Boys will be boys. Gather a group of idle young men — anywhere in the world, at any point in history — and chances are they will either cause mischief or invent an impromptu game. Often they manage to do both.
Picture a school corridor on a Monday afternoon in 1984. Three 17-year-old boys leaned against a wall, bored out of their minds. One was bouncing a tennis ball off the opposite wall. Another was casually tossing a bottle of lighter fluid. The third (myself) was gazing into space.
What came next required no planning or discussion. Seventeen-year-old boys seem to share a kind of unspoken agreement that nudges them into a single, spontaneous action. What did we have? A ball, lighter fluid, and a corridor. We soaked the ball with the fluid, set it alight, and turned the hallway into a makeshift playing field. Fireball was born.
Now imagine a similar trio of boys on a dusty plain in rural India centuries ago. They lean against a banyan tree one idle afternoon. One swings a two-foot rounded stick. Another whittles a small three-inch stick to tapered points. The third — evidently the most handsome of the group — stares into the distance.
Two sticks and a dusty clearing are all it takes. They draw a circle on the ground, about four feet across. The small stick — the gilli — is placed within the circle. One boy strikes one end of the gilli with his bat-like stick, the danda, sending the smaller stick spinning into the air. He then hits the airborne gilli as far as he can while the others rush to catch it. Gilli-danda is born.
That scene might have unfolded in the Himalayan foothills, in a Cambodian village, or beside a Venetian canal in Marco Polo’s day. Boys are boys, and sticks are easy to find. Variations of the stick-and-stick game appear around the world, including in the United States, where a similar pastime is called pee-wee.
Today, the strongest roots of this sport are in India. In some regions it is played side by side with cricket, and from a distance the games can look strikingly similar. While some Indian nationalists claim that gilli-danda is a precursor to modern cricket, it is more plausible that the bat-and-ball passion in the subcontinent influenced the way gilli-danda was played, which in turn helped shape local cricketing styles.
Indian cricketers are well known for the wristy techniques they use to play shots. Watching a boy swing a danda to strike a gilli reveals the early form of that same wrist action. Likewise, the catchers in gilli-danda develop sharp hand-eye coordination that serves them on the cricket field, sometimes leading to success and admiration.
Decades after my invention of fireball, I was walking down a street in Valencia, Spain, when a stray firecracker landed at my feet and began hissing sparks. Instinctively, I relied on the memory of kicking a flaming tennis ball. With a quick flick of my foot I sent the firecracker into the empty road, where it exploded without harm.
The games an idle boy invents often stay with him for life.