A boy who recently entered his teens opens the batting with a seasoned southpaw. While his senior partner stares in astonishment, the kid swings at everything that comes his way, tonking international bowlers for fun.

It seems like every Indian boy’s childhood fantasy.

It is actually a Bollywood film, called Chain Kulii Ki Main Kulii (2007), where Karan (played by Zain Khan) uses his “magic bat” to butcher all manner of bowling and belie his age.

On Monday night, amidst a sea of pink at the Sawai Mansingh Stadium, 14-year-old Vaibhav Suryavanshi (named like a Hindi film hero!) went one better than Bollywood. Suryavanshi’s sizzling century kept Rajasthan Royals (RR) alive in this season’s IPL.

But it resurrected something more important — the awe that comes with the art of six-hitting.

Suryavanshi smashed a total of 11 sixes in his knock of 101 off 38 balls. He also blasted seven fours. In other words, he scored 94 runs in boundaries alone.

In an IPL, where seeing the ball cross the fence had started to numb the senses, Suryavanshi reignited the joy of maximalist batting. Of course, a lot of this joy was simply down to his age. An age when most boys would be happy to have packed the right books in their school bag. Suryavanshi, for his part, had sent the Gujarat Titans (GT) packing.

Did Suryavanshi eclipse teenage Tendulkar?

Indian cricket is no stranger to prodigies. The tales of Sachin Tendulkar facing the fastest bowlers in Pakistan (and the world) at 16 have been narrated more often than some Indian scriptures. But not even the most ardent Tendulkar fan can dispute that Suryavanshi has just produced the most outrageous innings by a teenager.

Suryavanshi decimated a bowling attack that comprised India’s second-most capped fast bowler in Tests (Ishant Sharma), the man who has bowled the second-most dot balls in this year’s IPL (Mohammed Siraj), and the finest spinner in T20 franchise cricket over the past decade (Rashid Khan). And he did so without so much as middling the ball on most occasions, sending several heaves and miscues over the ropes.

As good as he was on the night; Suryavanshi may not even have been at his belligerent best. He didn’t need to be, such was the potency of his power and intent.

Suryavanshi’s accomplishment was to make Yashasvi Jaiswal a complete afterthought

Being left-handed means everything that Suryavanshi does looks that extra bit glamorous. To start with, there is his baseball-esque stance that assumes his default shot is a slog. Then comes the backlift, rising like the irresistible love child of Brian Lara and Yuvraj Singh. The speed of his hands through the ball recalls that of Adam Gilchrist while the sheer nonchalance off his pads would have made prime Sanath Jayasuriya proud.

Much like these icons, there are no half measures with Suryavanshi, who is probably too young to understand much about caution anyway. Thankfully, nobody in the RR camp (certainly not Rahul Dravid) seems to have told him anything about arcane things like false shot percentages.

I had missed watching Suryavanshi’s first couple of innings live, before catching up with viral videos of him banishing his first ball in IPL cricket for a six. On Monday, as I sat down to have dinner, Suryavanshi was in his early 60s. I had barely finished one luchi and a handful of paneer when he had crowned himself as the fastest and youngest Indian centurion in the IPL. This included 30 runs in a single over (three sixes and three fours) that gave Karim Janat a taste of the fiercest depths of bowling hell. Perhaps Suryavanshi’s greatest accomplishment was to make Yashasvi Jaiswal, one of the most watchable batters in the game, a complete afterthought. In a matter of less than an hour, Jaiswal was no longer the phenom of the Royals. A teammate almost a decade younger than him had snatched that title.

Neither copybook nor caricaturish

Last summer, during the Euros in Germany, I was mesmerised to see Lamine Yamal play for Spain. Yamal wasn’t the silkiest player to watch, and nor was he disproportionately good at any one thing. Instead, what he displayed was supreme efficiency, making the most of every single opening and producing devastating results.

Much the same can be said about Suryavanshi, who makes even Yamal look old. Neither copybook nor caricaturish, Suryavanshi is already a master of simplifying his trade — see ball, hit ball (albeit with a bit more footwork than his forerunner Virender Sehwag). The calculation in the teenager’s mind is clear enough: What is the most he can get off a ball? A six. And he proceeds to do just that. What is the most he can do with the next ball? Same answer. Quite often the same outcome.

It took a pinpoint yorker from Prasidh Krishna to end Suryavanshi’s historic innings. Historic not just in terms of what unfolded but how. Here was a boy who played as if his bat had captured lightning. As if fear and failure were flies to be swatted away.

In 1958, Pele, then 17, had scored six goals in the knockout rounds en route to a redemptive championship for Brazil at the FIFA World Cup. The 1976 Montreal Olympics saw Nadia Comaneci nail the perfect gymnastic score as a 14-year-old. Boris Becker was one year shy of adulthood when he became the youngest Wimbledon men’s champion in 1985.

Where does Suryavanshi’s hundred rank among these incredible feats? The answer matters less than the existence of the question.

An evening somewhere between a video game and a dream

Suryavanshi will be the next this, the next that. The Rs 1 crore he had earned during last year’s auction will feel like small change after a flood of endorsements. Commentators will ask him to “keep his head down and play his natural game”. His father will be venerated for daring to live his dream through his child.

A torrent of memes about being the model Indian kid will flood the internet.

Suryavanshi will likely be unable to take RR to the playoffs. Lady luck might send many of his subsequent mishits into the grateful palms of boundary riders. An India debut may be premature. Suryavanshi may retrace the footsteps of Tendulkar. Or be condemned as another Prithvi Shaw.

Whatever follows, though, will not take away from what happened on April 28, when a 14-year-old lived an evening somewhere between a video game and a dream. Suryavanshi’s will remain the IPL’s defining story of instant impact. The story of the boy from Bihar who did not wait for the future.