Naomi Lynch (extreme right) with other KKR cheerleaders. An agency picture

Every time Kelly, Naomi and Rachel or Oona, Melody and Philippa climb on stage and do the arabesque dance move, the crowds come rushing down from the galleries towards the fencing so their eyes can feast on the girls.

All that the girls have seen of Calcutta, however, is Victoria Memorial.

And, oh, the Kolkata Knight Riders cheerleaders are fascinated by the “rickshaws”.

Naomi Lynch, who is from London, says: “We took photographs of the rickshaws in all the cities we have passed. They look different in every city and will later help us remember all the places we have been to.”

If they dance hard, they travel harder. In between, there’s time only for a shut-eye and no-shut chatter on the phone. Off the phone, KKR’s black-and-golden girls are reticent.

Chandra Pal, the manager of London-based Fierce Performance Production that has put the cheerleading team together, says: “I can make them dance, but I can’t force them to give an interview.”

Two hours to go for the May 13 match against the Delhi Daredevils, the nine girls and three boys in KKR T-shirts get off the team bus, making their way to the Eden Gardens greenroom, jabbering busily.

A quick smoke later, the girls disappear into the dressing room, and about 45 minutes later when they re-emerge, the tiredness from all the toing and froing is gone from under the eyes of 25-year-old Naomi, who flashes a stud on her tongue when she talks. They do talk, once they have warmed up a little.

“We have been through a lot of places, but mostly hotels and airports,” says Rachel Martin with a shrug. Her smile, even in conversation, borders on the seductive on a face adorned with prominent cheekbones and expressive eyes.

All the travelling makes them edgy. Moodily, they flick the ash off the cigarette as they wait for the match to start. Someone picks up a cup of coffee, then junks it for juice. The fidgeting with mobiles is ceaseless.

Rachel, like Naomi and four of the other girls, is from London. And, no, she is not a professional cheerleader. Nor is Naomi and none of the others either. Three of them are Ukrainians anyway, and probably heard of cheerleading even later than we heard of the IPL.

Olga, who’s a Ukrainian and understands some English, seems the most cheerful of the girls but she spreads her arms wide to indicate she misses everyone — family, friends, maybe even a boyfriend. Asked about them, she smiles: “Phone, phone, mail.”

“I have to travel so much. My friend loses track. He keeps messaging me ‘where are you now’,” laughs Naomi.

When they’re not practising or performing, they’re almost always on the mobile because there’s little else to keep them entertained.

When Shah Rukh and the boys trotted around the Eden in a victory lap after the win against Virendra Sehwag’s team, the girls were out in front waving their pompoms. But when SRK partied with his cricketers into the morning hours, Rachel and Naomi and Olga weren’t around.

“Anywhere in the world, cheerleaders do not hang out with the players. So here, too, they don’t party with the team,” explains Chandra.

“Nice boys,” says Naomi, with a smile, revealing that partying may be out but not a powwow with the Laxmi Ratan Shuklas. Or does she mean Shoaib Akhtar?

On their time, the girls are free to go anywhere but being in an unknown city — and being known faces — they don’t. “One day one of the boys (of the troupe) took us home and his mother cooked an Indian meal for us. It was very nice,” beams Naomi.

Bollywood has whetted their appetite for Indian food and paneer is a favourite. “We don’t get it in London,” she says.

It’s Bollywood that drew the girls to India. If you’ve missed them, the chances are you have missed box-office smashers like Kal Ho Naa Ho, Jaaneman and KANK — even London-girl Naomi knows what KANK is. The Ukrainian trio have worked with Bollywood choreographer Ganesh Hegde, on whose request Fierce Performance Production brought over the London sextet.

Hegde has choreographed the team’s moves, though “it wasn’t done professionally. SRK is a good friend”. Some other teams like Chennai are using Indian girls but Hegde explains, “it’s a western form of dance. They have to do a lot of stretching and the girls from abroad are better able to do it. They have schools there. They keep fit, upgrade their looks and are abreast of any new moves or style of dancing. Indian dancers are reluctant to spend money to keep up with trends.”

Jorge Aldana, who is director of Fierce and is a choreographer himself, reveals his dancers have performed with Madonna and Kylie Minogue. They have now settled for Kareena and Priyanka because “Bollywood is growing”. Earlier, the girls would fly down for shoots and return, but since September six girls have been camping in India.

“Money is not big here. They (the girls) come for the visibility and the experience. They also prefer the warmer climate. For a not-so-good dancer, it is also easier to get work here than in London,” says Aldana.

The girls are all trained dancers who are doing this “just for variety”, adds Rachel. She started to train at the age of two. “I have learnt ballet, too.”

At six, Naomi was a late beginner but “salsa, hip-hop, rock ’n’ roll, we (can) do it all”, she laughs.

Jumping with pompoms should just be a laugh, too. During matches, the cheerleaders dance every time their team hits a four or a six, a rival wicket falls and during the changeover between overs.

In the last Eden match, for instance, the KKR team hit 13 boundaries, 10 Delhi wickets fell and a total of 37.5 overs were bowled. A back-of-the-hand calculation shows the cheerleaders would have danced for 40 minutes — give or take a few. That’s like a walk in the park. Ask Tejas — one of the cheerleaders who dances up to 10 hours a day — his fitness regime.

“A jog around the park” gives Naomi the figure men would die for and women would kill for. For others, it’s an hour at the gym. Aldana insists, however, “many people stress on having a good body and looks but for me knowing dance is more important”.

A powerful voice is not a condition since, unlike in the US, where cheerleading originated in the 1880s in Princeton University, belting out the cheer — “Hey, you in the crowd/clap your hands and yell it loud,/Yell go, fight, win”, for instance — is not part of the routine here.

It can get tiresome and depressing when the team is in the dumps. “It was sad when our team lost three matches,” says Naomi. At times, it can get disturbing. “At one particular stadium the audience threw paper darts and things at us,” says Rachel, but wouldn’t name the city.

The moral police in some cities have been throwing more potent weapons at what they call too much skin. But Calcutta police don’t seem to mind. Policemen posted outside the dressing room take a peek every now and then to catch glimpses of bare legs and midriffs. It isn’t the men only. As a girl strolls outside, talking on her phone, a posse of policewomen stares, long and hard. The girl looks at them, tugs at her shorts and steps back into the dressing room.

When fifty or sixty thousand people stare, you don’t notice. And, what the hell, T20 is a bit of a shorts-and-shots show anyway.

Famous CLs

Presidents

George W. Bush: The world’s most famous, now retired, cheerleader has got to be George W. Bush, the US President who practised the art at Phillips Academy, an independent boarding school at Andover, Massachusetts.

Franklin D. Roosevelt: President for four terms, Roosevelt who ruled America through the Great Depression and World War II, was an American football cheerleader at Harvard.

Dwight D. Eisenhower: Eisenhower, the 32nd President, shared with his predecessor more than a cheerleading past. He was the commanding general of the victorious forces in Europe in the war before he became President.

Show business

Madonna: She has got to be the most famous. She was a cheerleader in her school at Bay City, Michigan, where she also apparently got straight As.

Halle Berry : If you thought cheerleaders were dumb, let’s just say Halle was also editor of the school paper and class president in high school.

Sandra Bullock : Cheerleader in Washington-Lee High School, she was also voted Most Likely to Brighten Your Day there. Sandra still does that, doesn’t she?

The other squad

Bangalore

The 12-member group is from the Washington Redskins, called the first ladies of American football

Average age is 25 — the youngest 19 and the oldest 33

When not cheerleading, one of them handles sales for a marketing firm while another is a business systems analyst

Jenny, a mother of two, leads the team on the ground

Cricket’s “kinda like baseball” to at least one of the members

Chennai

The team (seven girls and five boys) started with an all-Indian cheerleading group

The Jasmine Oza Dance Troupe of Mumbai put it together. Oza is a choreographer who has worked in movies

India Cements, which owns the Chennai Superkings, has set aside Rs 20 lakh for cheerleaders

The team leaders are Deepak, Priya and Amar, all single

Oza wishes that the crowd sees the cheerleaders as their brothers and sisters

Mumbai

Believers in gender equality in a female-dominated game, the team has six of each

All are from the Shiamak Davar Institute of Performing Arts. Gauri, SRK’s wife, used to dance with Davar’s team

They are all residents of Mumbai. Shush about the cash

Their favourite cheerleading tunes are Duniya Hila Denge and Aala Re

“Kinda like baseball” isn’t what you hear in the team. Being Indians, they are crazy about cricket and love the T20 turbulence

Hyderabad

All-girl team of 12, who are from Australia and Canada

Joanne and Michele, twins from Sydney, were lifeguards on a beach near Sydney and say they had some stints in the Baywatch serial

Pay is good, the same as the Americans and Europeans — about $100 an hour

Cricket, they say, is slow and at times dead, but that may be because there’s no charge in the Deccan team

Not the crowds, at least in Calcutta where a banner said, “Will you marry me?”