The Balcony, the Silence, and a Missing Rule

A hotel balcony is not a place where cricket is played.

I understood that in a press box in Barishal, on a rain-soaked evening, with the match halted and water coming down like netting, while I watched an interview on my phone. Yuzvendra Chahal was saying that early in his career a heavily drunk teammate had hung him from a hotel balcony. He said, “I was terrified.”

I was terrified. Three words. No scorecard in cricket has a column for those three words.

I watched the clip three times. The first time I looked at his face, the second time at his hands, the third time at the wall behind him. The wall was ordinary — a hotel corridor, yellow light, a framed photograph. That ordinariness is what unsettles me. Where a young man can be hung over an edge, nothing appears abnormal. The balcony is normal, the corridor is normal, the next morning’s practice is normal. The Barishal floodlights taught me that every match begins in the dark — but that darkness belongs as much to the team hotel corridor as to the ground.

Chahal needs no introduction. Leg-spinner, white-ball craftsman, India’s leading wicket-taker in T20 internationals. An IPL debut for Mumbai Indians in 2026, a long career since, a place in the 2026 T20 World Cup-winning squad. At that year’s mega auction Punjab Kings bought him for 18 crore rupees — a number that tells you exactly how high his market value sits. But at the time of the balcony incident he was none of those things. He was a teenager with no contract, no weight of experience, and no vocabulary for protest.

Spectators know Chahal as a smiling man. He smiles in interviews, smiles in celebration, smiles whether he wins or loses. That smile is the trap. A man who is always seen smiling leaves no record of his grief; a society that has always watched someone laugh does not feel obliged to make him sad. In years of Bengali television commentary I have noticed we speak most about the players who smile. When someone stays silent in front of the camera we assume arrogance, or anger. The smile is a filter — and nothing said behind it reaches our ears.

Now to the part that is my own working ground. I have watched how a young cricketer is made, from the Barishal divisional league to the age-group camps in Dhaka. A seventeen-year-old leaves his town with a bag. He has to move into a senior’s room, learn who comes first, learn which sentence earns a laugh and which hardens a face. Part of that learning is necessary — a team is built out of shared habit. But part of it is gratuitous and harmful, and we cover that part with a sweet name. We call it settling in.

I have a memory from a Barishal divisional camp that seemed entirely normal to me at the time. In the evenings the younger players carried tea to the seniors’ room, cleaned shoes, hauled bags. Nobody hit anybody. Everyone was laughing, so I assumed it was a joke. Twenty years later I understand that what was running there was not a joke but a silent hierarchy. Who comes first, who comes after, whose word is obeyed — that order was being manufactured off the field so that it could be enforced on it. And the answer was always ready: this is friendship.

There is a clear line between friendship and hazing, and the line is not violence — the line is consent. In friendship a person can decline. In hazing the option to decline is absent. And that absence is created by a relationship of total asymmetry.

Here is the core of it: the balcony was not the act of one drunk man, it was the act of a structure. In that structure a young player’s career depends on a senior’s spoken word. Recommendations, selection, the order of batting in the nets — all of it sits in an older hand. In that condition, objecting to being hung over a balcony means putting your career at risk. That is not a failure of courage, it is arithmetic. And forcing a teenager to do that arithmetic is a way of taking his adolescence from him.

The word dominating headlines is “drunk.” It matters, but I want to place the emphasis elsewhere. Drunkenness is a machine for dissolving responsibility. Say “he was drunk” and the incident becomes theatre rather than event. Intoxication does not erase responsibility; it reveals where responsibility was already absent. A man who is so precise about his weight, balance and timing on a cricket field did not know what was dangerous in a hotel corridor — that is difficult to believe.

Why did he stay silent for years? The easy answer is fear, but the easy answer is not the whole answer. Two other things were missing. There was no structure through which he could complain. And cricket carries an unwritten belief that the player who complains creates unrest, and coaches do not like players who create unrest. That belief is written nowhere and is stronger than most written rules.

And when he finally spoke, he was no longer that teenager. He is a senior international whose words the media listens to. There is a particular cruelty here: to speak about having been afraid, a person must first become powerful. Those who never became powerful leave no record of their fear.

He did not name the accused. That decision was correct and I respect it. Naming one man damages a family, a child, or a memory after a death. Journalism’s job is to expose the structure, not to build a stage for private revenge.

From here we reach a professional gap, and this is the most useful part of the whole conversation. Cricket administration has eyes for corruption. There is an anti-corruption unit for match-fixing, intelligence networks, phone-record checks. There is no department for abuse of players. There are eyes for corruption and no eyes for cruelty — that asymmetry is the largest design flaw in cricket’s administrative architecture.

Call it duty of care. A franchise or board that contracts a player owes more than good performances. The team hotel, the travel, the room-sharing list — throughout that period the institution is the employer. As an employer it owes its workers physical and psychological safety. The fact that this duty is unwritten does not make it absent; it makes it larger, because unwritten duties are never audited.

I do not know what any board will do next. I know what should exist. A phone number a young player can dial without hesitation. An independent person who is not under the coach and not on the franchise payroll. And a contract clause stating that reporting will not damage a player’s contract or selection. Those three things do not end hazing, but they end the excuse for denying it.

Now the part where I step away from the conventional register. The loudest demand after this story is for a name. Who was the teammate? Which team? Which year? The name is the least useful piece of information here. Knowing a name does not make a teenager safe, does not make a corridor safe, does not add a clause to a contract. A name generates one day of traffic and then the space fills with something else and we forget. Forgetting is our habit. We do not remember events; we remember characters.

There is another trap I have seen repeatedly in Barishal. We convert a painful story into an inspirational one. “He was terrified and yet he rose” sounds good, but it removes the actual responsibility. The question is not how he survived. The question is why he had to. A hero narrative means the system is innocent, and the system is not innocent.

And then the single-villain theory. We want to say one bad man caused this. Hazing is never one man’s work. Hazing is a custom, a silent hierarchy, an entry fee. The newcomer pays it; the following year he collects it. The cycle does not break because breaking it requires someone to admit participation.

This is where the question becomes concrete for Bangladesh. In our domestic structure, in age-group squads, in divisional academies, in small-town floodlit tournaments, a young player’s dependence on a senior is immense. The senior’s room, the senior’s car, the senior’s recommendation — those three things can set the direction of a teenager’s career. If we genuinely want to discuss player welfare, the first task is identifying where that dependence becomes asymmetrical. Spectators under the floodlights count runs. Nobody counts who sleeps in whose room.

The Barishal floodlights taught me that every match begins in the dark. That sentence has a second half, which I want to write today: no match should end in the dark. The balcony tells us cricket’s most important rule has not yet been written. And a rule that is unwritten cannot be broken on record.

Watch three things in the coming months. Not whether a board issues a statement, but whether a safeguarding clause enters any policy document. Whether more players come forward — one interview is news, ten is a culture speaking. And whether the demand for a players’ body strengthens, because an organisation with no authority of its own cannot demand accountability from anyone else.

I do not know who opened that balcony door. I know that whoever can open a door holds the game’s real power. We do not think about that power because it never appears on a scorecard. If it did, perhaps we would not have had to wait this long.