It started in the corridor outside their house. Ashok Sharma used to bowl at his elder brother Akshay. The only goal was to hit him. The only way to hit him was to bowl fast.
“I used to hit him bowling fast,” Akshay says. “So in order to take revenge, he also began to bowl fast so that he could hit me. We never thought he would become so good going ahead.”
When Ashok got the ball in school cricket in Rampura, batsmen his own age would move away from the stumps. Not in dismissals, but in retreat. “He had broken many ribs,” Akshay recalls. “I have seen batsmen running away.”
The pace was not coached. It was personal. A younger brother trying to hurt an older one in a corridor. The corridor led to a ground. The ground led to school cricket. School cricket led to a delivery clocked at 154.2 kmph for Gujarat Titans against Rajasthan Royals in Ahmedabad — the kind of speed that makes viewers look up from their phones.
Rampura is 80 kilometres from Jaipur. Nathulal Sharma farmed during the day and drove for the local newspaper at night, delivering papers to various stands. He earned Rs 10,000 a month. His wife wanted the boys to focus on academics and secure a government job. The usual route, the safe route, the one that doesn’t depend on talent surviving long enough to become a career.
Both sons wanted to play cricket. The family could not afford both. “He couldn’t have put his two sons’ future at stake,” Akshay says. “So he asked me to decide who will enrol in the academy.”
Akshay decided that Ashok should go. The older brother dropped out. The younger brother carried on.
Nathulal enrolled Ashok at the Aravali Cricket Academy in Jaipur, run by former Rajasthan leg-spinner Vivek Yadav. The boy used to travel over an hour each way from the village. Eventually, he moved into the academy’s hostel to focus properly. Ashok made the Rajasthan Under-19 team in 2019.
Then the pandemic shut everything down. The lack of game time was one blow. The death of Yadav — due to stomach cancer, aggravated by Covid — was another. The coach who had first given the boy from Rampura a proper structure was gone.
Sometimes when there was no cricket, both brothers worked the family farm.
“He came a few months back and I took him to the farm where we were seeding wheat,” Akshay says. “I do cricket coaching and also look after my farm.”
Growing up
When Ashok began playing Under-19 cricket, he came home and asked his father to stop driving at night. Nathulal did. The boy whose corridor bowling once brought complaints to his father was now earning enough for his father to rest.
Kolkata Knight Riders picked Ashok in 2022. The village got talking. It was a fluke, they said. When Rajasthan Royals released him the following year, the village spoke again – nothing will come of this one.
The village didn’t know what the snub did to him.
“He took the release from RR seriously and was eager to perform,” Akshay says. “The best thing that happened was that he got Ashish Nehra as a coach. Being a bowler himself, he understands a bowler’s mindset.”
And then the line that tells you everything about Ashok Sharma:
“He is like a computer. You just need to give him the command where to bowl and he will keep hitting that area.”