From a white wall
in Kaluvoya
to this.

I am from Kaluvoya, a small town in Nellore district, Andhra Pradesh. Not a place anyone would associate with cricket except the people who grew up there. For us, cricket was the whole afternoon. Every afternoon.

I was around 8 or 9 when I remember it most clearly. I was good at studies, always top 3 in class, sometimes first. But school was just the thing between waking up and playing cricket. That is honestly how I thought about it those days.

The problem was afternoons in Nellore summer. Friends wouldn't come out. Parents wouldn't allow. So I used to play alone in our backyard. I would set up a full Indian selection trial in my head. I gave each imaginary competitor a name, I batted for all of them, I bowled for all of them, I kept the score myself. Our jasmine pole was the wicket. I would run up and bowl at it copying Brett Lee as close as I could. For batting I would throw the ball up in the air and play shots. After every over, every innings, I would go to the white wall and update the scorecard with colored chalk. We had colored chalks those days. Runs, wickets, everything written on the wall. A full match. One boy. One wall.

I wasn't doing it to pass time. In my head that was a real selection. I genuinely believed I was competing for something.

There was a local team in our area called KTYC, Kaluvoyamma Talli Youth Cricket Team. The older boys from the neighbourhood used to play matches. I used to walk 2 or 3 kilometres just to watch them practise. They were my heroes. My first dream in cricket was not India. It was KTYC. Get into KTYC first, then India. I had the whole thing planned out at age 8.

Sehwag was my cricketer. I used to watch him and I used to feel something I cannot explain properly. When he got out I would switch off the TV. I could not watch what happened next. One-day matches those days used to be daytime matches, and I used to fake stomach ache to stay home. My dad figured it out after the second or third hospital visit. After that whenever I said stomach ache he would just check if Sehwag was playing. If yes he would not argue.

One time there was an India vs Australia day-night match. My dad was out of town and came back that morning. My mum knew I was faking and sent me to school. I sat through first period, second period, trying to hold it together. Third period the tears just came out. The teacher asked why I was crying. I said stomach ache. They called home. My dad had just reached home, he picked up the phone, came to school, took me back without saying anything, switched on the TV, and went back to his school. He is a government teacher. He didn't say one word about it. Not that day, not ever.

For 9th and 10th I stayed in a hostel. No TV. But there was a newspaper in the security room every morning. I used to wake up early just to go check what Sehwag scored. Those hostel days whenever I called home, my dad used to tell me the score first. Before asking how I am, before anything. The score first. That was our thing.

I did play for KTYC eventually, a couple of matches. But by then the feeling was different. The aura it had when I was 8 watching them from the boundary, that was gone. It was still cricket. But it was not that dream anymore.

Now I am in Hyderabad. I work a data engineering job, I am average at it, it pays the bills. At night I open the laptop and build this. Nine daily cricket puzzles, a live auction, a leaderboard, a place where fans can write their own cricket stories. I built it because nothing like this existed for people like me and I could not stop thinking about it.

My dad does not know this website exists yet. I have not shown him. I will. When I do, I think he will understand it immediately. He always understood the cricket thing without me having to explain.

I do not know if that 8 year old in Kaluvoya drawing scoreboards on the wall would recognise this. But I think he would believe it. He always believed he would do something with cricket. He just did not know it would look like a website.

Kalyan, from Kaluvoya, now Hyderabad