Kashmiri Cricket

Room where they place the stickers on the bats.

Glueing the 3 pieces of the cricket bat

Although Sindhu couldn't care less about cricket, she was fascinated by how they made the bats.

Along the Pahalgam-Srinigar corridor, there is a small stretch which sells Kashmiri made cricket bats made of willowwood. Given all the IPL excitement, we had to buy one. Rushil picked one that had Sachin's name on it and he tells everyone that it was signed by Sachin.   After that, every minute we spent in the hotel room, Rushil in his Royal Challengers t-shirt would beg us to play imaginary cricket, we would bowl, he would hit the imaginary ball with his new bat while pretending to be Sachin, Dhoni or Yousuf Pathan and then we would field while he made the runs.  A few days later, we got him a ball and we bowled with a real ball in the room, we're lucky nothing broke. When we got back, he invited  his buddies over and they were playing cricket in the house with a real ball, again we were lucky but now, no more cricket in the house.