Abdul and his Salim, dad in Pak, son India

Abdul Aziz, it is said, could never stop his tears when he talked about his Salim — Salim Durani, who died at age 88 last Sunday. The story of Abdul Aziz and Salim Durani fully illustrates the horror pre-modern ideas of religious separatism and nationalism wreak on unsuspecting individuals, whose birth into one belief system or the other is just a quirk of randomness.

Abdul Aziz, born in Afghanistan on August 15 — but 42 years before the first Independence Day — was a useful cricketer who was willing to travel. In the days of princely patronage of cricket, Abdul Aziz moved to Jamnagar in the mid-1930s, to play for Nawanagar, the team of Ranjitsinghji, who had died three years previously. He was a useful batsman and one of the best wicketkeepers of the times, despite being very tall and burly.

Abdul Aziz got a job in the police force of Nawanagar, a son was born to him — Salim Durani — and life was good. He declared that he’d become the father to a ‘Test cricketer’ and started coaching him rather early — he passed the new cricket ball before the baby’s eyes. The idea was to get him used to the moving ball. At around seven or eight, Salim was being trained to dive left and right to catch the ball thrown by his father. Abdul Aziz then did something decisive — Salim could bowl with both hands, but his father turned him into a left-hander. This, Salim recalled in an interview in 2020, was done on the advice of the great Vinoo Mankad, who was born in Jamnagar and was a teammate of Abdul Aziz. Mankad, himself a very fine left-arm spinner, would tie Salim’s right hand behind his back so that he could get used to using only his left arm to bowl.

Then 1947 happened. Abdul Aziz, a widower by then, moved to Karachi in the new country of Pakistan, leaving Salim with relatives — and they met only once after that, in Kolkata during a Test match in 1960-61.

In Karachi, Abdul Aziz mentored several cricketers who reached great heights, the most famous being Hanif Mohammed. Thus, Hanif, born in Junagarh, was being trained by an Afghan coach in Karachi, and at the same time the Afghanistan-born Salim was being mentored in Jamnagar by Mankad, who was born there. We can safely assume that separatism based on a belief system or nationalism did not matter to people such as Mankad and Salim.

Intriguingly, while the Abdul Aziz-coached Hanif became famous for his concentration and orthodox batting, Salim turned into a flamboyant stroke-player who loved to hit the ball to and over the boundary, and scored a quick 108 on First-Class debut at age 19.

Abdul Aziz seemed to live for cricket, and on the edge of penury due to his kindness. “He spent all his money on his students. He bought us shoes, gloves, bats and anything any of us needed. Sometimes he was left with no money in his pocket and then he would ask us to get him something to eat,” Hanif recalled years later. Salim, too, is remembered by his peers as a very generous man.

The only time his father watched him play, Salim took eight wickets in the Kolkata Test of 1960-61 and India won by a huge margin. He played many cameos with bat and ball — for instance, the wickets of Garry Sobers and Clive Lloyd in the Port of Spain Test in 1971, the 38 he made during a nervous chase of 86 against England in Chennai in January 1973. But a batting average of 25.04 in 29 Tests and a bowling average of 35.42 do no justice to a man of such talent — but then, he was not an averages man, he played the game as a game.

Six-hitting

Six-hitting was a wonder at one time — crowd in cricket grounds would chant ‘we want sixer’ for hours, mostly without reward. A six was an event. Now six-hitting is commonplace, and almost anyone with a hefty modern bat can edge the ball over the wicketkeeper’s head for a six off a fast bowler.

Salim Durani was one batsman who was reputed to oblige the cries of ‘we want sixer’ with a big hit. Yet, his records show that he struck only 15 sixers in 50 Test innings —that’s one six in three innings. Only once did he hit more than two sixers in an innings. Among current players, Axar Patel, a handy bat but primarily a bowler, has hit 17 sixers in 18 Test innings — one six almost every innings. Ravindra Jadeja, again primarily a bowler in Tests, has hit 56 sixers in 94 Test innings.

The persona of Salim — tall and handsome, and powerful yet graceful — was infinitely larger than numbers can tell; it was built on the expectation of something remarkable occurring when he reached the batting crease, or grabbed the ball. This can never be understood in our times, when massive bats have turned six-hitting into a banality that even tailenders perform while sleep-walking.