Mahesh Patil knew that it was just a question of a few overs.

The much-anticipated cricket match between India and England did not unfortunately live up to its prospects of a humdinger of a contest. The final test in a 5-match series, in which the scores were tied at 1-1, with 2 matches drawn, did promise a much livelier contest, but it was not to be.

True, England scored a pretty good 355 in its first innings and dismissed India with a fairly thin lead of 35 runs. At that stage, the term humdinger was still being exchanged fairly frequently by the many venerable commentators in the box.

But the English team folded up for just 75 in its second innings, leaving India with just 111 for victory – depending on who the commentator was, that number was either a good omen or bad.

India started quite well, with the opening batsmen relaxed, and taking their time to settle down. After all, it was only the fourth day and they could quite easily complete the match by stumps on that day. And they had a day more, just in case.

At 100 for 2, and with five overs remaining in the day, England was just going through the motions.

The following two overs yielded five runs each, with a lovely boundary each over from the rising Indian batting star Ajeez Shah. That made the scores level. A run more, and everyone could go home contendedly.

The subsequent over ended with no run – surprising, as the English team was practically begging the Indian team to take the run and end the misery.

The first two balls of the penultimate over resulted in no run. Which was when the incident happened.

Someone from the crowd, perhaps frustrated at India delaying the winning run, yelled something obscene about the Indian batsmen in the middle, which went down rather badly with many others sitting next to him.

What exactly was said by him still officially remains a mystery, though, if you had asked ten people in the stadium, each of them offered their best guess – except that none of the ten guesses were the same!

Within a minute, it seemed as if everyone in the stadium was fighting with everyone else. Given that it was the famous Wankhede Stadium at Mumbai, a city that was a melting pot of people from pretty much every part of India, the fighting among the crowd boasted of great variety and diversity, with curses and swear words being smeared around in seven or eight different languages, making it difficult to figure out what the fight was all about, and who exactly was fighting with whom.

An Indian cricket board official who went in to mediate had to make a hurried retreat, as he was at risk of having his new shirt torn.

With all the commotion around, the match of course came to a complete stop. The English players were viewing the entire melee with some interest. Ah, they were wondering, if it happened back home in soccer everyday, why should cricket be left behind?

The Indian batsmen were viewing it with some regret, wondering just why they could not take the run that was on offer in the previous few deliveries.

Eventually, after almost 45 minutes of utter chaos, the fighting subsided. Just as no one was sure what started the fight, no one was sure why it ended. The general consensus was that the yellers and swearers got tired and wound up.

By this time, it was quite dark. Technically, the umpires ought to have taken off the bails and called it a day, but as the Indian team needed just one run – and with eight mighty wickets at hand – it seemed silly to start another day with all the paraphernalia that an extra day demanded.

The English team was quite happy to bowl a few balls to get things done with – they were really looking forward to the bonus holiday when they could travel around Mumbai at their Cricket Association’s expense.

But Mahesh Patil looked around and said, “Look, this is really dark. I just cannot see the ball anymore. And the cricketing rules are not allowing the use of floodlights for this series. I know it is painful, but I do not wish to expose my players in such a way to some of the fastest bowling we have seen in years in the country. My players will assemble tomorrow. I apologise for the inconvenience.”

Despite the English team captain promising to use the slowest spinner in his team for the over, Mahesh stood his ground. He had his reasons – he was still haunted by his team’s Salim Jaffer getting badly hurt in the previous year’s series because Mahesh had pushed him to bat a couple of additional overs late in the day under somewhat dark conditions. He knew how silly he sounded to take it to an extra day, but once bitten…

Anyway, it was a perfect Indian summer with no chance of anything but lots of sun the next day.

And so 24 human beings walked off into the stands.

While having an early breakfast the next day in the hotel, Mahesh looked out the window, and he could not believe his eyes. It was dark outside, and it was pouring as if it had been waiting to pour for over a month! Surely this cannot be true. But it was. The hotel manager attending personally to him at the restaurant remarked how it was the first ever time in over a hundred years that the city had received heavy rains during the month. And, being a big cricket fan himself, the manager hoped that with this piece of news he would have reduced the Indian captain’s guilty feelings a bit – after all, Mahesh’s strange decision was the only thing almost everyone in India had talked late into the earlier night.

“What’s the weather report saying?” queried Mahesh to the manager.

“Ah, they are being a bit iffy,” said the manager, careful to ensure that he was using the best possible words to the celebrity loved by the entire country, “but I think the rain will stop soon.”

That was more a hope than a belief, and belief won. It poured all day long, more heavily than it poured during the heaviest monsoon rains. There was no way anything by way of cricket could be played – unless cricket meant a bowler and batsman playing inside a completely closed building.

The 24 men – and a few commentators who had the enthusiasm to turn up, and the ground support staff of course – waited until six in the evening, and had to be content with taking pictures of the most flooded cricket ground they had seen in their lives.

The match was a draw. And so was the series.

The next day, at the press conference, Mahesh was queried multiple times on the same thing – why on earth did he not allow just an additional over, or may just one delivery, bowled.

Ram Kishan, the famous reporter from Times of India asked the pesky question, “Mahesh, perhaps you should you have believed Rick (the English captain) when he said he would use a bowling change and use a spinner instead of a pacer.”

Mahesh looked at Ram – someone he knew quite well – for a moment and said, “Well Ram, more important, perhaps I should have believed in climate change”