Book Review: The Colonel's Last Wicket by G V Rama Rao, Libros International 2007
Jun 12 2008 | Views 191 |
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Tags: The Colonel Raju Molding Into a fine man and a cricketer
Tags: The Colonel Raju Molding Into a fine man and a cricketer
As stated the story line is simple, the hero of the novel, a retired Colonel of the Indian Army(Col. Seth), by chance observes a boy play cricket in a dusty village field, is impressed by his determination to bowl fast and his fire in the belly. He inquires further and finds that he is an orphan and is being cared for as an orphan and not as an adoptive son, by the local poverty stricken school teacher.
Seth makes further trips and decides that the boy needs a home and also support, to refine his obvious ,but raw cricketing talents, into a steely cricketing machine, that can face competition and achieve greatness. The objective here is to make Raju a genuine penetrative fast bowler and achieve an ambition that Seth had but failed to achieve, which was to play for India. Seth takes Raju into his house,that had been denuded by his wife's death and the departure of his daughters to Universities in the US.
As my purpose is not to relate the story and steal Rama Rao's thunder, I will conclude by saying that the story leads us to the slow harrowing process of first making Raju into a fine young man, while honing his cricketing skills. The story leads to an interesting finale,with some unexpected turns.
Rama Rao has some interesting flourishes and anecdotes. He uses his book to relate India's social history from the angle of a retired army colonel. He further divides the book into chapters which are not numbered, but denoted with, in most cases, a cricketing metaphor: and then he goes on to explaining that metaphor in some detail. Thus, for instance, the first chapter is the'Sightscreen', the fourth chapter relates to the'Stance' of the batsman and another called the 'off stump'. It is an interesting demarcation and I can say that Rama Rao succeeds quite well in it.
As an adoptive parent of a former foundling, I would have preferred somebody more expressive and openly affectionate to a helpless child. Rama Rao has made Seth as outwardly cold and unexpressive. He initially starts of taking on the boy to essentially act out his fantasies of achieving greatness in cricket vicariously through the boy. In a conversation with his daughter Aparna, he says(p 49)"...... I am not going to make him (raju) my son. I brought him home with me to improve his talent for cricket". Though Seth continues to be his inexpressive self, his love for Raju(I suspect,grows), this you can only glean from actions not so much by words.
Some anecdotes that Rama Rao relates in his book that are incidental to the story are very interesting. One such episode is Col Seth sitting up on a Machan in order to shoot a leopard that was causing depredations to neighboring villages. He asks for a cricketing sight screen to be placed by the kill so that he can see the leopard better: I wonder if Rama Rao knows of any such episodes. As a boy, I went on actual Shikar in the self same forests of the then Vizag District and had never heard of something similar.
I summary, I found Rama Rao's 'The Colonel's Last Wicket" both an excellent read but also a virtual tour de force of India of a time and a place. I congratulate him on a succesful yarn
© Girdhar Gopal., all rights reserved.
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