Deep inside Malabar, fringed by the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats on either side, a December night got suffused with hope, despair and finally ecstasy. Lionel Messi’s Argentina was the favourite in this part of Northern Kerala, an affection that quadrupled once Brazil and Portugal got knocked out of the FIFA World Cup.
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The build-up was about anxiety and dreams. The Argentina flag was a regular marker across a village split by a canal into Ponniam East and Ponniam West. The canal wasn’t exactly the erstwhile Berlin Wall but there were cases of micro-parochialism out here. But every four years, when the World Cup looms, the two Ponniams and the rest of Malabar and Kerala join hands, worshipping the ‘Beautiful Game’.
Kylian Mbappe had his fans, but out here in the watering holes, be it for chai or toddy, or at local libraries, political party clubs, Messi is the reigning deity. Through the climax in a night when the cicadas sung as usual, while palm civets scurried atop Mangalore-tiled roofs, the acoustics had a Dolby effect as fireworks synchronised to Messi’s tap-dance at Doha.
In the hours before the summit clash, a whisper gathered momentum: Will Argentina do to Messi what India did to Sachin Tendulkar by winning the 2011 cricket World Cup? A collective yearning gathered strength and even those itching to go to neighbouring Mahe, a former French colony and now part of Pondicherry, for their share of subsidised tipple hesitated as the television offered a brighter allure.
Old memes of a Malayali offering puja for Messi at the local Bhagavathi temple did the rounds. Even if Mbappe threatened to alter the script, the “ nammada Messi jayikkum“ (our Messi will win) spirit was all-pervading. Football moves you in multiple ways and when a tiny village erupted with delirium close to midnight, all seemed well in sporting paradise.
France fought hard, but it was Argentina’s night and Kerala was wide awake. Obviously it would be the same in Bengal, Goa and the North East besides cities with their niche European club football-loving crowd. Messi proved to be the Moses parting the seas.
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