Anjali quickly decided not to pursue her career in medicine. If she had worked in a government hospital, she would have had to do her fair share of nights and weekends in hospital, which would have been tough when Sachin was back in Bombay between tours.
Had she worked in private practice as Dr Anjali Tendulkar, she reckoned she would be consulted for her name rather than her expertise.
Anjali is an all-or nothing person and she couldn't have just dabbled in doctoring. Moreover, she wanted to devote herself to keeping her husband in the right frame of mind to play his best cricket.
A fascinating excerpt from Annabel Mehta and Georgina Brown's book, My Passage to India.
For the wedding, Anjali wore a stunning red-and-gold Paithani silk sari and Sachin wore a simple white kurta-pyjama with an embroidered trim.
Anjali looked radiant, her hair swept back in a bun with a white mogra gajra, a small teeka on her forehead, a gold necklace and matching earrings, a Kolhapuri saaj (three long rows of hollow gold beads) and gold and red glass bangles, all very restrained by Gujarati standards.
For the ceremony, Sachin and Anjali both wore a typically Maharashtrian floral mundavalya, a string of jasmine buds across the forehead with another hanging either side of the face.
That day, I acquired a new label -- Sachin ki saas or Sachin's mother-in-law -- and a new status as a celebrity-by association, which took some getting used to.
After a few days, Anjali and Sachin returned to their own flat, and so began their married life together.
Anjali had yet to complete her postgraduation in paediatrics, so she went straight back to work, but Sachin happened to have a break from cricket, so he did all the sweeping and swabbing in the flat and scrambled his own eggs for breakfast because they didn't have any domestic help.
He has never been too grand to do his share of the chores. Quite the opposite, in fact. He had not grown up with servants and has always enjoyed domesticity.
Even now, he prefers to do his own ironing because he thinks he does it better than anyone else. He can rustle up a delicious Baingan Bharta quite expertly.
As a boy, Sachin had shared a room with his elder brother Ajit in their parents' flat in Sahitya Sahawas, the writers' co-operative housing society in Bandra East. He arrived some ten years after his siblings and, by all accounts, they doted on him.
It was Ajit who spotted his little brother's astonishing ability and natural style and dedicated himself to nurturing his career.
He has played a crucial role in Sachin's life, initially playing with tiny, tubby Sachin in the unusually large playground they were lucky to have in Sahitya Sahawas.
We only got to know Sachin's parents after the wedding. In India, parents of couples don't usually interact before the wedding is formalised.
When I suggested to Anjali we should get together with Sachin's people as we would have in England, she answered firmly: 'It is not done.'
After the wedding, I often visited Anjali and would always go up to Sachin's parents' flat to say hello to his mother Rajni.
Crippling arthritis prevented her from standing, and she would sit on a chair chopping onions and garlic, which she would then put into a pan on the gas stove and reach up and stir without being able to see what she was doing.
She was an excellent cook, famous for her Maharashtrian fish dishes, crispy fried Bombay duck and tasty prawn curry.
Maharashtrian food must be cooked with a light hand and I prefer it to Gujarati and North Indian food, which is rich with ghee and gravy.
Her simple yellow dal served with plain rice, varanbhat, is the best I've ever eaten. Arjun was brought up on it, and for many years would eat nothing else.
I have always admired Rajni's spirit. She is now housebound with 24-hour care in a room crammed with pictures and figurines of Hindu gods in Sachin and Anjali's home.
I truly believe that Sachin gets his guts from her, as well as his ambition and his focus. He also inherited her hair.
She is two years older than me and has thick, curly hair, barely greying, which she wears in a big fat plait.
When she was still working and suffering acute pain, she somehow got down four flights of stairs to get to her office because there was no lift in the building. Sachin's father accompanied her in a taxi. He was a fine example to Sachin of a devoted husband.
Every day, he would buy Rajni a fresh sweet smelling gajra for her hair. I think it was a relief to them when Sachin met Anjali, the first doctor in their family.
Anjali has seldom spoken in public about her husband or her marriage. Ajit has never said a word about Sachin.
Sachin has always been quick to express his gratitude to Ajit and to his coach Achrekar Sir, but he invariably claims that his father was his greatest inspiration and his guiding light.
In spite of being bookish, Ramesh encouraged his son to pursue his sporting ambitions, at the expense of his formal education.
To this day, Sachin places a photograph of his beloved father by his bedside wherever he goes.
There was no money in cricket when Sachin began playing and no one predicted then that successful cricketers could become multimillionaires.
Today, parents are keen for their children to become cricketers because it is well paid, even relatively low down in the chain. My grandson, Arjun, is already earning a good living playing cricket.
Arjun is six foot three; he towers above Sachin and me, his mini grandmother. I am in my eighties and shrinking daily.
Arjun's height comes from my uncles, my mother's brothers, who were well over six feet tall.
There is a lot of left-handedness in my family, too, and all three of my nephews are left-handed, but Arjun might also have inherited that from his dad. Sachin writes, chops onions and cuts Arjun's hair, all expertly, with his left hand, and he bats and bowls with his right hand.
A few months after they married, Anjali qualified as a paediatrician. She was exhausted after so many exams, and she and Sachin were longing for some quality time together.
Throughout their courtship, Sachin had been in Australia or somewhere far away and she was always in the hospital.
My mother used to say that if you start your marriage deeply in love, it carries you a very long way, and so it was for Sachin and Anjali.
Anjali explains it as mutual respect for their different passions: 'I admired him for his astonishing talent and for going off and playing in front of the world. He admired me for studying medicine.' It took many years for them to find a single fault in one another.
Anjali quickly decided not to pursue her career in medicine. If she had worked in a government hospital, she would have had to do her fair share of nights and weekends in hospital, which would have been tough when Sachin was back in Bombay between tours.
Had she worked in private practice as Dr Anjali Tendulkar, she reckoned she would be consulted for her name rather than her expertise.
In any case, she didn't want to be endlessly treating the coughs, fevers and cut fingers of wealthy kids. She was interested in seriously sick underprivileged children and in helping their mothers to care for them.
Anjali is an all-or nothing person and she couldn't have just dabbled in doctoring. Moreover, she wanted to devote herself to keeping her husband in the right frame of mind to play his best cricket.
Playing cricket at Sachin's level brings immense pressure and exposure, and she believed her duty was to help him through the ups and downs, the disappointments and the triumphs, to steer him through his medical dramas and his mother and father through their health issues. As I understood it, she was giving up her life for Sachin.
My daughter's decisiveness blew me away. There was no discussion, no agonising, no vacillation, no tears. Her mind was made up. It reminded me of myself when I decided to leave England and come to India to marry Anand all those years ago.
Excerpted from My Passage to India, by Annabel Mehta and Georgina Brown, with the kind permission of the publishers, Westland Book.
Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff.com
