There was a time-years ago when Mumbai's most loved icon (Sachin Tendulkar) was just a curly-haired moppet- when she was universally known as Sachuchi bai' (Sachu's nanny). Her name is Laxmi Gize.
Laxmibai's eyes mist with nostalgia as she travels back to circa 1974 when Mumbai was gentler place and Sachin Tendulkar an 18-month-old tornado capable of driving the most stoic person round the bend. "I was asked by an acquaintance if I wanted to be full-time nanny to this toddler who was so full of masti that no one could control him," she reminisces. "I said I'd try. It wasn't easy, he was a handful, and he'd make me breathless running after him. But he was such a cherub, the cutest baby around. Everyone would want to take him away and play with him."
Laxmibai remembers how she'd brush Sachin's corkscrew curls into ponytails and loop them with coloured ribbons. "Everyone would ask me, 'Is this a boy or a girl?' " she smiles. "I'd tell them it was a boy. Even the teachers at his school were foxed when I took him there on the first day." So deep was the attachment between the two by then that Laxmibai would stay the full three hours in school with her little ward. "With working parents and elder siblings in school and college, it used to be only Sachu and me at home all day," she says.
"I couldn't bear the thought of going back to an empty house, so I'd stay put. When he started going to school I was close to tears."
Sachin, incidentally, had no such emotional frailties, nor did he suffer the trepidation pangs of the other pre-schoolers.
"Seeing so many children in one place, he became even more charged," Laxmibai recalls with a fond laugh.
After he got home from school, the future maestro's thoughts would turn to his favourite game.
He didn't have the patience for mundane activities like eating and drinking," says Laxmibai. "I'd chase him into the playground with his milk, his food and God knows what else. For him, it was only cricket, cricket and cricket all the time. He'd tell me, 'Bai, let's go down' and I'd reply, 'Sachin, are you mad? Can't you see how hot it is?'.
Then he'd point somewhere and say, 'See, there's shade over there. Let's play bat-ball.' He wouldn't take no for an answer." It was thus that Laxmibai became the first bowler the master batsman faced in his life-the gentle patter of the minuscule plastic ball making way for the flippers and yorkers from the Shane Warnes and Wasim Akrams years later.
The playground of his housing society, Sahitya Sahavas, was Sachin's 24/7 haunt-if he wasn't playing cricket, he'd be on a treetop or fishing out tadpoles and guppy fishes from the little clear-water stream that flowed through the colony into the adjoining Bandra creek. "I would warn him, don't you dare take them into the house," says Laxmibai.
"He'd cart them to the terrace anyway and dump them into a plastic tub to watch them swim." So obsessed was Sachin with frogs that he once made his mother call up a friend, who'd claimed to be eating frog bhaji, to ask for the recipe. "His family members were at their wits' end," chuckles Laxmibai. "They'd moan, what is this child going to do in life? He's not interested in studies, all he does is play and trouble Laxmibai."
Then destiny took a spin worthy of a Qadir googly, and imp metamorphosed into idol before you could say howzatt. Laxmibai wasn't around to witness the meteoric rise-she'd quit when Sachin was 12- but she did follow his career graph with loving interest.
"When he got married, he sent a special car to pick me up, served me food himself and put the first morsel into my mouth," she recollects.
"Even later, if he ever saw me on the street, he'd get out of his car and touch my feet. Just like his late father, who was truly a dev manus.
Sachin is not changing his relations with time. Once he build relations he carries it life time. He is still down to earth and not changes after this great success.
You are Great Player & Nice Human being Dear Sachin!!! We love you.
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