The match-day vibe is unusually quiet among the Indian players. It is February 2019, and India’s Board President XI side, led by Smriti Mandhana, take on England Women in a one-day warm-up game under an hour at the Wankhede Stadium. But this group is far from their ebullient self, the buzz at the warm-up atypically muzzled.
The Board President XI squad huddles near the media-box end on the Monday morning. Their black armbands come into view. Devika Vaidya, the India spin-bowling allrounder part of the squad, doesn’t, though — at any point through the match.
It has barely been 24 hours since her mother’s sudden passing due to cardiac arrest. Vaidya, 21 at the time, had been practising with the squad at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai when the tragedy occurred, in her hometown Pune.
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Nearly four years on, Vaidya sits in the Coochbehar room at the Brabourne Stadium, a stone’s throw away from Wankhede. She is addressing her first press conference as an India player, after her side’s seven-run loss to Australia in the penultimate T20I of the five-match series on Saturday.
On a night her 45-ball 72-run stand with captain Harmanpreet Kaur almost formed the pivot to a series-levelling win, Vaidya appears remarkably level-headed, self-assured. Until not long ago, she had been wrestling demons within her mind to attain a semblance of this equanimity.
“I had sought professional help,” says Vaidya about the emotionally turbulent phase following her mother’s death where she found herself drifting away from the game and the world around her. “But then I realised that the best way to get out of such a zone is speaking it out.
“I am not someone who would sit and talk about my problems with anyone or even with my family and friends. It took me a lot of efforts to speak up and that helped me. That’s how I started trusting people other than just my mom. Then I realised there is a world apart from my mom. It took some time but I am fine now.”
To most on the Indian women’s cricket circuit, Vaidya’s mother, Maushami, was a constant presence on tours. Her premature demise left a void so big in Vaidya’s life, and career, her focus drowned amid the shriek of silence the tragedy birthed.
"It was a shock for the next one year. I couldn't realise what had happened because we were continuously playing," she recalls. "That was some kind of an escape… playing was an escape because I didn't want to go home. Something has happened, I don't know what has happened. I didn't want to know or get used to the fact that she is not there.
"The first year was me escaping reality."
The defeaning quiet the COVID-19 pandemic’s first wave plunged the world into only worsened matters for Vaidya, too, at a personal level. The solitude, however, also brought with it perspective and acceptance.
“After COVID started, it hit me that the person so close to me was not with me anymore,” says Vaidya. “I then had to support my family also. It was a partnership there also — taking care of my grandparents, and they taking care of me. It was a long journey but then some things have to be accepted.”
Even before the personal loss pushed her into a corner, a slew of ill-timed illnesses and injuries that preceded it upended her career.
“It was all good until 2017,” remembers Vaidya, who played her only T20I before the ongoing series in 2014, at 17. She had good all-round showings in the 2017 ODI World Cup Qualifiers to make the squad for the tournament proper, too. But a shoulder injury a month out from the World Cup shoved her out of contention.
Just as things started to look up for her, she contracted dengue, and when the Australia A side toured in October-November 2018, chikungunya robbed her of captaincy and she was replaced in the squad. “After that there was a lack of confidence in me whether I can come back really and play at the top level,” Vaidya recollects.
Being an elite cricketer can often be a lonely place. Being one in India, ever more so. That’s down to mental-health well-being, by and large, remaining far from a priority in the country. The discourse around it is well off the mainstream, any structured support for cricketers across the food chain few and far between.
In a recent conversation with ESPNcricinfo, former India men cricketer Robin Uthappa shed light on this harsh reality about cricket’s mental-health crisis. The emotional wreck the death of her sister and mother last year, during the devastating second COVID-19 wave in the country, left India women batter Veda Krishnamurthy remains another poignant exhibit.
To Vaidya’s good fortune, though, she found allies when solace seemed unattainable. With support from friends, family, her state association Maharashtra, and fellow players, Vaidya pulled herself back from the brink.
In longtime friend and Maharashtra teammate, Mandhana, the India T20I vice-captain, she found a confidante.
“There were a couple of seniors… I used to speak with Smriti that, since we are playing together from childhood, we wanted to play and win a World Cup together,” Vaidya says.
“We used to talk regularly and there were some India players who were in contact with me and the officials as well. They used to back me saying, ‘You are a good bowler and batter.’ It’s about getting in the right mindset and I would do well.”
At her lowest, Vaidya remembers telling herself, “I knew that if I get through this phase, nothing can stop me.” The motivation to help India win a world title, a silverware that still eludes them, spurred her on to find her way back to a sport that’s both been a friend and foe.
“At the end of the day, it was always a dream to come back, play for the country, win a couple of World Cups,” she says. “That dream actually kept me going. Whenever I used to think, “Nahi khelna hai abhi, bass ho gaya (enough is enough, I don’t want to play anymore),” the thought that ‘if I don’t play now, how will I win a World Cup’? used to haunt me and kept me going.
The enterprise has held Vaidya in good stead. A promising show in the domestic season saw her score 130 runs in five innings at an average of 32.50 and a strike rate of 109.24, apart from picking up six wickets, in the inter-state T20s. On the back of it, she has now played all four T20Is of the Australia series, slotting in as the first-choice leg-spinner who is more than handy with the bat, too.
Her three wickets in four innings so far have had classical leg-spin bowling at its core, on pitches both teams have scored over 170 almost at will. But it’s with the bat that Vaidya has left a more decisive imprint on the series and, potentially, on the squad to be soon picked for the T20 World Cup in South Africa in February.
Coming in at No. 5 for all four fixtures but the third one, where she batted at No. 7, Vaidya, in the fashion of a resourceful accumulator, has played something of a foil to the big hitters. Most memorably, in India’s only win in the series so far, it was Vaidya’s last-ball four in a 5-ball 11 that took the match to a Super Over and, the home team eventually to victory, before a record 47,000-strong crowd.
“My batting is totally upon the situation — whether I have to play my shots or to rotate strike and give confidence to myself and the other batter,” she says of her role in the line-up. “It depends on when we are batting and which phase and play accordingly. That’s the challenge and I am really enjoying it.”
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Short-statured, left-hand batter Vaidya doesn’t have the build, power, or reach to clear the boundary the way the likes of Harmanpreet, Mandhana, Shafali Verma or Richa Ghosh does. But she keeps the scoreboard ticking, albeit at a strike rate that can do with some working on, with a knack for finding the gaps every now and then.
In Harleen Deol, a batting all-rounder who bowls leg-spin, she has a direct competition in the squad. And with the return of the big-hitting pace-bowling allrounder Pooja Vastrakar, who is missing this series through injury, a rejig in the make-up of the starting XI is imminent.
Despite promising performances against Australia, Vaidya might not be a shoo-in for next month’s tri-series in South Africa or the World Cup that follows. But for someone who knows what it feels like drifting away from cricket, the value of this comeback is far from what scorebooks can ever attest to.
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