The moment I finally said, “Alright, I’m doing this, I’m going to Brisbane to watch the Test,” Brisbane said, “Too late, mate.” Not in so many words, of course. But the ticketing website did flash a smug little Sold-Out banner across the screen, and that felt close enough. Turns out, while I was busy weighing the pros and cons of leaving my family a week early, thousands of other fans had already clicked Book Now. But there was no going back now. I was fully committed. And I wasn’t ready to un-commit. I’d already crossed that invisible line in my head. So I did what felt natural: I booked my first flight. A Saturday morning departure to Brisbane, which would put me in the city right as the match was about to begin. No stadium seat, no accommodation sorted, no plan beyond just being there. But still, I was going. Somehow, the rest would sort itself out. That’s the thing about Test matches. You don’t just watch them. You give yourself to them. It felt like a good decision. Until I checked the calendar. The flight was on a Saturday morning. I had booked it on a Thursday night. Which left me exactly one day, Friday, to do everything else: packing, tying up loose ends at work and cancelling a long-planned meeting with a colleague who had flown in from overseas. We’d been meaning to catch up for months, except now we weren’t. I sent him a short message the night before. Said I had to travel unexpectedly and hoped we’d catch up the next time he was visiting Sydney. So Friday became a blur. I tossed clothes into a bag, scrambled through work emails and told myself that I’d somehow sleep on the plane. By the time the Saturday sun rolled around, I was exhausted but triumphant, standing on the kerb with my suitcase, waiting for my Mercedes-Benz V-Class Uber. Yes, you read that right. A Merc as an Uber. I booked a normal Uber X ride from my house in North-West Sydney to the airport, but it turned out that the Uber gods really liked me that day and sent a six-figure car to pick me up (at least I think it was). I did a double-take. Then a triple-take. Briefly considered checking the plates to make sure I wasn’t accidentally hijacking the ride meant for some touring celebrity. But nope, it was mine. The driver looked young, maybe 29 or 30, and Indian. Naturally, I got curious. You don’t expect a car like that to show up under Uber’s standard ride option. So, a few minutes into the trip, I asked him about it. He laughed and said yeah, he gets that question a lot. Turns out, he drives this Merc around mostly for premium bookings and events but occasionally switches on Uber for fun when he has free time, and doesn’t really care to register for the premium rides. Said he only did it because it was a good way to meet interesting people. I told him that sending this particular vehicle to pick up someone going to a Test match might just qualify as divine intervention.That’s when the cricket chat began. He mentioned that he often gets bookings from Indian celebrities who visit Sydney. Nothing too specific, just that a lot of his clientele end up being film and cricket folk. And then, almost as a side note, he dropped it: apparently, he knew Virat Kohli from his U-19 days in Delhi. Used to call him Chiku Bhayya. Now, almost every millennial from Delhi claims they knew Virat in one way or another. Just like every Bangalorean in the 90s – are they Gen X? I get confused – knew someone who knew Javagal Srinath or Anil Kumble. It’s almost a rite of passage. But there was something different about the way this guy said it without any performance or pride that made it seem real. We spent the latter half of the ride silently as I was playing out the steps from getting off the plane and finding a seat at the stadium, but I was smiling throughout. It wasn’t because of the Mercedes or even the celebrity angle, but the sheer ordinariness of the moment. I hadn’t even left Sydney yet, and already cricket had found a way to slip into the story. Through a stranger, through a memory, through a name that somehow still felt personal to someone. I didn’t want to read too much into it. But as omens go, it felt like a good one. We pulled into the airport just as the light began to shift, basking in the rays of an almost-orange sky. I stepped out, stretched, did that awkward pat-down to check for my phone–wallet–keys, and reached for my suitcase in the trunk. And that’s when I saw it – the car right behind mine. Another Uber. The door pushed open and out stepped … Abhinaya. The very colleague I’d cancelled on less than 24 hours earlier. For half a second, I froze. Not because I didn’t want to see him, but because I genuinely felt disappointed that he might be flying back to India. I stood there thinking, if he’s leaving the country, I should’ve made time. Then he looked up and spotted me. He smiled in a tired, slightly amused way that said, Really? Here? Now? I smiled back. We walked toward each other. With a is-this-really-happening look on my face and the same thought in my head, I asked him where he was headed. “Brisbane,” he said. “To watch the match.”My jaw didn’t drop. But I think my eyebrows shot up far enough to make that point. We were on the same flight. Later, when I got to my seat and saw he wasn’t seated beside me, I felt oddly reassured. If he had been, I think I would’ve looked around the cabin for hidden cameras. It was already starting to feel a little scripted. We checked in, got through security and found a quiet place to settle down, swap cricket memories, and eventually had the catch-up that was supposed to happen earlier in the week. We made our way to the gate and boarded. Different seats. Same direction. The story had already begun. Once I got to my seat, I finally did what I’d been meaning to do for about two trips now and pulled out The Wrong Man by Tim Ayliffe. It had been sitting in my bag for months like an unpaid bill. One of those books I kept carrying around with the full intention of reading, and then never actually reading. I’d opened it once, maybe twice, but never properly. I’ve always had a thing for thrillers, especially spy and espionage thrillers. Back in engineering college, I used to haunt the public library and burn through their collection so fast that eventually I started pestering the librarian for new arrivals. At some point, she gave up and just began setting books aside for me. I’d gone through most of the Ken Folletts, Frederick Forsyths and Robert Ludlums they had.One stand-out from that time, I’m talking about the early 2000s here, was Bunker 13 by Aniruddha Bahal, one of the rare espionage stories set in India. Bahal actually led the sting operation on match-fixing in Indian cricket while at Tehelka, the magazine known for its investigative journalism. So yeah – espionage, journalism, cricket, it all blurred together in the best way. Even the book in my hand was a signed copy that I found in a bookstore near Avalon Beach, so I was very excited to read it. As the flight began to take off, I finally started reading the book. It’s set in Sydney, which made it all the more amusing that I was reading it just as I was flying out of Sydney. One of those little ironies that only makes sense when you’re half-asleep at 35,000 feet.Excerpted with permission from My Summer of Cricket: Three Tests, One Fan and Decades of Stories, Nikhil Kulkarni, Hempbury Books.