The last time I was at Wankhede Stadium, I swore to myself that I

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would never go there again. This was years ago; I had gone against my better judgement because the British Deputy High Commissioner had invited me to see the England-India One Day International from his specially reserved seats.

I imagined that we would be in an air-conditioned box, seated on sofas, with white-gloved butlers serving cucumber sandwiches and tea from a silver tea-service. Obviously, I wasn’t the only one with these imperial delusions: one of the other guests wore his finest blazer and cravat, the elegantly jaunty look for a cricket match at Lords, London, England. But we were at Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai, India and soon the heat did him in. Since he wasn’t English but Indian, he preserved his British stiff upper lip and kept the blazer on till it began to run in dark blue rivulets.

There was no box, air-conditioned or otherwise; we were with Mumbai’s cricket hoi polloi, and that’s a hoi polloi like no other. There were no sofas either, not even chairs: we sat, like everyone else, on hard concrete benches, guaranteed to give everyone, even the English, stiff lower limbs. Space was demarcated on the benches for each ticketholder, obviously on the basis that cricket spectators are all escapees from the Great Bengal Famine. So we sat, cheek-to-cheek as it were, all bum chums for the day. What made things worse was that India lost, and our hosts, Linda and Howard Parkinson, were profuse in their commiserations and diplomatic in their celebrations. If I remember, all Howard said was, “I say, good show, what?”

That was quite some time ago. In the meantime for the World Cup, it was rumoured that they had pulled the wretched Wankhede stadium down, rebuilt it and swanked up the place, so one went, ticket in one pocket and hope in the other, to see a match, any match. For the record, New Zealand played Sri Lanka, and the match was of such blinding brilliance that one fell asleep. Or would have if it hadn’t been for the public announcement system’s manufactured excitement after every over. Perhaps that’s why they have a PA system: shots of sleeping spectators are not good for ratings. One obvious question though: did no one tell the big bosses of ICC that we too have months called December,

January and February?

In case you wondered, the stadium has improved. It had to: the last one was so bad, it couldn’t get worse. Another reason is that they have replaced the concrete benches with plastic chairs.

They didn’t get carried away though: the chairs have been specially ordered from the same people who made the benches: they are extra narrow on the continuing assumption that all cricket spectators are survivors of the Great Bengal Famine et cetera. At the end of the day you felt like a vada that had been squished between two very stiff pavs.

But cricket fans are fanatical: I am still scrambling to get a ticket for the finale. I rang a few likely friends, cricket lovers with well-advertised clout with the authorities. Their answers ranged from ‘No’ to ‘Sorry, no’. Finally I got hold of Mr X. “I just bought 15 tickets for the final,” he said triumphantly, adding though I hadn’t asked, “Rs 45, 000 per ticket.” In my next life I want to be a cricket fanatic and a diamond merchant.

I am told these seats are in an air-conditioned box. They will probably have a silver tea service and white gloves, Sula wine, Antiquity whiskey and all the other finer things in life. The boxes, by the way, are way, way up above the stands to keep the hoi polloi out.

This does bring about its own problems. For one, you have to climb a lot of steps. For another, you get a bird’s eye view of the game. “But that’s okay,” my friend Mr X said quickly, “Each box will have a 46-inch high definition TV set so we can watch the action.” Amazing what money can buy: your own TV room in a stadium. In my next life, I want to be a cricket fanatic and Sharad Pawar.