HE DOESN’T have a single photograph from his playing days. No shirts, no trophies, no bats. Not even the Man of the Series award from India-England, 1984-85.A man who took 12 wickets in a Test match at 19, who stumped Imran Khan in Sharjah while the crowd chanted his name and Javed Miandad at MCG, who was called India’s most naturally gifted cricketer alongside Kapil Dev — and his house in Abhiramapuram, Chennai, is clean of all evidence that any of it happened.“There is nothing at home connected to cricket. I want to keep away from my playing days. I have given everything to somebody or the other,” says former India leg spinner Laxman Sivaramakrishnan.The memories he tried to give away too. They didn’t go.***The first scar came at 14. Sivaramakrishnan, still in school, was a net bowler for the Indian team at Chepauk. Still in uniform, as he rushed straight to change in a small room at the stadium, a senior India batsman called out to him, “Hey. Hey.” Sivaramakrishnan looked up. The player allegedly asked him to come and clean his shoes.“I just looked at him and said, ‘That’s none of my business, you just do what you need to do.’” Sivaramakrishnan (back row, second from right) was part of the India team that won the 1985 Benson & Hedges World Championship of Cricket in Australia.The senior cricketer, he says, had mistaken him for ground staff. “I didn’t know what racism or colour discrimination was. I was just wondering why this man had to react like this.”Story continues below this adThat was the first instance. It would not be the last.In the Tamil Nadu team, prominent players called him “karupa (dark-skinned)”. When he fielded on the boundary in Bombay, Chandigarh, Jalandhar — “generally north of India” — the crowds chanted “Kalia, tera kya hoga”. At a hotel in Mumbai, now the Trident at Nariman Point, a gatekeeper allegedly refused to let him back in after he had stepped out. He was then part of the Indian team and was staying in Mumbai for a training camp ahead of the Pakistan tour. He didn’t have his key. The gatekeeper allegedly looked at him and refused to believe he could be an India cricketer. He says he waited an hour for a teammate to come out and vouch for him. “After that, I realised I should take the keys with me. But I would be trembling when I got near the gate for the fear of being rejected and kicked out again.”He was 16. He carried the trembling for decades. Sivaramakrishnan made his Test debut at 17 years.***He talks of other instances. How, on his 17th birthday, with the Indian team in Pakistan, Sunil Gavaskar, the captain, ordered a cake. The team assembled. Then, a teammate spoke. “Hey Sunny, you ordered the right colour cake. Such a dark chocolate cake for a dark boy.”Story continues below this ad“I started crying and refused to cut the cake. Sunil Gavaskar had to pacify me and then I cut the cake with tears in my eyes.”He was 17, “the baby of the squad”. He had just been given a birthday cake by his captain. And a teammate had turned it into a joke about his skin.‘Because of my darkness, people would dismiss me. There was hurt… I wanted to forget, forget, forget’For a month, the Pakistan crowds had their own version. “Kalia, Kalia, Kalia…” Even the umpire, Shakur Rana, gave him a hard time while bowling. Gavaskar, he says, confronted Rana after lunch, in front of the boy. “You don’t talk to any of my bowlers. If you have an issue, you come and talk to me.” Sivaramakrishnan’s best performances always came under Gavaskar.“Because of my darkness, people would dismiss me. There was a sense of hurt every time this happened. I always wanted to forget, forget, forget but deep down, it’s always rooted and it comes out. All these things put me in a position where I had very low self-esteem at a tender age… it is very hard to build confidence.”***Story continues below this adIn the West Indies, everything was different. “Everybody’s skin colour was on the darker side. They were very happy people.” Malcolm Marshall and Desmond Haynes took him out almost every evening during the Test series. They showed him Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados. They went to Marshall’s house and watched old West Indies matches — Colin Croft bowling, the old footage crackling.Gordon Greenidge, who rarely spoke to anyone, not even his own teammates, opened up to him. “He told me, ‘This is what I went through in England and that’s why I just mind my business, play my cricket and just go.’” Two dark-skinned cricketers from different hemispheres, finding each other through the same wound. BCCI commentators (from left) Danny Morrison, Harsha Bhogle, Sunil Gavaskar, Sivaramakrishnan and Ravi ShastriSivaramakrishnan spent most of his time in the West Indies dressing room. During lunch, he would walk in, say hello to Clive Lloyd — who would simply nod — and sit with Haynes or Holding or Andy Roberts.He was 17. He was happier in the opposition’s dressing room than in his own. The cricket, briefly, silenced everything.***Story continues below this adIn January 1985, at Bombay, Sivaramakrishnan took 12 wickets against England in only his second Test. He was 19. The ball drifted, dipped, turned. Batsmen reached for deliveries that weren’t there. Air India put up a hoarding on Mount Road in Madras: “Siva Rama Krishna, give us a break at Chepauk.”Two months later, in the World Championship of Cricket final against Pakistan in Melbourne, Sivaramakrishnan dismissed Saleem Malik. Then came the ball directed at Miandad. Miandad, one of the finest players of spin the game has known, was drawn out not by a reckless charge but by the mesmerising loop and dip — the flight enticed him into an off drive, his hands reached out and met thin air as the ball winked past him. Sadanand Viswanath completed the stumping in a flash. Miandad stood there looking like a novice. That was what the boy could do when the ball was listening to him. Three for 35. India won the tournament.On my 17th birthday, Gavaskar ordered a cake. Then, (a teammate) spoke: ‘Hey Sunny, a dark chocolate cake for a dark boy.’ I started crying and refused to cut the cake. Sunil Gavaskar had to pacify me. I cut the cake with tears in my eyes.In Sharjah, against Pakistan again, the crowd chanted “Sheeva, Sheeva” as he ran in. He bowled Imran Khan a generously flighted googly. Imran stretched out in defence. Not long after, Imran jumped out decisively, but the ball did its handler’s bidding and passed him in a fizzy blur. Stumped. Pakistan crashed to 87.Ravi Shastri would later call him “probably India’s most naturally gifted cricketer along with Kapil Dev in the ’80s.”That was the peak. Then came the fall.Story continues below this ad Laxman Sivaramakrishnan was called India’s most naturally gifted cricketer alongside Kapil Dev.***Between age 16 and 19, Sivaramakrishnan grew two and a half inches, but his release point didn’t change. The ball that used to land on a good length now landed full. He began bowling full toss after full toss.“If anybody at that point, with their experience, had told me that I had to change my point of release, I would have probably done that. But nobody did. It became a habit. The full tosses became more and more and more.”In the 1980s, all India had for support staff was an administrative manager. No analyst. No biomechanics expert. No qualified physio. When Sivaramakrishnan injured his shoulder throwing from the boundary in Australia, he was given ice packs and painkillers. Nobody diagnosed it. He kept bowling. It went from bad to worse.Story continues below this ad“My ability to perform on the cricket field was actually becoming a problem for me.”The labels arrived swiftly. Success has gone to his head, some said. Others said he was drinking, on drugs. “People love to spread bad things. My tours happened between 16 and 19 years. How would people serve me alcohol in a hotel when I am underage? I have never done drugs in my life. I have had a few beers later in my life. I don’t say no to that. But imagine a 19-year-old being called an alcohol addict, a drug addict.”He played his last international match at 21. The 1987 World Cup. He was done.***“Pretending becomes a habit… Actually, you are trying to prevent further damage. When you are being attacked from all sides, you need to push them away. And when you try to push them away, it looks like arrogance.” He pauses. “I was living a story like Jekyll and Hyde. Two different personalities in one man.”Story continues below this adHis parents placed a matrimonial advertisement — Test cricketer, owns a flat, looking for a bride. They gave a post box number. Two weeks later, when they opened the box, there was not a single application. “Which meant people had made my reputation so terrible that nobody wanted to even let their daughter get married to me.”A day after he returned home from playing in the 1987 World Cup, the Tamil Nadu selectors called him in. They allegedly told him he didn’t have a place in the team. “They asked me to tell the press that I was unfit. I said I won’t. I will not make things easy for you. If you want, you drop me.”He was dropped. He joined a Chennai-based company and played for its cricket team. He worked in the accounts department. He would leave home at 6.45 in the morning, ride a Kinetic Honda scooter14 km to the factory, crunch numbers until 2.30 pm, then drive 8 km to the nets. His salary was Rs 8,000. He swapped hisMaruti 800 for the scooter because he couldn’t afford the fuel.Then came leptospirosis. During a tournament in Hubli, he had chased a ball hit into a swamp, picked it up and carried on playing. Two days later, his temperature was 105°F. The bacteria, he says, attacked his liver and kidneys. “I was on a salt-free diet for six months.”***He survived. Not all at once. Not cleanly. He married Harini in 1995. She knew what she was signing up for. He had told her everything. His daughter Hamsini is now studying psychology — a choice he encouraged wholeheartedly.In 1998, ahead of a home series against Australia, Sachin Tendulkar called him. He wanted Sivaramakrishnan to bowl at him in preparation for Shane Warne. The greatest batsman of his generation knew whose wrist to call when he needed to face the greatest spinner. That was validation the system never gave him.In 2000, he became a commentator. First for Doordarshan, then WorldTel, then the BCCI panel. He spent evenings picking the brains of Ian Chappell and Tony Greig, but resolved not to drink. His wife put him through enunciation exercises. They switched to speaking only English at home, for the sake of his career.He spent 23 years behind the microphone. But even there, the old wound followed. “I’ve never done a toss or a presentation. I asked one of the producers why. He said, ‘We have been instructed by our bosses not to put you.’ They said it is to do with me not being presentable.” Sivaramakrishnan pauses. “The most charismatic and the best in the business is Vijay Amritraj. Is he not dark?”The colourism that met him at Chepauk when he was 14 was waiting for him in the commentary box at 60. Different room, same wound.The mind broke in stages. During the IPL in the UAE, the quarantine years, it got bad. “I was down completely and I didn’t want to see myself in the mirror. I would have a couple of drinks and go to sleep because I could not bear anything. Whenever I was awake, I thought I was going to die.”He would close the curtains. He didn’t know whether it was day or night. He wanted to sleep it off. Alcohol was the only thing that brought sleep. “Sometimes when we were travelling in Dubai, there’s no speed limit. If the vehicle went very fast, something in my mind would tell me to just open the door and jump out. Somehow, something stopped me from doing anything silly.”The hallucinations came at night. “You close your eyes, you see images that you can’t imagine. All very frightening. You open your eyes, there’s nothing. But you’re so tired that you want to sleep. You close your eyes for a while, then again, open your eyes. So there goes your sleep.”The drinking made the depression worse. The depression made the drinking worse. “Every time, you manage to tangle yourself tighter and tighter. And you have the whole world outside saying, ‘See, I told you. Liquor is the reason. I told you’.”He couldn’t go to the bar with other commentators. They would say he was drinking. So he ordered drinks to the room.When he returned home mid-way, the old stories resurfaced — he’s become an alcoholic, he missed a match by sleeping in. Nobody knew what he was battling.Then, days ahead of the IPL that starts on April 28, came calls from the BCCI broadcast team, checking on his well-being through friends. “It created a false hope. Why call my friends? I used to wait for calls. It is what I had faced during my cricketing career. A sponge can only soak up to a level, after that it will break. How much more can I — and should I — take?”He put out a tweet saying he was retiring from commentary.While there was no official word from the BCCI on Sivaramakrishnan’s allegation, an official from the Board told The Indian Express, “The BCCI has never and will never discriminate against any player, former player, commentator because of their skin colour. As far as Laxman Sivaramakrishnan is concerned, we respect his contribution as a cricketer and as a commentator. The Indian board has never discriminated against anybody.”***He is 60 now. There is not a single trace of his cricketing career in his living room in Abhiramapuram.“From the age of 15 to 60 — 45 years. I have been traumatised by all these things. The players referring to me by my colour, the crowd chanting… Over and over again. Even when you sleep, suddenly you wake up and the first thing you think of is all the insults and names that you were called.”He says he has had enough. “Life is not all about money. I have been in the BCCI fold from schooldays to now. I now want to be in a space where my spiritual life, golf, and good health go well.”He spends his days on the golf course now. The hands that once spun a googly past Imran Khan grip a seven-iron instead. The silence is chosen this time.The trophies he gave away. The memories he couldn’t.