I never saw a gun firsthand until I was a teenager. It was unexpected. Guns always would be in a country without regular recreational usage. However, it was the extreme end of unlikely for someone to pull a gun at the cricket field during village cricket on a Saturday, when we were meant to be playing less seriously in low quality leagues as a form of preparation for club matches on Sunday.
None of us were even from the village we were nominally representing. It was very much just practice. We had two helmets and one pair of left-handed gloves amongst the entire team, so I couldn’t bat at the same time as my cousin, the only other left-hander. We also didn’t have neutral umpires and that was the problem.
The villages can be strange places. Some are extremely insular, known to us only by odd stories seeping out occasionally. Articles hidden in the newspaper about horses biting off some child’s arm, or feuds and murders for property, or mythic creatures like bucks and lagahoos terrorizing these near-forest communities.
There was crime out there, of course. Police never went there, and almost no one else did either. I didn’t know it at the time but there was no better place to hide anything. You never knew who was involved either. Our team’s keeper for the previous season was one of the few real village boys in the squad, and he lived deep in the bush near the reservoir. But he wasn’t available to play that season on account of being in jail, having made the career transition to a hitman. Unsuccessfully, clearly, since he had managed to get caught in a country where the conviction rate for murder was below 10%. But he hadn’t managed to kill anyone either. And I don’t know the conviction rate for attempted murder.
So, anybody could be a problem. There had always been the reputation of violence in the villages. Long before drugs and smuggling, and even before guns. Few of us were from the villages, but we were all the first generation to not be. All of our parents had grown up there, and most of our grandparents still lived there. We knew the stories. Of people drinking too much and going home to beat their wives and children. Of jealousy leading to the use of the cutlass in the need to protect their property, which meant their woman. And the expectations of how “real men” thought and behaved, combined with the inability to express oneself, and the abhorrence of the feminine trait of resolving things through words. All of this resulted in the legacy of targeted murder, as compared to the urban idea of indiscriminate violence. As in the wrong place at the wrong time, because it was always the wrong place there, no matter what time.
My left-handed cousin Devan wasn’t a good umpire. It was the year before he started wearing his glasses regularly. We already knew he couldn’t see. But he was fighting against the idea that he needed the spectacles. He held almost no catches that year and didn’t make any runs either. But that was the same as every year. Could spin the ball a mile, though. It was why we kept him in the side, as well as familial loyalty. He was indeed struggling to see, but even when he could, like all the years before and after, he still wasn’t a good umpire. He had the habit of being bullied into a bad decision, and then afterward not giving the right decision, as if to make up for it.
Cricket is emotional. We weren’t going to win that match. There was no chance. Nothing was at stake either. We were almost at the bottom of the league, and the opponents were stuck in the middle of the table. But that didn’t stop someone from running home and coming back with a gun in his hand to threaten the umpire. It took minutes for him to leave and get back, which tells you the size of the village. We didn’t even notice he had left the field. Nor did his teammates.
Lalchan saw him first. He was a true left-hander, but he played the game right-handed because he learnt from watching his brother. Despite his old-man’s name, he was our age. Rail thin, already going grey by fourteen, sparse moustache already when the rest of us couldn’t even grow sideburns. He’d had a hard life growing up on the periphery of the swamp, between the fishing and farming communities, but not a part of either. Almost the stereotype of being intelligent and talented against all the odds. stacked against someone who didn’t have electricity until high school, and really did have to study by hurricane lanterns. But he still topped all his exams, while coming to school often tired after helping working on fish ponds, and sometimes bruised if his father drank too much.
We knew all of this about Lalchan though not too much of the details. The swamp wasn’t a place we hung around a lot. Even when we went to pick him up for matches, our parents didn’t linger. I’d known him for years, but I didn’t realize till that day that I didn’t really know him at all. You never really know who’s ready for a crisis. Because they have to be. Because they’re used to it. Because they’ve seen worse. Violence isn’t something they’re unfamiliar with.
From behind square, where he was the other umpire, he saw the trouble coming. To be fair, we all saw the trouble coming. Devan had given not out to some obvious decisions with the justification of “It don’t look good”, without even adding the “to me” at the end, which sometimes waylaid discussions of bias.
“That’s it. I done. Me ain’t bowling no more. Them only theifing,” the man who had left the field said, a few overs earlier. He had good reason to be annoyed, too. He punctuated his reaction by pulling the ends of his moustache so it stuck out from either side of his face.
It was a valid reaction. But as bad decisions continued it seemed he reached his limit. By the time Lalchan caught up to him around mid-pitch, he already had the gun in his hand and was waving it about and shouting. From where I was, I couldn’t hear anything clearly.
I saw Lalchan trying to reason. He was a calm person, even as a teenager. The only calm adolescent I knew. Most of our team froze. Though I got up, as well as the captain, we didn’t actually move. We didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t a situation we had experienced or prepared for ever.
The bowler with the moustache, now the gunman, was yelling and pointing at Devan with the non-gun hand. None of his own teammates went near him. They were all gathered in the outfield, even the keeper. It didn’t seem to be a good sign.
We never got into serious trouble. Small things, like scuffles at school or parties, more posturing than anything serious. No one finished anything. It wasn’t part of how we lived. Those who had a reputation for finishing fights, they were serious people.
When I saw Lalchan walking up to the man, I thought he was going to try to play peacemaker. He had experience from living at home with his parents. For the rest of us, stopping fights was a martyr’s role. We all had heard of people who had been stabbed parting fights.
“Better two people dead who looking for it, than you dead looking to be hero” was something my father had said more than once. His village also had a reputation for roughness that stuck to it. Even though it had become a place for old people, populated by alcoholic leftovers, who had collected a severance package when the sugar industry shut down and were now drinking away that money spending it on the same alcohol they had produced. It came full circle. Anyway, he probably knew what he was talking about. Much more than we did.
Lalchan walked up to the man, who was still shouting. I could see him talking. This was before I needed glasses to see even the other side of the room. The man was still shouting and pointing, and he turned to point at Devan, who had not moved from the umpire’s position (frozen in fear, I assumed). As the gunman turned his head, Lalchan hit him in the neck with his forearm, took the gun from his hand and, as in a film, popped open the cylinder chamber and shook the bullets out onto the ground.
After that, chaos ensued. As if there was a signal to move. The opposing team ran in and took their player away off the field. We ran onto the field, half of the team going to Lalchan and the other half to Devan, who hadn’t moved except vertically, now sitting next to the stumps. It took about thirty minutes to get things back to normal. By then it was almost dark and the idea of finishing the match, floated but never seriously so, was impossible. I don’t know how they put it in the scorebook. Maybe “Home team won, combination of bad light and firearm threats”. Probably not, it would set a bad precedent on winning tactics.
*
Later that day we were at the bar after the match. We always went with the older players on our team, since they were the ones who drove and we had to go with them, even though most of us wouldn’t drink. Not because we were underage. There were many teenagers who drank, which was easy in a country where old enough to look the barman in the eye was good enough to be served. It was more because we often had matches on the following day, and had too much respect or fear to show up in any state less than perfect. We were then still young enough to see cricket as a viable career step. When we were slightly older, and dreams of going pro faded, though we were still not yet of voting age, we would all be as drunk as anyone else. Except Lalchan, who, understandably from his circumstances, had a healthy fear of the destructive power of alcohol.
“You see down where I living, people behaving mad now. Fisherman ain’t bringing back just fish. Is all kind of things they carrying across from the next side. Things dangerous. You does have to know how to handle things early. Otherwise when it start to get out of hand, it done too late,” Lalchan said. “You doesn’t want to have to get involved, but they does force you. Just because you around. It don’t have nobody checking nothing in the swamp. If they feel they could just come in your house, they go come. You have to make sure they know not to play up.”
This was the only explanation we got for the day’s events. Lalchan never wanted to discuss further what he had seen or was used to, being where he was from. We saw him differently from that day. Even as we started seeing him less. First injuries, and then family responsibilities took him further and further from us. Especially after high school when, despite his excellent grades which were high enough for a scholarship, he chose to go into the public service. Initially with the intention to study part-time, but more pressing was the need for money to support his mother and sister, after his father passed away, predictably, from heart and liver disease.
He never got around to it. We hadn’t yet finished university when we got the news he, too, had died. They found him in the swamp, not far from the house, within view of the porch. Apparently, he had drowned. But we knew it didn’t make sense. He could swim like a fish, and anyway, the water was barely knee high. We didn’t say anything, me or Devan or anyone else, but we all figured it had something to do with knowing how to protect yourself. Because you couldn’t protect yourself from everything. But we didn’t tell his mother or sister, because it would have been worse for them to think that, if they didn’t already.