Daljeet Bumrah loved her siestas in the scorching Ahmedabad afternoons. But the acoustics of a taped tennis ball ramming her bedroom wall in the modest three-room house woke her up. She threatened the culprit, her adolescent son Jasprit, that she would burn the ball if he ever disturbed her again. Jasprit nodded his head, before he thought deep and discovered a method where could keep banging the ball in the tiny room of his, yet not wake his mother up. He realised the ball barely made a sound when he hit the floor skirting, where the wall intersected the floor. Little did he then know that he was developing the most feared weapon of his, the toe-crushing yorker, that the alignments and bearings of a million-dollar arm was being synced, or his mother sense that the boy next room could end up as one of the greatest cricketers of her country. 

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The room was so small that it could barely squeeze in a tiny cot and a study table. But a rectangular patch of space between the crammed furniture was all he required for his run-up. Thus, was born the most minimalistic yet most intimidating run-up—not so much of a sprint as is a stroll—in the sport. Nine measured steps and he explodes, the body recoils backwards and the bowling arm juts out like the blade of a windmill. He breathes life into an inanimate sphere of leather. Or the devil that obeys its master’s orders. The collection of match-balls in his house, still the same old apartment in the middle-class Goyal Intercity community, would have their own tales to tell. Of the wicked angles and trajectories, he had made it traverse, of the varied emotions he had made them endure, or how with his artful fingers he transformed them into a priceless piece of treasure. 

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But the journey of the greatest fast bowler of his country began in the modest three-room house. His is an instructive tale of a man maximising the peculiarity of his circumstances to forge a special career. Bumrah didn’t crib that his house was small or the resident association forbade cricket inside the gated community, or his mother threatened to burn the ball, or the summers in Ahmedabad were too hot to play cricket outside, or that he was born with hyperextended joints in his arms, or the death of his father due to Hepatitis when Jasprit was seven, or the numerous time the public and pundits watched his action with suspicion. Rather than cursing his fate, blinking to adversities, slipping into a whirl of doubts, he maximised the supposed drawbacks to forge the most fascinating, and perhaps irreproducible, of careers in sport.