He paid a heavy price…

He was a tall, slightly built, soft-spoken young man with a toothy grin and restless feet, incapable, it seemed, of standing still. He must have been 16 or 17 when he shyly stood in the background and watched the State Bank team--of which his uncle Abid Zainulabuddin was the captain--at nets behind an impressive office complex on a main thoroughfare of Hyderabad. His own home was in a modest quarter of the city in the bylanes behind the bank, from where he walked to the nets via the bank's rear entrance. He would wait patiently to get a chance to bowl his harmless legbreaks to the later order batsmen.

Little did any of us realize that this young man of the ever present smile would one day play for India, delight the cricket world with his wristy strokeplay, and eventually become a successful captain. Yes, soon enough, he was making waves in domestic cricket, especially with his unusual capacity to play those wonderful onside shots to balls pitched anywhere from outside the offstump to the legside. Nothing he did in domestic cricket until that momentous double century in the Duleep Trophy prepared anyone for the fairytale beginning of three hundreds in a row to his Test career.

The early impressions of Mohammad Azharuddin were all about how he was a devout Muslim and devoted grandson, doted upon, and shattered by the death of his favourite human being when he was on the verge of his Test debut. Every report out of Hyderabad stressed his simplicity and modesty in the face of all the adulation that was now his. When he slowly found his feet in the big bad world of international cricket after his spectacular start had tapered off into relatively ordinary performances outside India, he still came through as a young man with his head screwed firmly on his shoulders, now quietly determined to cement his place in the sun.

The Indian captaincy came to him almost by happenstance, but it sat lightly upon his shoulders, until disaster struck on the South African tour. He was a troubled man, in poor batting form, leading a losing team. What happened when he was retained as captain against England for the home series is now history and started the most glorious phase of the Hyderabadi's career.

Through the ups and downs of Azharuddin's eventful career, conflicting reports about the man did the rounds in the corridors of cricket. One side of him continued to be seen in a favourable light. He showed respect to seniors, cricketers and others, he exerted quiet authority over his team, and he still retained a reputation as the boy next door, but there were also occasional flashes of arrogance in the utterances he made retorting to criticism, there was this new image as a man of expensive tastes. And we all know where his career ended, after numerous comebacks and electrifying exhibitions of an unusual talent.

In the end, what haunts admirers and well-wishers of this brilliant cricketer--is a poignant sense of what might have been. Just as his cricket fell short of greatness, thanks to his failure against genuine pace and in adverse conditions on the field, his life too has been found flawed in the face of the ultimate test--that of character. It is one of the tragedies of Indian cricket that someone so decent and dignified should lose his way in the manner Azhar did.