Akash Deep: Dealing with life's curveballs, adding own swing

Tracing the tough path India's toast of the Edgbaston Test win took, in the words of those who helped him rise

- Somshuvra Laha [e-mail]

Earlier this year, Akash Deep was in Pune with his seriously ailing brother-in-law, helping him to get back on his feet.

And every time he was in Lucknow during IPL, Akash spent sleepless nights keeping vigil at a Lucknow hospital where his elder sister, who the world now knows, was admitted for cancer treatment.

It’s as if despair is hell bent on shadowing a man, who had lost his father and brother in the space of six months. Saurasish Lahiri, the former Bengal skipper, recalls Akash once asking him, in a moment of helplessness, if there would ever be a silver lining. "I just told him: 'God burdens those who can shoulder this kind of responsibility'," Lahiri says.

Akash soldiered on. This is a man who until he was 20 didn’t bowl with a leather ball full-time, and whose first season of structured cricket at a second-division club began without pay. To overcome those odds, make first-class debut happen at 23, Test debut at 27 and a first 10-wicket haul in just over a year takes the kind of grit few possess.

One wouldn't know that seeing Akash though, as he quietly goes about his job. "Akash is like a sponge. He will observe everything, take mental notes and do his job silently. He isn't someone to be swayed by one good performance," says Lahiri, a former Bengal off-spinner who gave Akash his first trials as an U-23 bowler in 2017-18.