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Brazil brings out the boy on us
By Rohit Brijnath*

I had no idea where on the map of South America Brazil was. But we knew yellow, we knew Pele, writes Rohit Brijnath

It was 1982, I was 19, in love for the very first time and, on a July night, introduced to hate.

It was the first World Cup I can remember watching, alone in the early morning Mumbai darkness, watching Doordarshan pictures that hiccuped every now and then.

Back then, nicotine just beginning to stain the brain, I had no idea where on the map of South America Brazil was. But we knew yellow, we knew Pele, we knew the samba, these were universal passwords, a sporting umbilical cord that connected us all.

Everyone played football. Everyone. You could play it anywhere, too, on roofs, trains, corridors, dorm rooms, with anything, whether paperweights (bad idea), ping pong balls, paper rolled up, ma's knitting ball.

A game could start from nothing. Walking down a street, lampposts abruptly became defenders and a lost matchbox a ball. It's a universal thing. There are stools and tables in Ronaldinho's drawing room still dizzy from the amount of times he dribbled them.

Sometimes, even now, your hair kissed by white, you look around, and no one's watching, and it's as if you can't help yourself, and you try to curl an empty tin through an empty doorway.

Way back then, as a 14, 15 year old, there was no Maradona yet, only Brazil, only Pele, and we a whole world of scruffy, awful, desperate imitators. He was the only one of them all, that brilliant 1970s team, whose entire name we knew: Edson Arantes do Nascimento. An exotic name rolled around perfectly on the tongues of a billion boys.

But we'd never seen them live, never read a book on them, there was no Internet, no cable TV. But somehow we knew, maybe our fathers told us, but style, languor, creativity, cool, joy, expressiveness on a football field was Brazil.

Then 1982. Then suddenly, for the first time on my TV, there they were, proof of magic. And not just any Brazil, but Zico, Socrates, Eder, Falcao, Junior, Oscar, Cerezo, surely the best Brazilian team since 1970.

Eder seemingly couldn't pass a ball straight but only with an exaggerated curl. Zico was reputedly the most famous Brazilian four-letter word since Pele (of course there had been Didi and Vava before). Socrates smoked off the pitch we were told, but he was smoking on it. These men could write haiku with their studs. This was football the way we imagined it.

This was also love. Hate was reserved for a scrawny, blue clad- Satan, Paolo Rossi.

In the first group stage, Brazil won every match, scored 10 goals; Italy sneaked through without a win, scoring only two goals. In the second stage, they play each other. Brazil needs only a draw to proceed further.

Brazil is beautiful

Brazil is beautiful but lazy. Rossi scores.1-0. Socrates, released by a swivelling Zico, threads the ball between post and goalkeeper Zoff 1-1. Rossi scores again. 2-1. Falcao rifles in the equaliser. 2-2. Then Rossi scores once more, 3-2, and when the whistle blows, you want to vomit, you cannot move.
It is the first time I realised how deep inside me this game, this team, had suddenly got, as if it were tugging at my intestines, how much joy it could release or despair it could bring.

Years later, or so went a surely apocryphal story, Rossi was in Brazil for a seniors event and mentioned his name to the taxi driver. Abruptly the taxi stopped, the driver said: `Get out.' Why, asked Rossi. Because of what you did to us in 1982, replied the driver. I understood.

Since 1982, so much has changed, cities and countries moved, children born and grown up, reflexes dimmed. But still, lurking in the corners of my existence, there is always football and a can on the street to be kicked, and there is always Brazil.

I do not go as far as to measure my life through World Cups and Brazilian wins. But this I know. For those of us who have left their youth somewhere behind, this team still stirs the residue of the boy that lives within us.