Returning Rumeli’s rough road to redemption

Returning Rumeli’s rough road to redemption

One of India’s celebrated allrounders, Rumeli Dhar last played an international match in 2012. © Getty Images

January 21, 2018Our chat with her in a coffee shop in a hotel in Mumbai is about to wind up when, unprompted, Rumeli Dhar says, “I don’t know if you know, but I have also led India once.”

The pride in her voice is impossible to miss, but it’s also told to reaffirm her stature in the pantheon of Indian cricket. Everyone in the circuit’ has a common thing to say: ‘Rumeli’s class was up there with Mithali Raj and Jhulan Goswami.’

One of India’s most celebrated allrounders, Dhar’s last of 78 One-Day Internationals was against Australia on March 14, 2012. So what happened, we ask her. Taken aback by a blunt opening question, she retorts: “What happened? Nothing. I had some injuries. Cricket is a sport…Things don’t always go to plan.”

January 23, 2018It’s exactly seven years to the day since Dhar’s last Twenty20 International – against Windies in Ahmedabad in 2011. She has a chance to impress in Delhi’s first Super League T20 match against Baroda at the Sachin Tendulkar Gymkhana in Kandivali before the national selectors meet at the Bandra Kurla Complex Ground in the afternoon to pick the squad for the T20I series against South Africa.

One of the selectors was to watch Dhar play, but changed her plan because of the city’s traffic and went directly for the meeting at BKC. Perhaps overeager to push her case, Dhar gave two lives in her 16-ball 14 from No.3 before being caught at the midwicket fence. Then, Baroda’s openers hit her all over the park in her three overs as Delhi lost by eight wickets.

When one Baroda player reminded Dhar that she has had a good season, she shot back: “Kya fayda? Aaj tho out ho gayi (What’s the point? I got out today).”

Dhar, now 34, turned heads once again after a strong domestic season. Her 226 runs, including a match-winning 83-ball 91 laced with 14 fours and two sixes against Baroda, and nine wickets helped Delhi finish second in the inter-state 50-over competition. She carried her form into the T20 competition, playing a key role both with the bat and ball in a win over Railways, the defending champions, in the first round. Raj, the Railways captain, and Hemalata Kala, the chief selector who many years back as a teammate had helped Dhar realise her potential, took note.

“After five years people have started talking about me again,” Dhar tells us. “That is the biggest win for me – knowing that people like Mithali and Hema di are appreciating my efforts. I must be doing something right! Time has come for me to rise. I am done looking back.”

Overlooked as the committee named four rookies in the squad, Dhar took four wickets with a fiery bowling performance against Maharashtra a day later in front of two selectors. She was also at the crease to complete the nine-wicket victory over Goa that gave Delhi the Super League title. She finished the competition with 109 runs and seven wickets in seven matches. More importantly, she did not break down over 14 matches in a space of two months.

February 21, 2018Dhar, who flew in for an injured Goswami, wore her India jersey again after 2171 days when she was named in the XI for the fourth T20I against South Africa at the SuperSport Park in Centurion.

The romantics won’t miss that Dhar’s latest lifeline has come in a country where she first established herself as a top-class allrounder during India’s journey to the 2005 World Cup final. It was also not unnoticed that the player of the match in India’s first-ever T20I, against England in 2006, is back in the mix in the year where the focus is on the World T20 in the Caribbean in November.

Dhar has worked out what she needs to do to make a mark again. “In this day and age if you bowl ten overs and concede 20-25 runs in the domestic circuit, you need to understand that it means around 40 runs at the international stage. At that level, you will definitely get hit…The same thing applies to batting – if I score a 90 here, I will easily bring that down to 70 in international cricket,” she says. “I never did so much analysis (before) because I always believed that I was good enough. I had that pride that I was playing for India and I had the ability to do well. It is something I have started doing now.”

Whether she succeeds or not, Dhar’s comeback after almost six years of exile is a remarkable story of how she fought depression and found her hunger back with the help of a strong support system.

Rumeli Dhar played with a knee injury in the 2008 Asia Cup, and won the player of the tournament award. © Getty Images

***
Dhar played with an injured knee to be named as the player of 2008 Asia Cup in Colombo. She recovered from a surgery to contribute in India’s third-place finish in the 2009 World Cup in Australia. Dropped by Vrinda Bhagat’s committee after a poor home series against Windies in January 2011, she came back more than a year later, after Gargi Banerjee became the chief selector, to pick up six wickets in two ODIs against Australia. But a shoulder injury after that made her put on weight and her “graph began to plummet.”

The shoulder injury was so severe that doctors predicted an end to her career. Her hand was in a sling and she was recovering at the National Cricket Academy, but due to miscommunication Railways named her in their squad for the 2012-13 season. She could not play, but Khyati Sharma, presently Delhi’s physiotherapist, worked hard in putting Dhar back on the field “within eight months.”

With relationship rough and Dhar out of national reckoning, Railways ignored her for the 2013-14 season. Here was a talent rated among the best in the world only a couple of seasons back, and now even her employers did not see value in her. The rejection was a bitter pill to swallow. With no formal support available from the board, Dhar slipped down in her own estimation, and nothing made sense anymore.

She joined Rajasthan as a professional, and became their captain, but her spirit had understandably broken by then. “Honestly, I had reached a point where I was living, but there was no life in me. (After my last two matches against Australia) nobody asked about me. I had a major injury after that…It had come to a point where Rumeli Dhar was nowhere,” she reveals. “I was depressed and I didn’t know what was happening.”

Even encouragement from Goswami, her childhood friend, did not help. The fall was too steep, amplified by BCCI’s poor treatment of domestic cricket. “I think by that point I had sunk very low. I (had) lost all my strength and my will to fight,” she adds. “You know how people say when you lose everything, a person starts going totally blank. That’s what was happening with me. I was just playing. I didn’t understand what I was doing. I was just going through the motions.”

Dhar’s father met with a serious accident, and having to spend nights in the hospital before rushing to office in the mornings started to put things in perspective. The family and a special friend, whose name she doesn’t want to reveal, did their best to pull her out of the hole. The recovery started with Dhar’s friend motivating her to wake up early in the morning and go cycling.

“They stood by me from 2012, and it took me till 2017 to overcome it,” she continues. “I never understood what was happening around me. I would get angry, feel irritated and then I would remove all that frustration on my family and friends. Thanks to them, I found my way back. It was their belief in me that helped me fight through this and stand up again.”

Rumeli Dhar played a crucial role in Delhi winning the Super League title in the 2017-18 T20 competition. © BCCI

Winning is a big part of the Railways culture, but Rajasthan’s standards were so poor that Dhar was “honestly wondering” if she had made the right decision. She had to teach the girls “everything – how to run, how to bowl.”

She could not sulk in front of youngsters she was now responsible for. It must have helped that Mamatha Maben, the former India captain who once made an international comeback after nine years, was the coach. She “learned how to be more patient”, and became vocal in her approach for the first time. Her leadership skills were vindicated when Rajasthan qualified for the 2013-14 Plate semifinals. After three seasons with Rajasthan, Dhar moved to Assam in 2015-16.

“In an established team everyone knows what is expected of them, but in a weaker team it is about keeping them together, keeping them disciplined – that is a challenge,” she looks back. “Catches were dropped, but I couldn’t say anything because raising my voice would mean scaring the girls. Those four (five) years with those two teams taught me a lot, especially being patient and speaking politely. I was in a different zone – I learnt a lot, but if you look at my career graph, they were probably wasted (years).”

Assam opened an unexpected door for Dhar. She found a place in the East Zone squad for the inter-zone three-day competition in March 2017, where she was as the fifth-highest run-getter. Batting for long periods against the country’s best bowlers brought back the belief. Around the same time West Bengal government conferred her with a state award, which she thinks was a result of Goswami putting in a word.

“When I got called up for East Zone, it changed my mindset. After seven years, I played zonals. That is a long time. I had completely forgotten how it feels to play a two (three)-day game,” she shares. “(The government’s recognition), it all happened with a span of five days and that’s when I thought that Rumeli Dhar is back and she can do something.”

Dhar’s inner voice had woken up. She resumed bowling medium pace after two and half years, enrolled for swimming, bought a bicycle and followed a strict fitness regime. She became serious with her private coaching assignments as it helped her understand her own mistakes better and rectify them quickly “I don’t know if anyone will believe me, but now all I can see, whether I am asleep or awake, is the India blue in front of me. Often when my phone rings, I don’t realise it’s ringing,” she points out. “I was never a fitness freak. I would always run away before, but now I know that if I want to play fitness comes first. Even now, when I sometimes fall behind, I think of my dream of wearing the blue again. That motivates me to keep pushing. People have told me that I have lost weight, and for me, that is a huge compliment.”

Last year Northern Railways, where she works in the mechanical department, said they wouldn’t be granting her so many leaves anymore. She had to find a way to play cricket by staying in Delhi. It was a blessing in disguise. Amita Sharma, Dhar’s former India bowling partner, had been persuading her to play for Delhi for a few years. Dhar attended the open trials and got picked up in the Delhi squad. “During the trials I wanted to show them all that I was the best there. I was not complacent about getting selected. I wanted to be the best and that was how I performed.”

***
Delivering for Delhi against better teams in the top-drawer of domestic circuit proved to be the game-changer. The national selectors went with Dhar because none of the young pace bowlers impressed in the season, and there continues to be a serious dearth of pace bowling-allrounders. That, however, is not her concern.

There is a message of hope in Dhar’s return to international cricket. As Ananya Upendran, the Hyderabad pacer and a former Wisden India staffer, tweeted: “Rumeli Dhar’s return is inspirational on so many levels, but I think the biggest and most important impact is likely to be the hope it will give a lot of senior players within the domestic circuit. It will mean they stick around for longer.”

That would be a remarkable contribution from Dhar to Indian cricket.