The rules of rooftop cricket were complicated, specific, and entirely our own.
A six was only a six if it cleared the water tank on the left. A boundary to the right did not count — that was straight into the Sharmas' side, and we had a treaty. The wall on the far end was the wicket. If the ball went down the stairs, the batsman was retired, not out — a distinction that took on enormous importance during close matches.
We played every evening from five to seven-thirty, when the light went. Eight of us from the colony, ages ranging from nine to fourteen, organized by an informal hierarchy that nobody had declared but everyone understood. The older boys batted longer. The younger ones fielded closer to the walls. This seemed fair to all of us at the time.
The ball was a tennis ball, always. A proper leather ball had been used exactly once, in the summer of 1997, and had landed on the Mehtas' AC unit and done something to it that had never been properly explained but had resulted in our access to the roof being briefly revoked. After that, tennis ball only, no exceptions.
We broke three windows during the years we played up there. Each time the procedure was the same: everyone froze, there was a moment of collective held breath, and then we slowly looked at Vikram, who was the best at talking to adults and who had, on two previous occasions, successfully argued that the wind had done it. Vikram's gifts were wasted on us. He should have been a lawyer.
I think about that rooftop sometimes — specifically the feeling of fielding at the far end as the sun went down, the whole colony spread out below you, the smell of cooking drifting up from a dozen kitchens, the particular orange of those Delhi evenings, the sound of a bat connecting cleanly with a ball and everyone going quiet for a second to watch where it would go.
I have been in many places since. I have seen things more beautiful and more impressive. But I have never again had that feeling of being exactly in the right place — the feeling that the universe was, temporarily, perfectly arranged, and you happened to be standing in it.
Vikram is a software engineer in Bangalore now. I don't know what happened to the Sharmas. The rooftop probably has a mobile tower on it.
The cricket match is still going on somewhere, in some version of time that I cannot get back to but can still, sometimes, almost hear.