The intergenerational love story that spawned a local cricket club

Last month, 53 million people around the world watched India beat South Africa in a nail-biter of a Cricket World Cup final held in Barbados. The next morning, thanks to a new program sponsored by the Greater Boston Cricket Foundation, a group of local families gathered at Lexington High School’s Crumb Field to introduce their children to playing the sport themselves. 

The Youth Cricket Program is an unusual work in progress for boys and girls aged 6 to 10. Their parents, some of whom serve as coaches, grew up playing cricket in India, Pakistan, the UK, or other former Commonwealth countries. Some played as graduate students in the US as they worked toward advanced degrees in engineering, tech and medicine. They married, had children, and now want their kids to play the team sport that, for them, holds the attraction of baseball, football, hockey and basketball combined.

Theirs is an intergenerational love story with a sport that embodies both personal and national aspirations, as illustrated by the Lexington-based Shah family – Sanaya and Kartik Shah, their 6-year-old son Nathan, and Nathan’s grandparents Vasanti and Arvind Shah of Hyderabad, India, who live part of the year in Lexington. 

Kartik Shah, who arrived in Massachusetts as a PhD student in biology, was born in 1986 — three years after India won its first-ever Cricket World Cup, a stunning upset for a highly diverse country then struggling to build a strong economy and cohesive national identity. His father, Arvind Shah, was in his late twenties at the time, one of ten children from Navinar, a village on India’s west coast, whose family had moved to Bombay for a better life. Although he knew about other sports like tennis, these required facilities or courts — “a rich man’s game” as he recalls. “Gully cricket,” played in just about any empty space, even small alleys, was for everyone. “We read about cricket matches in the papers and had our favorite radio commentators — at first just once a fortnight from the UK,” he recalls. The World Cup win changed everything. 

In college, Arvind was selected to play for the cricket team and continued after graduation, working for companies like Colgate Palmolive and later Food Corp, which maintained extremely competitive employee teams on the Bombay cricket circuit. 

Arvind married Vasanti Shah, an accountant who had played on the first women’s intercollegiate cricket team in Hyderabad, at a time when most Indian women were not allowed to wear pants. The couple was expecting their first child when, just a few days before Kartik was born, Arvind slipped and suffered a severe back injury while playing on a wet cricket field in a monsoon Kanga League tournament. He was unable to get out of bed for nearly a year.

The Shahs had to move from Bombay to Hyderabad where the in-laws could help while Vasanti worked. “We struggled financially,” Vasanti recalls. “We had food on the table but no luxuries,” but somehow managed to send Kartik to private school when he turned three. Kartik learned to read and write and speak English (at home he spoke Kutchi) and, very soon, he began to play cricket.

Kartik dates his obsession with the game to 1992, when he was six and watched the World Cup in Australia on a color TV. He was mesmerized by India’s Sachin Tendulkar (who had been inspired by watching American tennis player John McEnroe on TV).

“Sachin was an immensely talented but very shy and soft-spoken guy. He was a genius at cricket, whacking the fast bowlers, deftly hitting the slower bowlers, a near complete stroke-maker. Amazing technique and he never gave up. No matter who you were, rich or poor, industrialist or rickshaw puller, government officer or servant, everyone loved Sachin,” Kartik says. “He had many qualities that our parents wanted to see in their children. His personality also appealed immensely to a lot of us kids. He’s the major reason I picked up the cricket bat.”

Along with inspirational figures like Sachin, cricket provided a window onto the world outside India. “I first saw glimpses of the UK, Australia and South Africa through televised games,” says Kartik. “Cricket was also a cohesive thing. India is so diverse and, at that time, we were still a relatively new country. Cricket brought us together and it still gives us a sense of belonging among other countries in the world.” 

By age ten, Kartik, like most kids he knew, was going to cricket camp every summer. “You wake up before dawn, get breakfast, ride your bike to camp with a heavy cricket kit behind you. You train for a few hours, eat lunch, and then train again till dusk. Weekends were for competitive games. I did this until I was 16. I wanted to be like Sachin. So did every other kid,” Kartik recalls. But then things changed.

“Tom Brady’s story of his father feeding him balls, the Williams sisters and their dad — those are beautiful stories, but not my story. My parents never said I could become anything I wanted. I wasn’t raised to think that way. We could only think within our circumstances: to get a decent education and job. That was considered being successful.”

Over the years, seeing other kids with more training and skills, Kartik realized he probably wasn’t going to become a professional cricket player. “That was a very painful realization,” he says. “In a country of a billion people, the odds of making it are pretty small. Crazy small. But that I’m not a professional cricket player is one of the true regrets of my life.”

In 2002, aged 16 and living at home with his parents and younger sister, Kartik had to decide between going to work and going to college. The options were limited. His parents often reminded him of the rampant nepotism in most professions at the time — politics and business, even medicine, movies and media — the remnants of a caste system. Young Indians who excelled academically and who had no family connections were urged by their parents to obtain a STEM education. Biotech had just arrived in India as a four-year degree and Kartik decided to try it. “I had to borrow money to attend college and went with what cost the least. Bioengineering –- unlike computer science — was new in India at the time, with few professors and fewer opportunities to do research. Luckily I discovered that I liked DNA and heredity. I fell in love with molecular biology and genetics,” he says. 

By his second year of college in Hyderabad, Kartik had started thinking about studying in the US. “Every time I went to the library, I looked at foreign textbooks and tried to figure out where the authors had studied or taught,” he says. “A friend who had recently come to the University of North Carolina let me use his credit card to pay for my applications.” 

At 19, Kartik applied to several graduate programs at American universities. He didn’t believe he’d be accepted and didn’t know how he would finance it if he was. But his GRE scores were good and his TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) score was great, he says, because, worried about his English proficiency, he had prepared by binge-reading sci-fi novels of H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, and Michael Crichton. He received several rejections and was accepted at Penn, but could not imagine raising the $90,000 per year it would have cost. 

He had almost given up on the idea of study abroad when he received an acceptance from Tufts’ doctoral program in biology. He had mistakenly applied for a doctorate instead of a masters degree. As a doctoral candidate, he discovered that he would not have to pay tuition and, as a TA, would even receive a stipend.

Kartik arrived in Boston at age 21, feeling provincial and socially awkward. “I had never experienced anything like the Tufts campus. Quiet, green, serene,” he says. “In Hyderabad, I called my professors ‘Sir.’ They wore three-piece suits and were entitled to hit you if they chose. Here, my professors wore shorts and asked me to call them by their first names. The culture shock was brutal. I had no small talk. The only thing that was familiar was cricket.”

Almost immediately, Kartik discovered local groups of overseas students and immigrants from the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies and South Asia who played cricket in the greater Boston area. These games, played on the weekends, became his home away from home, his breathing space from the pressure cooker of the lab, his exercise and his social life. After he got his PhD at Tufts, he moved to MIT for post-doctoral training. “That,” he says, “was like drinking water out of a fire hydrant – cutting-edge research, so many brilliant people, sometimes spending 16 hours a day in the lab. On weekends, I’d go to the lab early in the morning, play cricket, and then back to the lab at night.”

By then, he had met Sanaya, who had also come to Tufts for graduate studies in occupational therapy. They married in 2012, and once they became parents, Kartik’s weekend cricket affair came to a full stop. While he worked at Vertex Pharmaceuticals and then Takeda, he could barely manage time to even play short pick-up cricket games. The couple moved to Lexington with their son Nathan and settled into the routines of American suburban life. It wasn’t until COVID that Kartik, Lexington-based Hiren Kakkad and Grafton-based Adil Waqar began talking about bringing cricket to Lexington.  

Adil was born in Buffalo but raised in Karachi, Pakistan before he returned to the US for graduate school. The two first met in the summer of 2019 at a pick-up game in Burlington. “If not for cricket, we probably would have never met,” Kartik recalls. “We come from two countries that are considered arch-rivals, on the cricket field and beyond. But when I asked Adil’s help in forming the Greater Boston Cricket Foundation, there was no hesitation.” 

What started off as a simple pick-up game that they could play while wearing masks and maintaining social distance, blossomed into a popular night cricket format, lit by floodlights. Players spread the word, and the group grew from a handful to two teams, then four, then six.

“Our group shows that cricket can help transcend geographic and cultural boundaries,” says Kartik, who is now managing 100 plus people and a waiting list.” 

The group calls itself a “dad’s league,” with games scheduled on weeknights from 8:30 pm to 10:30 pm, after their kids have gone off to bed, leaving weekends for family time. 

In 2024, the recreational cricket league runs like a well-oiled machine, complete with field permits, liability insurance, team rosters, jerseys, professional umpires, volunteers and even local sponsors. The schedule is posted on their website and live game scoring takes place on an app. The group plays on multi-purpose synthetic turf fields at the moment, but is eyeing a dedicated cricket field for its members and for developing youth cricket.

Arvind, now 68 years old, also plays in the recreational league. He is still quite “fit,” and Kartik, now age 38, says it is a matter of great joy and inspiration that his father can play alongside him. “We want to encourage people to stay active,” says Kartik, “and cricket is a great medium for it. Life has indeed come full circle for our family.” 

Nathan Shah, now six, is the same age as Kartik was when he fell in love with cricket. His grandparents Arvind and Vasanti Shah, now retired, spend long stretches of the year in Lexington, and Arvind coaches on the ‘backyard’ cricket pitch in the middle of the LHS football field that Kartik negotiated with Lexington Recreation to make available. His friend and Lexington’s Little League coach Eric Bristol steered him to Tricon Inc on Waltham Street for uniforms and to Ranc’s for “Player of the Day” gift cards. He bought $1,000 worth of equipment including a tent, bats, balls, wickets, and cones – guessing correctly that he’d find sponsors to pay him back later. Those sponsors now include Tashan, an Indian restaurant in Bedford, Turnpike Market in Billerica, and Bay State Wealth Advisors out of Newton.

“I believe that if you build it they will come,” Kartik says. “As far as the future goes, I’d love to see Lexington’s schools field cricket teams.”

The Greater Boston Cricket Foundation’s Youth ‘Intro to Cricket’ program for the summer of 2024 runs through August 11, costs $240, and includes a cricket bat and jersey. Girls participate free of charge. “I thought, I will run the program even if I only have three or four kids,” says Kartik. “We now have fifteen, and I get contacted every week by a new parent who says their child is interested.”

If your kids might be interested, please contact https://gboscricket.com