My late father, obsessed with cricket, never saw Sobers bat, field or bowl (orthodox spin, chinaman or swing). He merely heard a cantankerous uncle, the only one that owned a short wave radio in his village near Tirunelveli, narrate to him with the vivid eye of a poet how Sir Garry’s collar would be up and how his bat, from his backlit, would descend from the heavens as he smashed 95 at Chepauk in January 1967. He would sometimes forget his own birthday, but never forget this second hand memory of a legendary sportsperson, reconstructed from a crackling radio broadcast, delivered to him via cranky uncle describing a cover drive he never saw himself. Human memory is indeed reconstructive, rebuilding each scene from stored fragments rather than playing back a recording, so a story heard enough times gets rebuilt with the same neural intensity as an actual afternoon you have lived through. Some human beings provide the raw material for second, third and fourth hand memories that play back in IMAX level detail and immersion, and Sir Garfield Sobers was one of them. I heard this story, practically third hand, and yet, I can see him play in my mind’s eye. A child, across a generation, and before adulthood and society and schooling shackle one’s mind, concluded that a human being can be incredibly good at everything at once. Go well, Sir Garry.