HOOKED ON THE AFGHAN SPIRIT

Joy is a rare commodity in Afghanistan; its cricketers are grabbing every chance for folks back home 

- ANIRUDH MADHAVAN

As much as overexcited broadcasters would like you to believe so, India taking on Pakistan in a cricket match is not war. Ask the Afghans. They know war.

They started playing cricket because of war.

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, thousands of Afghans fled, many on donkeys, to neighbouring Pakistan. It was in the refugee camps of Peshawar that the boys first heard of this new game called cricket. (There are records of British soldiers playing the sport in Kabul, but it didn’t stick as it would in many colonies.) The boys would start playing with sticks for bats and rolled-up plastic bags for balls. The odd tennis ball was a godsend.

A few years later, the country that gave them refuge would win the World Cup. It was a moment of joy for Imran Khan’s “cornered tigers”, but also for the proud Pashtuns. Though divided by a border, a lot of south Afghanistan and north-west Pakistan lies in the historical region of Pashtunistan.

It was from these camps that a rock of Afghanistan cricket would emerge. Mohammad Nabi’s family moved to Pakistan in the 1980s. They were relatively well off, and started businesses and families there. Nabi was born in Peshawar and played cricket in the camps. “I used to hide from my parents and play cricket in school,” he told the UN refugee agency in an interview. “There was no future then in cricket; now we are a proper country with a real team.”

The family, like many others, returned to Afghanistan once the Taliban regime fell in 2001. “It felt strange when I first came back,” he said in the same interview. “The war had spared nothing; everything was broken. But now, buildings have been rebuilt, roads repaired, markets reopened. We have cricket grounds and proper academies; earlier we had nothing.”