That evening as I stepped out of my hotel, I saw Jadeja in the foyer. When I returned, he was there again, coming back in. The Saurashtra team was staying in the same hotel, and Jadeja was going nowhere. I saw him at breakfast in the mornings and in the foyer in the evenings on both days of the match. I nodded once in recognition, but realised he didn't want to do an interview, which I respected: he is the one cricketer who hasn't bothered with learning English or promoting himself or getting himself advertisements. Even with Hindi he only just gets by. However, I did let him know that he should have declined the interview in the first place.
Jadeja danced at Anderson, swung at almost every ball, and swung like hell. Miss. Miss. Bang. Miss. Bang. Miss. Bang. This was a hare taking on wild dogs if ever there was one
On the two days after the early finish to the match I would still see Jadeja in the hotel, always in a Saurashtra Cricket Association (SCA) tracksuit, with a turban-like cloth around his head. He was not going anywhere near home. He was struggling to adjust to life without international cricket, and his response was to play more and more domestically. In the October heat of Rajkot, with Saurashtra having won two matches already, the coach, Shitanshu Kotak, called nets.
I went to the session to meet Kotak for a story I was doing on the Ranji Trophy. I sat down with him after nets. The last man out was Jadeja, wearing that turban, moustache waxed and twirled, the SCA tracksuit on. They call him chhatrapati [king] in the Saurashtra team.
"Bhai saab, aapne sharminda kar diya mujhe" (Brother, you shamed me), he told me. "But what is it that I can talk?"
"I am doing a profile on you. I have met many people for this, but it is incomplete without you telling your story," I said.
"Two matches, 24 wickets, two fifties. That is enough to tell my story. That will send the message."
"No, I am more interested in how you got here. People should know where their cricketers come from."
"Who else should know? [Prime minister] Narendra Modi?"
And we laughed. It was as if he didn't consider that he had done something big with his career and life. He caught me off guard by proposing we do the interview right then, because this time he was really going home. I wasn't prepared for it, but our chat revealed a lot about the person.
I asked him about the turban. He held it in his outstretched hands, the way you do when seeking blessings at a temple. He had recently gone on a 350-kilometre foot journey to Mata No Madh, the house of Ashapura Mata, the goddess who appeared in Jam Rawal's dream. This cloth holds the blessings of the mata (mother goddess), he said.
At another point during the chat, his hands went up similarly. He said his father - "who has also got bored of me being at home all day" - advised him that if playing for India involved begging anybody, he had better come back to Jamnagar.
