Pathos of the expatriate

I don’t know if it is still there, but in the museum at Lord’s there used to be a glass case containing a stuffed sparrow killed in mid-flight by Jahangir Khan. It always felt somehow dismally appropriate that the one sparrow to substantiate biblical claims should have to spend its eternity at Lord’s, but a different age and a more exuberant game demand a more optimistic symbol and in an incident during a one-day match at the Oval in 2002 between India and Sri Lanka Romesh Gunesekera has found it. ‘The whole of the Oval was hushed,’ he writes on the death of a London pigeon, sacrificial victim of a Sachin Tendulkar drive:

The nearest fielder walked over and picked the bird up as though it were the dove of peace. He carried it slowly towards the boundary. Sunny knew then that this was the picture for him … He kept the lens aperture small, knowing that in his photograph the sky would be a bowl where newspaper confetti floated like circling buzzards, while in the centre a pair of clasped hands prayed to a dying bird.