I don’t think anyone knew Mahendra Singh Dhoni. I don’t think anyone was meant to. I certainly didn’t know him very well. I had dinner with him once and it was revealing. He had come over to the apartment we were at in Adelaide. My colleague had cooked, I was warming the pre-cooked chapattis and he came over and said he would do it himself. He talked freely. When he had finished dinner, he picked up his plate, walked across to the basin, washed it and placed it upside down on the platform next to it. He volunteered to wash the other plates. I tried telling him that he must speak to India’s cricket lovers more often. He nodded and smiled. Of course, he didn’t. But I got the feeling that evening that I was talking to someone who was not trapped by the game. We all are, in some ways, because cricket offers us so much. It fills our lives, but that evening, I got the feeling that Dhoni was in it and yet detached. He talked about bikes, about planes, about guns, about wanting to become a