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Jai was pure joy

K N Prabhu

It is hard to believe that M L Jaisimha is no more. He was so full of life till that cruel canker within him cut it short. Sixty is no age to die, especially for one who was, in spirit, eternally young.

Jai was a child of his time - the 'swinging sixties'. In an Indian team, which included such handsome cricketers as Tiger Pataudi and Farookh Engineer, and prided itself on good looks, Jai was the dandy of them all. Born free, and it showed in his attitude to batting.

You could pick Jai out from a crowd, by the turn of his collar and the manner in which he strode, as if on sprung heels, to the wicket. Some time in the fifties, a batch of schoolboys came to Delhi for trials under the Rajkumari Amrit Kaur coaching scheme. Two of them, Jai and Surti, stood out from the others. Both were to bear out the promise they showed in those early years - Jai more than Surti.

It was not through big scores, but the manner in which Jai played the game. He had style.

"He reminds me of Bill Brown," said Jack Fingleton to me, during the Brisbane Test of 1967.

Jai, as a last-minute replacement for Chandra, had flown in from India and had barely a night's rest before the match, before he went out to make 74 and 101.

It was just like Jai to produce something special out of the bag if only to expose those who had rejected him as first choice for the tour.

Fingleton had sarcastically added: "You must be having plenty of talent in reserve if you can afford to leave out Jai."

It is to Jai's credit that he was able to take the rough with the smooth and tailor his batting to the needs of the moment, whether it was a long, starchy innings or one with frills and ruffles and beautiful to behold.

In the Calcutta Test of 1960, against Benaud's team, going in at number nine, he was unbeaten with 20. Then, promoted to number four, he batted all day for 74 runs to save the match. In the process, he achieved a record of sorts: he was on the field for all five days.

The following season against Pakistan, at Kanpur, Jai took 500 minutes over 99 in the role of opening batsman, which was trust of him. He played only four scoring strokes in the session before lunch, when he was run-out in a desperate bid to score his first Test century.

As an opening batsman, Jai had, perhaps, taken the role too seriously. He was to revert to type and was free to be himself in the 1961-62 series against Dexter's team. He achieved his first Test century at Delhi after a run of consistent scores. He had now been forced to accept the opener's role, which did not quite suit his style and temperament.

Consequently, he struggled for runs on the West Indies tour of 1962, and the following season, in the home series against Mike Smith's team, he held his place with modest contributions of 51, 36, 23, 66, 33, 47 and 50, reserving his favourite Eden Gardens for a typically stylish knock of 129.

There were now other challengers for the opening as well as middle order, with Sardesai, Engineer, Kunderan and Borde touchinng peak form in the season ahead.

So, after an indifferent series against New Zealand, captained by John Reid, and the West Indies, captained by Sobers, Jai was dropped for the England tour of 1966, only to make a dramatic return at Brisbane.

Admittedly, there was a negligent cavalier streak about Jaismha's cricket, which did not commend itself to the Cromwellians in command of our cricket. But cognoscenti could recognise his talents. He was resurrected and was among the veterans recalled to tour the West Indies under Wadekar in 1971.

Wadekar has placed on record how much he valued Jai's advice. And it was Jai's ability and courage to stand up to an all-out bumper attack without flinching or revealing his distaste for pace, which foiled Sobers's bid to win the final Test at Port of Spain.

It is a pity that Jai's career should have run parallel to Pataudi's, for he was a skilled leader.

In 1965, when West Zone lost the Duleep Trophy to the South, I recall a veteran consoling Charles Borde, the losing skipper, that the day was not far off when Jai would no longer be around to challenge him.

Ironically, Jai outlived Borde as a Test player, but that prophesy came true when West regained the Trophy, when Jai was no longer skipper.

Jai played 39 Tests in a cared spanning 12 years. He scored 2,056 runs, including three centuries and 17 fifties. His off cutters, bowled with an angular run, were known to be treated with circumspection by some of our top batsmen. Indeed, Dilip Sardesai who scored heavily in the domestic tournament, once confessed that he could never read Jai.

All Jai's figures, meagre by our present standards, however, represent only a fraction of the joy he communicated to his legion of admirers.