Tendulkar and Kohli turn to ‘Batman of Mumbai’

MUMBAI: Mumbai has been home to many great India batsmen, including Sachin Tendulkar. But there is only one ‘Batman of Mumbai’ -- Aslam Chaudhry.

Unlike his fictional namesake, there is no need to use a flashlight or special telephone line to get hold of the bat-maker and repair specialist when the world’s leading run-scorers need their favourite blades reconditioned while touring India or appearing in the lucrative Indian Premier League. Instead a call is put into Chaudhry’s small, decades-old, workshop in a Mumbai side street, the home of M. Ashraf Bros, a bat-manufacturing business set up by his father in the late 1920s.

Photographs of Tendulkar, a longstanding client, with Chaudhry adorn the walls.

India’s Virat Kohli, one of the leading run-scorers at the ongoing World Cup on home soil and New Zealand’s Kane Williamson have also entrusted their bats to Chaudhry. “All the good guys are very particular (about their bats),” Chaudhry, who must satisfy individual requirements regarding weight, thickness and shape, told AFP.

Despite a bout of Covid-19, Chaudhry, now approaching his 70th year, still makes bats by hand, a physically demanding process.

He begins with a thick raw cleft of willow wood that is shaved, pressed and shaved again into shape, with a groove cut for a handle.

Chaudhry’s only concession to modern technology is an electric conveyor onto which a bat is placed while he turns a huge fly-wheel to operate a five-tonne weight to strengthen the wood.

Few stars will visit Chaudhry’s premises for fear of being surrounded by adoring fans in Mumbai, an intense hotbed of the game even by the standards of cricket crazy India. Instead he calls on them, either at their hotel or at Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium, with those that do turn up, such as Sri Lanka’s Lasith Malinga, getting more than they bargained for.