Sitting in her office surrounded by cricket trophies, Jwala Singh wipes her tears and remembers the vow she made the day her father died. “I promised myself that one day I would become an Indian actor.”
The England team remained true to their word, even at its expense. Singh is the coach of Yashasvi Jaiswal, who scored a double hundred in the second Test last week and is one of the brightest young batting talents in world cricket.
What begins as a plot chronicling Jaiswal’s rise from sleeping in a tent at south Mumbai’s Azad Maidan to the Indian team and IPL stardom turns into a story of two men, coach and student, as their journeys through life are equally remarkable. .
Throughout the three-hour drive through Mumbai, Singh shares his story at various stops on the way to Azad Maidan, where we end our conversation and point out the place where he first met a 12-year-old boy who helped us. He fulfills his promise to his dying father.
“We were playing on one of the fields here and when the match was over I went to chat with a friend,” he says. “There were two batsmen in the net. Someone was complaining about the pitches and the fielder, saying how he could bat. The other was a small southpaw who hit great swings without a word of complaint.
“I asked: ‘Who is this kid?’ My friend said: ‘Jwala, she has a lot of problems. He left his family in his village. ‘He’s very angry about cricket and I’m afraid something bad will happen to him.’ Suddenly the batsman came to me and I said: ‘What is your name?’ He said: ‘Yashasvi Jaiswal. ‘I live in this tent.’ ‘Where is your family?’ I said. I was shocked that he lived alone. I don’t like to talk about anyone’s poverty because I’ve lived it. “His story is also my story.”
After this chance encounter, young Jaiswal would move in with Singh and live with him and his wife until as recently as 2022. It currently lands on the Air India Sports grounds and is perched almost at the end of the runway at Mumbai Airport where Singh is based. He now has his own academy and spent hours coaching Jaiswal to bat.
Azad Maidan is very busy as we speak. At least 10 matches are being played on this small triangular ground on Thursday afternoon and Singh points to the pitch where Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli smashed the world record of 664 in a schoolboy partnership. He repaired Jaiswal’s bat by sanding the wood. A street food vendor drives his cart to the ground to prepare for the lunch rush with panipuri and sugarcane juice. It was a hawker like him who asked Jaiswal to help him sell street snacks to players for a few rupees pocket money.
The groundskeeper’s tent where Jaiswal lived for two years, which had no electricity and would be flooded in monsoon rains, was swallowed by a construction site as Mumbai’s inexorable growth destroyed historic maidens.
At one end is the Bombay Gymkhana, where the first Test match was played in India, and you need an invitation to enter. We stand at the northern end, close to where Mahatma Gandhi addressed thousands of people during the Indian uprising in 1931. Azad actually means freedom in Persian. The freedom to chase a dream bonds Jaiswal and his coach because, as children, they both left small villages in the state of Uttar Pradesh to make a name for themselves in Mumbai.
Singh moved to Mumbai in 1995, hoping to train under Sachin Tendulkar’s coach, the legendary Ramakant Achrekar. “I was a big fan of his,” he says. He takes us to the place where he lived for three years, sleeping in a mosquito-infested room at the gym, having to leave at 5 a.m. when people came in to work out.
“My father was a veterinary doctor who earned about 600 rupees a month (about £60 then) and he took out a loan and gave me money and told me to make my name in Mumbai. He was treated very badly because he allowed me to leave the village and come here. “After two years, I decided not to take any money from my family.”
Singh was a fast bowler and the lack of strength and conditioning advice and no doubt sleeping on the gym floor took their toll and after playing age team cricket at state level injuries ended his hopes. “One day I collapsed with an injury and it was the worst day of my life. My dreams ended that day. I didn’t have money for surgery. I didn’t dare talk to my family. If I tell them, they will tell me to go back to the village because my studies are good. After these injuries, I started coaching kids and making money.
“Then one day my father called and said he had stage four cancer. This was on September 14, 2009. I was completely broken. I thought I needed to take care of my father and asked him to come to Mumbai and live with me. It came for two months and expired on November 10. That’s when I promised to make an Indian actor. “I gave myself five years to find someone, otherwise I would have left cricket altogether.”
It took just one year, not five, for his path to cross Jaiswal. There were early difficulties. Jaiswal found himself banned from playing in domestic matches because someone forged a birth certificate in his name so that he could register with the local cricket authorities. “The hardest thing was that he was mentally weak and sad. People blackmailed him because of that birth certificate. They said if you play, we will show this certificate to the association and you will go to jail. That’s what he told me. That’s why he said, ‘I don’t want to play, I’ll go to jail.’ “I said I would take care of it.”
Jaiswal played in the Harris Shield tournament, an interstate school competition, and scored 47 runs and took five wickets. “I said to him: ‘Did the police come? Did you go to jail?’ ‘No sir,’ he said. I said: ‘I am with you and I will take care of you.’ He played in his next match and scored 319 in the three-day match. His father came to meet me. I told Yashasvi that she could live here and stay with me and promised to help her in everything. His father was very touched. He said he was here to take her back to the village. He said: ‘We are desperate. We can’t help my son anymore. You are now his father, mother and guardian. You keep an eye on him. You decide what to do. ‘You own his life.’ They dropped him off at my house. From there I started working with him.”
Over time, Singh became Yashasvi’s legal guardian. We go to his first house, currently used as a hostel by the current staff at his academy, and he shows us Yashasvi’s old bedroom. As we speak, a jumbo jet takes off at the airport a stone’s throw away and we have difficulty hearing each other. We then move to Singh’s current home, where there are photos of him eating cake and more trophies. There are also large mugs that require two hands to pick up.
“He was living with us as our son. I would wake up early and take him to the ground. In the past, when there were matches, he would start batting in the nets at 9 in the morning, then play and then score goals on his own again, that’s how hard-working he was. One day I took him to a store to buy a folder for newspaper clippings. He went in and bought a very small file. I said this was not good. I went inside and asked the shop owner for the largest file he had. “He filled it in two years.”
Jaiswal never needed much technical assistance. He was naturally talented and Singh mainly talks about his temperament. “He wanted to bat for a very long time. He scored many important scores. This is his path.” In 2019, Jaiswal scored 203 in a 50-over match. He scored 171 on his Test debut, 209 against England and scored three more first-class double hundreds.
Others helped too. Singh credits former India players Dilip Vengsarkar and Wasim Jaffer as mentors and also for their invaluable contribution to Jaiswal’s IPL team, Rajasthan Royals. Singh’s academy currently coaches more than 300 boys and receives scholarship boys from both villages and those who can afford to pay. Prithvi Shaw, who is currently out of the India squad, was among his custodians and Hamza Sheikh, who plays for Warwickshire and was the victim of the fielding debacle playing for England at the Under-19 World Cup last week, has been a regular addition. He worked with Singh, who showed him a message Hamza had sent to his father three years ago, saying he would one day play for the England Under-19 team.
The day Jaiswal made his Test debut in the West Indies last July was the culmination of Singh’s work but he was in the UK and unable to watch as his academy was on tour to play several leading state schools.
“I know it seems very blunt but by then I knew he would play for India. That’s where my confidence in him and his hard work came from. I would always tell him where I left my cricket, you start the journey. When he came to live with us we made sure he didn’t go through the same difficulties and thanks to his hard work he made it to the top reached.”
The warmth of the sun indicates that it is lunchtime. However, Singh is busy watching the cricket match at Maidan. “I am only 41 years old. I have 20 years left. “I want to add 11 Indian players to the squad.”
There is a young boy, no more than 12 years old, who bats beautifully. He’s half the size of his adult teammates, but he’s clearly one step above. Is he next? “That’s why I’m going back to Azad Maidan. They come by train every day for a long time. There are no viewing screens, not much grass, each game builds on the other. If you can stand out here, you will have great power. “Yes, this kid is good, let’s watch for a while.”
A chance meeting. This is how the Jaiswal story began. Maybe someone else is starting.