Sachin Tendulkar's retirement was India's Princess Diana moment
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Version 0 of 1. 'Sir, there is a shooting!" The room boy stood at the window looking down at the street, so I got off my bed and looked, too, expecting a body or a commotion of some sort. What I saw instead were a few TV technicians setting up spotlights and cameras on the hotel's broad terrace and getting the angles right with the help of a stand-in, who turned this way and that on his chair to simulate what the real subject would do when he eventually sat there. "They are shooting Saurav Ganguly," the room boy said, and then on his smartphone showed me a picture of himself standing with the former India cricket captain in one of the hotel's corridors. Not only was Ganguly living in the same hotel, he was staying in the very next room! I felt almost as impressed as the room boy (who wasn't a boy but a man; the demeaning description comes from a different era, and any minute now will probably take the leap to "room curator", though the wages and the bed-making and bathroom-cleaning will stay the same). We watched as Ganguly replaced his impersonator on the terrace and turned to his interviewer. "Live!" said the room boy, so I turned on the TV, hoping to find the conversation that, from the room, could be seen but not heard. But out of India's 515 TV stations, Mumbai has nearly 100, and, out of that 100, more than a dozen are devoted to sport. Several channels had not just one cricketer, but whole panels of them, discussing the same questions. What made him so good? Was he a god or merely a genius? How much would Indian cricket miss him? Could his achievements ever be equalled? His English mother-in-law appeared in one of these "debates" – they were really prolonged bouts of hero-worship – to say quietly that, whatever else, he wouldn't be retiring as her son-in-law: a rare moment of humour, as well as a reminder that Sachin Tendulkar hadn't in fact died but merely given up playing international cricket. It was the evening of the day India beat the West Indies in Mumbai – beat them easily, taking only three days of the allotted five – though hardly anyone noticed the result, because on the second day Tendulkar had been caught at first slip, when, in the words of the Times of India, "a stunned, disbelieving hush descended upon the stadium". He'd scored 74 when his audience had hoped for a century, and the game had continued in an unprecedented atmosphere of disloyal impatience, with the crowd wanting the home side to lose wickets quickly so that they would have to bat a second time and Tendulkar could come out to entertain them again. Cricket, however, cannot be so exactly choreographed. Tendulkar had batted for India for the last time. TV channels, newspapers and advertising agencies had elaborately prepared for this moment and stretched it out for days. Eventually the column inches became impossible to count. I arrived in Mumbai to images of Tendulkar on the airport's TV screens and left five days later to the same sight. Of course, no other batsman in world cricket has scored so many Test match centuries and runs in a 24-year career that endeared him to a country that has come to see cricket as the most visible expression of its new importance in the world – his retirement needed to be marked. But was it a moment of national significance? The media suggested so, but in Mumbai last week it was possible to meet people who never mentioned Tendulkar, who paid more attention to the celebrations marking the end of Muharram, for example, or the state of fiction in Marathi, or the price of onions (up 278% in a year), and who were repelled by the Tendulkar affair as a tamasha, a great fuss, that had been ordained by the cricket authorities and the media and was now boring them stiff. But none of their distaste made it into any news coverage that I read. Tendulkar had become a monolithic news event, like the grieving for Diana, Princess of Wales, into which any form of sceptical intrusion was forbidden. On Sunday morning my friend Rafique Baghdadi took me on a little tour of Mumbai. We have known each other for 30 years. His enthusiasm for the neglected and obscure aspects of his city has never dwindled, and whenever we meet, he shows me something new; this time it was a ruined Jewish cemetery that had been colonised by a Muslim family and its flock of hens. On the way there by taxi we saw a skyline that, over a far shorter time than our friendship, has been utterly transformed by high towers of air-conditioned apartments, built on the site of old slums and cotton mills. Rafique laughed at the possibility that he might buy one; even the meanest would cost at least 20m rupees (roughly £200,000) in a city where a freelance writer might count himself lucky to earn one-hundredth of that in a year. Growing disparities in wealth and soaring property prices are old Mumbai themes, the subjects of many inquiries and reports, but now Rafique felt that nothing could done, that the time had passed when his city's future could be affected for the better. Tendulkar was born in the city in 1973 and began his professional career here aged 15 in 1988, when the urban middle-class he grew up in still had the austere lifestyle that over the following decades was to be abolished by economic liberalisation and the huge growth in consumer spending. Indians of a certain age and class can find in him a symbol of continuity as well as change – an exaggerated version of their own good fortune, with his sports cars, flat in St John's Wood and his valuation on the Forbes' list as the 51st richest athlete in the world. In Tendulkar's childhood, when Mumbai was Bombay, his neighbourhood bordered on what were then called "the mill districts", which made a good imitation of Victorian Lancashire; India had one monochrome television channel and only two kinds of car; the cheese came in tins. That age seems far away. Last week the Times of India listed the "special deals and innovative dishes" that restaurants and bars were providing in a city "under the grip of the Sachin fever". What the newspaper called a "retro bar" in one suburb offered what it claimed were Tendulkar's favourite foods, including prawn curry and orange Szechuan paneer. At another, the Manchester United Cafe Bar, drinkers were to be tempted by a "Master Blaster shooter" comprising cherry syrup, orange juice and vodka. In this gaudy, cornucopian India, only people over 40 have any accurate memory of a plainer and harder-pressed time. With Tendulkar's departure, their number will no longer include a member of India's cricket team. Everybody speaks of his modesty and decency, and his calm handling of his country's expectations. Perhaps these qualities are connected to the time and society that shaped him, and therefore that in Mumbai last week the country was saying goodbye to an older version of itself. 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