Remembering Vinay Verma: Ten years on

It slipped my attention that Saturday, March 6th marked ten years since the passing of my uncle, Vinay Verma. Many on The Roar would remember Vinay’s cricket musings, and in particular, his exuberant engagement with commenters.

That is the joy of the site, he would declare.

Looking as energised as he had in years, he had just completed a legends game at Roseville Chase, where he was in his usual fine form. Sipping a beer on the sideline before a call up, he proceeded to send down offies with his usual venom.

Don Bradman once looked at his double-jointed hands and remarked, “You have a spinner’s fingers”. From being mentored by Bishen Bedi at North Punjab, to grade cricket and then to Shires, he maintained his usual guile.

He once said he’d repeatedly dismiss a young buck by the name of Mark Taylor in the nets for Lindfield.

And despite the bung knee that years of toil brought, like most battered sportspeople, a modicum of success makes you wonder if you really do have another throw of the dice. He rolled one last time for his beloved Roseville District Cricket Club.

No one could possibly suspect, given that day, given his frame of mind, it would be the last time they saw him, spoke to him or heard from him. Never one for clichés, Vinay’s exit was as written as they come: putting the full stop on his life by playing the game he loved.

For a man well versed in poetry, he was equally at home with the more common prose of the cricket field.

While he could be as epigrammatic as Freddie Truman, he didn’t need to be. And that was Vinay’s charm. He was egalitarian at heart and could get along with everyone.

Kevin Pietersen, ever wary of misrepresentation, was unsure about doing a sit down interview with Vinay. “I don’t care about your conquests, I care about your cover drive,” Vinay assured him. KP agreed to the chat.

And while playing cricket made him happy, so did writing. Despite a career selling auto parts, it remained his passion, one lost and recaptured.

His mantra was “Write with your heart, edit with you head”. Having co-authored Kapil Dev’s autobiography By God’s Decree in 1985, I saw a renewed enthusiasm in him back in 2009, when he turned his attention back to his words.

One day he called me into his office, asking for my feedback on a book chapter he was writing. No sooner had I finished, he flicked the tab over to The Roar’s cricket page.

“That Geoff Lemon is good,” he said. Scarcely a week would go by without him mentioning a conversation or debate he was having with his dear friend Kersi Meher-Homji.

He was proud of starting the Seriously Cricket Chronicles, a subscription service featuring such luminaries as Gideon Haigh, Mike Coward and Ayaz Memon. Mike was a pallbearer at Vinay’s funeral.

One wonders what the growth of the SCC would have been in the space of a decade.

We’ll never know.

But I do know that he’s not quickly forgotten by those who had the good fortune to know him, either a little or a lot.