Like billions of sports fans globally, so many of my favorite childhood memories involve cricket. While I was born in Canada, I grew up in India, where my father was completing a doctorate. In India, cricket is life. My father and I were enormous fans of the game. There’s nothing quite like watching a match live–the sound of the bat making contact with the ball and the ball just grazing the wicket. We loved to talk about our favorite moments and argue over our favorite players. It was an opportunity to share time and space not only with the team and the sport we love but also with each other; to connect over our shared passion for this beloved pastime.
When my father got a job teaching in the United States, we left India behind, and cricket along with it. When I was completing my high school education in Alabama, and going to college at Auburn University, I could no longer watch the matches being played back in India, and there was no easy way to follow the ups and downs of the season. On the odd occasion, we would gather together a group of fans–usually South Asian and British expats–and take over a local baseball field to play some pickup cricket. But for the most part, we had no way to stay connected to cricket. It’s the world’s second most popular sport–but in the United States, it was still unknown.
