The man is uncharacteristically quiet. He is - to coin a phrase that one would expect him to voice - as quiet as a mouse who has gatecrashed a cat party wearing a pointy hat.
Navjot Singh Sidhu - with turbans as colourful, and often as long, as his phrases - has never been this silent. So if we did a Sherrypa on Sherrypa, this is about how it might sound - Sultan of Shooting Air, Tradesman of Tinned Laughter, Badshah of Bombast, Lord Loudmouth. His wanton verbosity can often turn vandal. Of Sunil Gavaskar's son Rohan, he once said: "Everything coming out of a cow is not milk."
In July, when the former cricketer resigned from the Rajya Sabha, it seemed he was getting ready for a new innings. But he is yet to take guard.
At stake is the Assembly election in Punjab, to be held next year. Many had thought that when the cricket commentator-comedy show judge resigned from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), he'd join hands with Arvind Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Punjab. He hasn't done so yet. There was speculation that he'd work with the Congress. That hasn't happened either.
So what exactly is Sidhu up to? He has thrown up a ball - and it has, as he once said, soared so high that it can bring down an air hostess with it.
One can't talk about 53-year-old Sidhu and not use cricket analogies and his mixed metaphors. Will he - as he clearly wishes to - open for either the AAP or the Congress in Punjab? Or will he be left to warm the bench?
Sidhu, who floated an outfit called Awaaz-e-Punjab in September, has had several rounds of talks with AAP leaders. He and Kejriwal, accompanied by their wives, met over a meal. Talks were held with the Congress, too. The whisper goes that Sidhu may even return to the BJP, which the party pooh-poohs. "Sidhu was a hero as long as he was in the BJP. Now he is a zero for our workers," says Punjab BJP spokesperson Deewan Amit Arora.
But the Paaji from Patiala does wield some magic, which explains his legion of fans. And he does so with words that defy logic. "India looks like a crippled cobra whose fangs are clipped," he said during one match. Crippled cobra? "When you can kiss the mistress, never kiss the maid," Sidhu advised in another. Why ever not?
The word-fest started in 1999. "We were together in the commentators' box in England," recalls former cricketer and commentator Atul Wassan. "Most of the commentators - including me - thought his style was not suited for commentary. But the feedback from the ground was that audiences were lapping it all up," Wassan says.
In the initial days, Sidhu enjoyed using multi-syllabled words. "Players like Sachin, Jayasurya - they are centrifugal to their teams' good performance," he would say.
But then he hit upon a formula: take a few words, put them together and hope they will make sense to somebody somewhere. Or at least tickle somebody's funny bone. A batsman hits a big one, and Sidhu says, to much merriment everywhere, "He is using his bat to make the fielders run all over the place just like my wife uses her broom to make me run all over Punjab." A cricketer is caught - and Sidhu says, "He chased the ball, as if a young guy chased a beautiful girl, but who never knew she was the daughter of an army officer and paid the price, with his wicket."
Soon, Wassan says, Sidhu was "hot property". He started working on his commentary with his turn of phrases, digging out old proverbs and so on, adds Wassan, who was Sidhu's roommate when India was touring New Zealand in 1990.
Since then, the man has worn many pugs - he is a politician, a former cricketer, a commentator, a television judge, and, of course, an inveterate coiner of phrases.
He is also a laughter machine - one who can laugh at almost everything, which is what he does on the popular Kapil Sharma Show on television. You can, with your eyes blindfolded, recognise Narendra Modi's voice by its nasal tone, Satyajit Ray by his baritone, and Sidhu by his loud, hyuk-hyuk laugh.
"Sidhu would just laugh and laugh even at bad routines," recalls Sunil Pal, the winner of the first Great Indian Laughter Challenge, a stand-up comedy contest where Sidhu was a judge. "I wasn't sure how he would judge... But he was fair," he says.
Sidhu is not laughing much in Punjab, though. AAP had initially proposed that he lead the Punjab campaign, and that his ex-BJP MLA wife (the one with the broom) fight an election on an AAP ticket. He wasn't happy with that. The party later offered him the deputy CM's post if the AAP came to power.
That didn't work for Sidhu either. He wanted to know who the party would field for the CM's post, and voiced his reservations about some of the state leaders. "I don't want to be the deputy if one of these clowns becomes the CM," he said.
That, coming from Sidhu, was a bit rich. "The talks broke down," says a Punjab politician.
But don't write him off yet, for Sidhu is known to bounce back. It's a trait that he's shown on the cricket field, too. At 20, he made a splash when he scored a dogged 122 for North Zone against the West Indies in 1983. But he scored 15 in the first innings and four in the second innings in his debut match against the West Indies - and was soon dropped.
An epithet - bestowed on him by a sportswriter - stuck to him like mud. The report that described him as a "strokeless wonder" was presented to Sidhu by his father, a prominent Congressman and lawyer of Patiala.
"I saw tears in my father's eyes on the day the article appeared," Sidhu later said in an interview. "I stuck that article to my cupboard and read it every day."
So he practised hard, and was brought back to the team. He scored 73 on his one-day International debut in the 1987 World Cup.
Sidhu is a bit like a rubber ball - he lands on the ground and soars up again. It's happened on the field - and outside. Many thought that his political career (he joined politics in 2004, at the behest of Atal Bihari Vajpayee) would end when he was convicted in a 1988 road rage case, in which a 50-year-old transporter died after being hit by Sidhu and a friend.
A Patiala sessions judge acquitted the two in 1999, but in December 2006, the High Court of Punjab and Haryana overturned the ruling. Sidhu was sentenced to three years of rigorous imprisonment.
His conviction evoked some humour, too. Cartoonist Rajneesh had a strip in which a character told another that he felt sorry for Sidhu. "Guys I feel sorry for are the ones who would be locked up with him for three years," the other replied.
In January 2007, the Supreme Court suspended the HC conviction till an appeal - which is still pending - was decided. The apex court hailed Sidhu for resigning from Parliament and granted him bail. He fought - and won - the byelection from Amritsar, held a few months later, and retained the seat in 2009. But in 2014, he was overlooked in favour of BJP leader Arun Jaitley. And since then, he has been biding his time.
AAP and Congress clearly believe that the man who can evoke a million laughs can be an effective mascot. After all, if you can laugh at his "He is a dibbly dobbly bowler" (about New Zealander Chris Harris) and "He looks like a brooding hen over a China egg" (about Sourav Ganguly), you'll also vote for him.
Sidhu is a man of curious contradictions. A vegetarian and teetotaller ("my father drank my share," he said in an interview), the student of Patiala's Yadavindra Public School and Mohindra College was a shy boy. Sidhu has often said that reading Vivekananda - his father had the complete works - helped him define himself.
"He was the quietest and the most soft-spoken person in the team," Wassan says. "He became boisterous only after he became a commentator."
On the field, too, he could be difficult to fathom. Taunted by commentators for being too slow, he worked to become an able fielder. Yet, he kept his partners on the edge because he could not be relied upon to run between the wickets.
His associates call him honest - which they say is his USP in a state where corruption rules. But former India player Manoj Prabhakar had claimed that Sidhu was an "eyewitness" to shady match-fixing deals. Investigators later described the allegations as "hearsay".
Sidhu, known to be tenacious, can also leave a field midway. During India's 1996 tour of England, he stormed out and flew back to India after being dropped from a match.
His performance in Parliament hasn't been memorable either. In his last stint, which lasted 84 days, he took part in no debates and asked no questions, says PRS Legislative Research. He was more vocal in the 14th Lok Sabha, but his attendance, at 27 per cent (the national average is 76 per cent), was among the lowest.
Wassan, however, is convinced that Sidhu will rise again. "He is a silent worker. He will come out with all guns blazing when he is ready."
Meanwhile, Sidhu has told a friend that he is contemplating devoting full time to television if his electoral talks fail.
After all, as he knows well, he who laughs loud - very, very loud - laughs best.
SIDHUISMS: WHEN THE CHAPPAL’S ON THE OTHER FOOT
‘In times of happiness, friends are plenty, and in adversity, less than twenty’
(Four, to be precise — that’s the group with Sidhu)
‘When you are dining with the demon, you’ve got to have a long spoon’
(Kejriwal, please take note)
‘There is always free cheese in a mousetrap’
(Deputy CM-ship?)
‘No one reads a book to reach the middle — it’s the end that matters’
(We are waiting, Paaji)
