Let the music play

Cricket in Sri Lanka and the brass bands are inseparable commodities. It's just such a day-long party, an existence outside cricket yet so much a part of it. Watching on TV, questions have always cropped up. What music do they play when Sri Lanka is not doing well, for they hardly ever stop playing? More curiously, how do they play Hindi songs, obscure ones at that, which many in India have forgotten too? And do they belong in Test cricket?

There are two endearing answers to the first two questions. "We don't play according to the match, we play according to the crowd. As long as the crowd is up to it, we keep playing," says the bandmaster at the P Sara Oval.

For the answer to the second question, we need to know they don't understand or speak Hindi. Ask them about the Hindi tunes, and they can sing the first two lines of many songs, perfectly in tune. Mere sapno ki rani (they don't know the album), Dekha hai pehli baar (Saajan, they know), Love in Tokyo (they don't know), Meet na mila (Abhimaan, they know), and many others. How do they learn playing them? "So what if we don't understand the language, we are crazy about the Hindi music," says the bandmaster. Music has some power, for somebody to be able to hum the lines they have no idea what they mean.

The third question has more complex answers, and more personal ones. They are enjoyable in a boring Test match, but when it is engrossing play, perhaps they seem out of place. More at home in limited-overs cricket. Boundary fielders, all alone in a crowd when under a skier, can't like it too.

Then again it is a personal judgement. Neither can anything take away from the energy that exists in the tent they play their music in. It's hard not to enjoy it. In the centre of the tent, the band has about 10 chairs for them and the equipment. The men on the trumpet take the lead, those on drums follow, those in the crowd can't stop dancing as long as there is air passing through those trumpets. In the lesser matches, like the famous school cricket (although it would be criminal to describe that cricket as 'lesser'), arrack flows too.

The brass bands have become so much a part of the picture that cricket in Sri Lanka is that it would be difficult to imagine it without these brass bands. To each his own then.