Kalgoorlie Miner (18): Inevitability

As Australia edged towards victory in the Adelaide test match late last year, I began to experience a strange and complex set of emotions that I hadn’t felt since observing a remarkably unremarkable boy on a Mumbai ferry some six months earlier. How were these events related, I wondered?

The emotional triplet began with pity, gave way almost instantaneously to guilt (at feeling pity, because pity implies superiority), and then slowly morphed into a deep and unreasonable sadness; and I mean unreasonable in the literal, dictionary-defined sense – that is “not governed by or acting according to reason”.

Every time Andrew Flintoff’s sagging, ashen face graced the screen on the fifth day in Adelaide, I recoiled as a fallen skateboarder recoils from the sickening sight of his own splintered forearm. His eyes were filled with the glassy, helpless terror of a poorly-anaesthetised man lying conscious through his own open-heart surgery. It was terribly difficult to watch, even for an Australian. I felt unable to revel in our victory because I felt so bad for the English*.

Precisely six months earlier, my comrade Tim and I were aboard a wooden ferry returning from an island in the Mumbai harbour. It was the final evening of our journey around India, and the setting was ideal for the resultant languid reflection - the boat advancing almost imperceptibly through the oily brown water; the sun sinking through the suffocating haze just as the light was metaphorically fading on our savage and testing oddyssey.

A glance around the ferry revealed a large component of relatively wealthy Indian tourists - the dignified parents, the spoilt, slightly flabby sons, and the heart-wrenchingly beautiful daughters - all chatting, laughing and texting. As an aside (grant me a moment of indulgence), no-one in the world delivers a more heavenly interpretation of the English language than a young, well-educated Indian woman - their frivolous, delighfully-inflected banter is the auditory equivalent of rolling around naked in silken bedsheets.

Anyway, juxtaposed against this well-to-do crowd was the remarkably unremarkable boy. He had a dark, serious face and wore a short-sleeved chequered shirt, a navy blue pair of straight-legged, long-zipped jeans, and a set of worn black leather shoes. He and his friend both had stern expressions that seemed completely at odds with both their age - which I estimated to be around 18 - and the jolly, relaxed tone of the tourist-filled vessel.

The critical event that triggered the pity-guilt-sadness complex was when the boy pulled out his positively monstrous camera - this thing must have been from the 1960s or 1970s. As he wound the film on he looked around and saw many of the younger, digital camera-owning people openly pointing and giggling, and when his mate took the photo - a photo that should have immortalised what was probably a rare and exciting experience - the boy wore an unforgettably sad expression, just like Andrew Flintoff's.

Q: What common factor links the remarkably unremarkable boy with England's defeat, and causes the pity-guilt-sadness emotional triplet?

A: Inevitability.

There is tragedy in the inevitability of heartless class discrimination, just as there was tragedy in the inevitability of the Adelaide test match.

Oh well, I've answered the question that was bugging me - whether or not you got anything out of it is another matter entirely. Sorry if I've wasted your time.

* Un-Australian I know.