sleepwalked. That's how she came to know he talked in his sleep. One night she called Naina to hear what Ravindra was saying in his sleep, and they strained to listen. Naina translates from Gujarati to Hindi: "Aye pakad, pakad. Mana kiya na, wahan nahin, yahan khada reh." (Hey, get it [the ball], get it. I told you not to stand there, stand here.)
Ravindra wasn't even 10 when cricket took over his life. It took him away from the tense atmosphere in the house. His mother and Naina encouraged him to stay out long. They were disturbed, though, when he cried every night. They prodded and prodded, but he wouldn't tell them why. One day Naina secretly followed him to his cricket, which was played in bare fields, with boys much bigger than him. Everybody used to bring a rupee to be part of the game, but Ravindra would never get to bat. By the time it was his turn, the bullies would announce the game was over. He feared being ostracised if he told of this at home.
One afternoon Lata, their mother, had a kitchen accident. She succumbed to burns a week later
That's when Mahendrasinh Chauhan entered Jadeja's life. Chauhan, an acquaintance of Jadeja's father, was a policeman, a small-time cricketer, and the coach at something called Cricket Bunglow, in the middle of Jamnagar. Don't go by the name - back then Cricket Bunglow was a bare field with a small building serving as a pavilion. Chauhan is not a qualified coach, but he is a strict disciplinarian with unique methods. To teach spinners flight, for example, he makes a boy stand in the middle of the pitch and asks the bowlers to bowl over his head.
