In the city from where Kipling’s novel of the great game began, the action has shifted elsewhere. Barring stragglers like Saurav Ganguly, who will catch the mid-morning flight to Multan on Friday, the cricketers who have brought this India-Pakistan series alive beyond all expectations have relocated to the city of sufi saints for another contest, for the three-match test rubber that begins on Sunday. But in Lahore, the afterglow remains. As elsewhere in the subcontinent, the day after the ODI series concluded, a question hangs in the late night haze: Is this only about the cricket? Are we on to something special? ‘‘Cricket is the winner,’’ whispers the local daily, The Nation. Pakistani batsmen may have slid to a ‘‘tame surrender’’, it notes, but ‘‘cricket is the winner’’. In airport lounges and hotel atriums, they are recounting stories of friendships struck off the field between Indians and Pakistanis. They are discussing the presence of Deena Wadia at the Wednesday match. She was here, she said last night, to enjoy the fifth one-dayer; but her attendance is a story beyond cricket. Ramachandra Guha, author of a social history of cricket in the subcontinent, speaks for most both sides of the border when he says: ‘‘Socially and politically, the tour has gone very well, better than anyone expected.’’ After the bitter contests at ‘‘neutral’’ venues in the nineties, this return of India-Pakistan cricket to the subcontinent, he notes, will benefit the game. ‘‘I think certainly that expatriates tend to be more jingoistic, hence the troubles in Sharjah, Toronto, etc. But in the past matches in India and Pakistan have also led to crowd unruliness. The point is that cricket intensifies social and political relations — now when the leaders are all for bhai-bhai, the crowds exude warmth. A young man in Lahore agrees. The warmth in this unusually hot March in Punjab is still tender, he sighs. He has a fiancee, he says, in India.If this thaw holds, the nuptials could proceed smoothly. Cricket, it would seem, is serving him as a handy barometer.
