Test cricket time has warped fascinatingly since the end of the first India versus West Indies Test at Kotla on November 9. On a dead pitch, the first day’s play of the second Test at Eden shifted from being about Sachin Tendulkar’s hundredth hundred to being about watching two of the other three great Indian batsmen in the team play what were probably their final innings at this once great cricket ground. If Monday, the first day, belonged to Dravid, Tuesday belonged to V.V.S. Laxman. From the third day to the fifth, we saw the drama of the young West Indian batting line-up managing to hit crazy highs and lows, collapsing in the first innings only to revive so magnificently in the second that people began fantasizing about a repeat of the great 2001 Eden Test follow-on flip-around, but with India at the receiving end this time.

In the meantime, between November 9 and 11, India’s opponents in that 2001 Test were involved in one of the craziest Test matches of the modern era. In the first Test at Cape Town, 663 runs were scored, 32 wickets fell, 23 on the same day when both sides were dismissed under 100, Australia for under 50, some part of all four innings were played on that Day 2, and the whole thing was over by Day 3, two reasonable Test innings scores bracketing two low Twenty20 scores in the middle. Speaking of flip-arounds, the second Test between Australia and South Africa (which began on Day 4 of the Eden Test) upturned all sane predictions. Australia, you would have imagined, would have tried to win by depending on the bowling attack that did get SA out for 96 in the previous Test, but not a bit of it — they unleashed an 18-year-old debutant who took 6 for 79 in the second innings. After which, Ricky Ponting, the old man who’d been written off by many, steadied the chase with newbie, homegrown curry-muncher Usman Khawaja to help get the 310 required.

The Mumbai Test was again, predictably, about Tendulkar, except someone forgot to explain this to the coin used in the toss. If the Windies knew what the script was, they chose not to follow it. They chose to bat and improvised the alternative storyline of 590 all out in their first innings. After which, in true Bollywood style, they completely kicked out the screenwriters and dismissed the great Tendu six runs short of an inevitable looking tonth ton. The place being what it is — there is Mumbelodrama in the very water itself — the story has taken several further twists. Sammy and Co couldn’t stop character actor Ashwin from stealing the main hero’s dialogue and fight scenes. Then, the set-looking West Indies collapsed from 91 for 2 to 134 all out in the space of an hour, in a mirroring of SA/Aus, bracketing two decent T20 scores, 153 in the first innings at Eden and the 134, around two adult Test scores of 463 and 590. Even as this is being written, it’s not clear whose day this is finally going to be: Big T has just walked in to bat a second time, following a harakiri with his own knife by Master Khansama Sehwag, and he has gone before this sentence finished typing itself.

Watching the first ball being bowled at the recent Eden Gardens Test was a shock. It was one of those slow motion realizations, the kind of thing that happens when you’re watching a Western and a bullet goes off and the horseman stays up, taking a full minute before he topples. I watched the first five overs, keeping my eye on the action in the middle of the field as you do when watching any game. It was only when a couple of fours were hit that I noticed an absence. Indian openers were scoring, but unaccompanied by the roar that you’re hard-wired to hear anywhere in India, and especially in Calcutta. Looking around, I saw there were only about 500 people in the stands, any sound from this paltry crew was being absorbed by the surrounding cascades of empty seats.

Coming in, I had passed through the several cordons of security. There was no question of bringing your own liquids, there hasn’t been since the disastrous 1996 World Cup semi-final against Sri Lanka where the knowledgeable, sophisticated, supremely sporting Calcutta crowd threw everything including the kitchen sink at the Lankan outfielders, punishing them for the crime of taking too many Indian wickets. The big difference between 2001, when I’d brought my eight-year-old to see the first session of that Test match, and now, was that I was in the club stands. Instead of concrete slabs that became oven-hot by 10 am, the whole ground had plastic seats and most of them were covered with some sort of shade. The bathrooms on the landings were new, even though the taps would be out of water by the end of the lunch interval, even though the floors would be awash in filth by the end of the day’s play.

By the afternoon, some things were back in place. There was a reasonable crowd, now in good voice. The cops were being officious, panicky even, as Tendulkar alternated facing deliveries with waving at ghosts around the sight-screens. The food in the halls downstairs was still awful, the Cola shamelessly over-priced, for some reason smaller glasses no longer available. When I returned home, having watched a beautiful Dravid hundred and a delectable Laxman half-century, I brought back with me my Eden souvenir, a plastic pouch of dirty looking water.

I had a pass to Eden for the next day, and time in hand to go and watch Laxman continue what would turn out to be yet another big innings, but I chose not to go. There was a bifurcation in my mind: the massed throb of a game at Eden and the great, relaxed pleasure of watching often far more ordinary games at Lords and the Oval. Along with that privilege, I’ve been extremely fortunate in that I’ve at least been to Newlands to watch a first class game and been taken around the Adelaide Oval when it was empty. The beauty of those grounds, the simple ritual of being able to bring your own food and drink, of going down to the stalls and buying a couple of pints of beer for yourself and your companions, the courtesy of the crowd, as people naturally wait for the over to end before walking back to their seats, all of that seems to belong to a different game sitting here in Calcutta. What was clear from my day at Eden is that unless something radical is done to welcome the long-game spectator back, one of greatest venues of Test cricket will stay reduced to being a coliseum for the T20s.

In the meantime, whatever the advantages and shortcomings at Wankhede, an amazing Test match has gone down to the wire this afternoon, with all four results possible till the third last ball of the match, with the draw being as good a win for the doughty West Indians. It’s a great reply to soothsayers predicting the end of the five-day game, as were the SA/Australia matches in Cape Town and Jo’burg. It’s also a slap in the face of the BCCI and the TV marketing robots who run cricket in India, whose idea it was to start a Test at Eden on a Monday, apparently because the Test cricket ad revenue in India loses out to Premier League football and F1 racing on the weekends. It’s a scandal there were only two Test matches in South Africa, and a pity there were only three here, and a mystery why there are only four when India tour Australia and not five, but if next year is anything like this year, the greatest game on earth should remain riveting.