Eating Out

I am half-a-minute late, not even that. But there he is, waiting, a tall glass of nimboo pani already on its way as he looks down languidly at the Oberoi swimming pool from the lounge adjoining La Rochelle. The nawab may be self-confessedly laid-back, but punctuality is obviously a virtue in his book of rules.

Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi turns heads. Judging by those that gently swivel—silver, black, male, female—when we walk into the restaurant. It could be that the former captain of the Indian cricket team is a bit of a recluse these days, not a part of the city’s social whirl or habitue of page 3. His outings are likely to be to cricket matches, wherever. Or, the streets of London, just walking them and "peeping into shops". "I am a city person, none of those country walks for me." And, increasingly, the polo grounds: a few years ago he instituted the Begum of Bhopal Pataudi Cup in memory of his mother.

However, my hunch is that it is his new svelte look—courtesy some ‘load-shedding’—that has the others staring. Obviously, food is not of the essence in this lunch engagement. When asked where he’d like to eat, he isn’t fussy: "Not Chinese, and somewhere close". The furthest East he cares to go, in cuisine terms, is "East of the Ganges". In distance, not too far out of Lutyens’ Delhi, where he lives. And so, our meal begins and ends with salad. But the conversation runs through many courses.

Pataudi’s passion these days is politics—armchair politics. "I love to listen to people who know what is really happening talk about who is stabbing who, what is going on behind the doors." Having braved the playing fields of politics once when Rajiv Gandhi asked him to contest elections, he plans to stay away from that battlefield.

Cricket is as much a passion, and will be less of an armchair activity: he’ll head the Indian Cricket Players’ Association which is being set up to improve communication between the cricket board and the players. "We want to make sure the players know what the board has planned for them."

Tiger, as his friends call him, is a voracious reader, juggling several books at a time. These days his mornings are taken up reading Black Gujarat, a travel book on Afghanistan and a book on modern rifles. The salad over, we talk about what his wife Sharmila Tagore is now doing. "I read somewhere that she is going to act in a film in Calcutta," he says nonchalantly. Do I hear right? Don’t they talk at home? Well, there is an unwritten rule in the Pataudi house. "When we first met, we decided that she would not bring films home and I would not bring cricket home." Touché.