Beyond boundaries: Remembering the ‘mother hen' of women's cricket

The Albees. That was the name of the first "ladies cricket team" in Bombay.

- Sharmila.Ganesan

It was short for Aloo Bamjee, the purposeful Parsi woman who used to stride into the Cricket Club of India lawns every Saturday with a hand-fan, a hat, and a heckle. In a Feat driven by her brother-in-law Kawas, Bamjee--a maternal, childless widow--would arrive bearing washed socks, stockings and sandwiches for the braided batters practicing in the nets and suffix their ill-timed shots with her go-to interjection: “Uppish!”

Had she been alive, Bamjee--who had never wielded a willow--would have hit an offthe-field century this month. On her birth centenary on December 28, though, you 're not likely to wake up to a Google Doodle of this short-haired pioneer of women's cricket. Despite having acquainted the city’s softball-playing young girls with the season ball in 1969 Bombay--four years before the Indian Women’s Cricket Association was born--Bamjee remains digitally untraceable, her legacy bereft of even a Wikipedia page. “I doubt the current XI know who Mrs. Bamjee was,” says former Al-bee-ite Shobha Pandit. “She is the reason they are.”