Excerpt from the chapter Sevens Season 1990
World Cup fever began early that year as the media started covering the ongoing preparations for the mega-tournament, such as the wrapping up of the qualifying rounds to determine the teams, finalizing the venues, and drawing up the tournament schedule. Argentina had a solid fan base in Kerala state by then. Football fans in the state had traditionally rooted for Brazil, largely because their own country had never made it to the World Cup final round. It had never seriously attempted to qualify, even though the country had produced talented footballers in regions such as Kerala, Goa, Bengal, and the northeastern states. In sports, India has been known mainly for its love of cricket to the outsiders, and not much of other sports on the world stage.
The rivalry between local fans of Argentina and Brazil got mixed up with their loyalties to the local football clubs in a confusing but endearing way. The World Cup was scheduled to begin in June, just after the Sevens season ended ahead of the monsoon.
Many important things were happening around the world in the run-up to the World Cup. Toward the end of 1989, the infamous Berlin Wall fell, and the western and eastern parts of Germany started talking about becoming one country again, as they had once been, but were split by the Allies, the winners of World War II, to keep it weak for not starting another World War. The vast Socialist conglomeration, Soviet Union was beginning to crumble at its edges. Small countries such as Estonia and Latvia declared independence from it, while many nations within that empire began asserting their freedom and pursuing their own destinies as well. The Soviet experiment to uplift mankind was nearing seven decades, but its collective efforts had not delivered what many had hoped for, and at times those efforts, often repressive and heavy-handed, had descended into human tragedies.
Many people in Kerala felt uneasy about the deterioration of the Soviet Union, as they had grown up reading the free books and magazines printed on glossy paper that were distributed for free or at nominal prices by their propaganda machinery. For many in the state, the goodness of Communism had long seemed well established in the Soviet Union. But by 1990, serious doubts were beginning to emerge about its viability as a governing principle, as troubling news continued to arrive from the Soviet Union, which was also a football powerhouse with players drawn from across its vast territory, including Ukraine. Many football fans were concerned mainly about the existence of the Soviet Union as a team in the upcoming World Cup if the country disintegrated.
The release of Nelson Mandela, after twenty-seven years in jail, was a major piece of news that brought a small measure of joy to the world, even to Chowara, where an access road leading from the main road to the ferry on the riverside had been informally named after him while he was still in jail. There was no signboard marking it, but everyone knew it and simply called it Mandela Road, though no one really knew who had first started using that name. Though some local Communist Party members took ownership of everything related to Nelson Mandela, who had become a hero to everyone regardless of political affiliation, it was hard to be a supporter of the Communist Party in those days, as its local die-hard adherents, mainly workers’ union members employed in companies based in the Aluva industrial belt, struggled to explain why people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were revolting against the leaders and governments that ruled under that banner.
Rumor had it that Punnoose had joined the local branch of the Communist Party that held power in the local government—democratically elected, no less. His sand-mining business was not doing well. By then the sand miners had almost exhausted the sand that had accumulated in the riverbed over centuries, extracting it within just a couple of decades. Although their activities had been legal and licensed by local governments along the river, sand mining had begun to attract scrutiny from state- and national-level authorities as well as environmental groups. The local operators like Punnoose were finding it increasingly difficult to deal with such oversight.