Eat, Pray, Love–The story of former India coach’s ‘cricket widow’
In A hotel room somewhere in Pakistan, Gary Kirsten was talking to god. There had been a sense of emptiness in him; he had become a run-scoring machine but wasn’t happy. The pressure of success — and he was the most successful South African batsman of all time — had reduced him to a curiously joyless robotic state, the weight of expectation on him often exceeding the height of his enjoyment. On that night in Pakistan, he finally decided to “commit himself to Christ”, as his wife Deborah puts it in her memoir Chai Tea & Ginger Beer, and found something that he could hold on to in the quicksand of success. “Something bigger than simply scoring runs … to relinquish himself to god’s will.” Years later, he was to have another spiritual moment of significance in another hotel room which would help him break away even more from the self-imposed mental shackles, and he would start enjoying (sporting) life more.
But this book isn’t his story, but of Deborah’s journey along with him. It’s unlikely that readers looking for gossip will be satisfied by Deborah’s narrative. Some might even be put off by her adolescent effusions about faith, but once you get her earnestness about it, and by extension, get her, the story reveals the life of a “cricket widow”, and of a (troubled) sportsman. In her revelations about their moments of despair, we get an empathetic glimpse into the life of a sportsman.
The memoir reveals an adolescent’s, and later, a young woman’s yearning to maintain her individuality and not get subsumed in the life of her celebrity husband. Fascinatingly, it’s her sense of faith, and her relationship with god, that helps liberate her. Once we realise that this book is coming out of that ambition, of that desire to not be a footnote in her husband’s life, and through that to inspire others, it becomes easy to get past her repeated expressions of faith. Without it, there is no Deborah, and there would be no Gary as well. She is firm that it was her faith that saved her marriage from collapsing. “Sadly, we see marriages in international sport crashing dime a dozen. Everyday, we see so many break ups,” she says during a chat in Mumbai. “Marriage is work,” she says solemnly. “It’s about constantly communicating, and not leading completely independent lives. Sometimes, when the wife does her own thing, the husband is on the road, it’s a recipe for disaster. It’s easy for relationships to break up and I have seen quite a few of them going that way. It’s sad but almost inevitable if you don’t have strong value systems and a commitment to each other.”
Through her, we get a better understanding of the pressures of being a high-performance sportsman and how it can affect marriages. It also allows us a glimpse into the strength of character required to not be reduced to an invisible partner. Deborah talks about late-night parties that cricketers attend and how those can cause marital problems. “Sometimes, you have to say that you are a married man and stay away. Gary would do it. We would have simple rules like trying our best not to go to bed with a fight, or try to have (Skype) meals together — me at home, and he in his hotel room — and have a chat. Small things like that make a lot of difference,” she says.
Deborah chose to follow her husband on the road as much as possible during his playing and coaching days, dragging their children along. A clothesline would hang inside the hotel room with diapers and other essentials, the children would run around freely. She takes pains to reassert that it’s an unromantic life of sorts, and a far cry from the perceived glamour of globe-trotting. The spouse of a celebrity sportsman will have to make a few sacrifices and Deborah quit teaching — her preferred vocation — for Gary. Luckily, she found a second love: journalism. She first started writing food columns for a travel magazine, a job that suited her life as a wanderer. Earlier, on cricketing tours with her husband, she would indulge in shopping and then get bored in hotel rooms. Now, she began exploring the hotspots in new cities she found herself in.
Much of Deborah’s religious fervour comes from her upbringing. Her father was a missionary, who was also deeply involved in fighting for racial equality in South Africa. Many a political and religious leaders would walk in and out of their homes and young Deborah inculcated much from them unconsciously. When she was five, she stumbled upon a painting of Jesus. “There was no label on it saying that this was Jesus, but when I looked at the strong face and into those gentle eyes, I instantly knew that this was my first glimpse of Jesus.” She broke away from religion for a while during her adolescence only to get back after a car accident.
Cricket fans would probably be more interested in her revelations about Gary’s troubled relationship with cricketing success and her observations about other cricketers. Deborah mentions a poignant meeting with disgraced former South African captain Hansie Cronje, who had confessed to fixing games for money. It was months after his public confession, months after a distraught Gary had called Deborah to say, “he did it”, that the couple went to visit Cronje and his wife Bertha at home. She writes: “As Hansie talked, I realised his whole appearance had changed. He was thinner and his face was drawn and gaunt. He looked feeble and transformed … in breaks between eating, he would hold Bertha’s (his wife) hand. He cried a lot — we all cried a lot. He apologised to Gary over and over.”
