From India with Love by Latika Bourke

Author:Latika Bourke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2015-03-27T04:00:00+00:00

6

MY FIRST TASTE OF INDIA

Before leaving, I had wondered whether I was duty bound to try to replicate how I might have lived had I not been adopted. Wasn’t that the real India I should get to know? But Mum quickly put a stop to that way of thinking. There was no point risking my health or safety, she said. So we didn’t skimp. We booked the best and most central hotel in Delhi as recommended by TripAdvisor, the Imperial.

As with landing in any country for the first time, my immediate impression was of the airport. It left Sydney’s poor old Kingsford Smith for dead—huge, clean, modern and dramatically decorated. Customs, baggage collection and immigration were all an orderly breeze. Given my diet of foreign news, I’d been expecting to be wowed by India’s booming modernisation, and this first glimpse didn’t disappoint.

One of the advantages in splashing out on the Imperial was that hotel transfers were included. I didn’t want to have to be worrying about touts when I arrived, jetlagged and in who knew what kind of emotional state. I’m almost ashamed to admit it, it’s so clichéd, but within minutes the hotel driver and I were exchanging cricketer stories. I whipped out my phone to show a photo of myself with my favourite cricketer, Michael Bevan. But I was outdone, because the Australian cricket team had stayed at the Imperial. The driver’s favourites were Ricky Ponting and Glenn McGrath, and he had pictures of himself with both of them to show off to me.

Dad, Rani and Damian love sport. It seemed to be always on TV in the background when we were in high school, much to Mum’s disgust, and mine. They’d watch it all, rugby league, golf, the tennis and the cricket. It didn’t matter if it was summer or winter, there seemed to be no reprieve from sport on the box. Golf makes me sleepy and I wince at tackles in rugby league or union, but in my high school years I did begin to enjoy a game of cricket or tennis.

One of the few games we all watched together as a family and with visiting friends was the 1996 one-dayer against the West Indies when Michael Bevan needed a four off the last ball to win the game. He smashed it to the boundary. It was a great night and made Bevan my high school crush for several years. More than ten years later I’d been sent to cover Kevin Rudd’s announcement of the Prime Minister’s XI at Manuka Oval in Canberra when who should pop up but Bevan-Heaven himself. I rarely ask anyone I meet in my professional capacity for a photo. Never a prime minister or a politician, but this was different. I roped my flatmate, Fairfax snapper Glen McCurtayne, into taking a quick shot. And now here I was in India using one of the most hackneyed Indian–Australian icebreakers—cricket! The conversation flowed easily, and in no time we were in the gleaming black four-wheel drive and off through night-time Delhi, bound for the hotel.

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