Outlook Chief Photographer Jitender Gupta was understandably tense on Sunday evening. He had spent nearly four hours with Mahender Singh Dhoni and not taken any pictures. But then airports and aircraft are not the best places to accomplish such tasks, especially with security personnel around. We had managed to convince Dhoni to let us take some pictures of him on one of his prized motorcycles on Monday morning.
To make it worse, he appeared to have switched his cell phone off on arrival. Our SMS texts sent on Sunday evening were delivered after midnight and there had been no response. It seemed like he had simply vanished. And we had our return flight that would leave Ranchi just after noon. Monday dawned early on us and we decided to go to Dhoni’s home in E-block of Shyamli Colony.
Two teenagers – we gathered later that their names were Chetan Midha and Manjit Singh – had beaten us to it and were perched on scooters just outside the iron gate. We walked in and rang the bell. Dhoni’s mother, the reticent Devki Devi, told us that our man hadn’t returned home all night.
The lads smiled at us. "Bhaiyya arrived in a Scorpio last evening. He then on a bike and rode away. We tried to follow him and the Scorpio that went with him. But they were too quick for us and we lost them," Midha said as they drove away, deciding to come back after a while. They returned in less than 15 minutes with Harsh Chauhan, a 14-year-old on vacation home from his boarding school in Bangalore, for company.
The couple of SMS texts that I sent him early in the morning were delivered almost as soon as he switched his phone on. And within moments, he was calling me on phone. But the network being what it was, the call ended almost as soon as it started. Yet, the missed call at 7:45 increased hope that we would get to see him before we were due to fly out of Ranchi.
No amount of tries from either of our phones would let a call go through and we settled down for another wait, unknowing how much longer it would be before we could make contact. The three teenagers were a good diversion and kept us engaged with a conversation that focussed almost entirely on Mahi-bhaiyya.
Nine minutes later, the purring of a big bike in the distance made their hearts leap. "Dekh, dekh, woh aa gaye (look, look, he’s arrived)," Manjit Singh screamed.
"I tried calling you," Dhoni said, pulling up and revving the bike up a bit, explaining that he had been out at his sister’s place all night and a combination of a busy BSNL network and his own decision to keep his mobile phone switched off had been responsible for the hits and misses. In just a few moments, we were heading into the house. And, nearly an hour later, we were heading back to our hotel.
The receptionist was beaming when we got back. "Mr Dhoni was here to see you and has left a note for you," she said, handing me our room key and a note. It was written in all-capitals, clear, concise and with some traces of an SMS addict:
Dhoni may be the most exciting Indian cricketer now, riding the crest to top the ICC rankings for batsmen in one-day internationals. He may even be the heartthrob of a nation, but as Jitender Gupta will testify, Dhoni is also a man of his word.
