The sky is the colour of wet concrete when I reach the Tendulkar mansion in Bandra. It has been threatening to rain all morning, and the living room, furnished in soft neutral tones, is washed in the dullness of a typical Mumbai monsoon. A few minutes later, Sara Tendulkar walks in wearing an orange dress that cuts through the grey outside.
We settle into the sofa and begin, as people sharing a first name often do: by talking about it. Meeting a namesake can elicit an irrational sense of kinship. Could this have been me in another life? The fantasy is harder to sustain with a surname that’s been printed across millions of replica jerseys and etched into a country’s collective consciousness.
There was a brief period when the mighty Tendulkar name she held privately didn’t connect in her mind to the weight it carried publicly. At school, show-and-tell sometimes doubled as a cricket bulletin. One morning, after classmates announced Sachin Tendulkar’s latest century, Sara raised her hand and said, “My father has the same name.”
“I was very, very young, and confused,” she laughs as she enacts that moment before she understood that the cricket legend everyone else was talking about and the father she knew at home were the same person. The country’s relationship with him would inevitably extend to her, and she grew up under watch before she fully understood why.
At home, her parents, Sachin and Anjali, made sure both Sara and her younger brother Arjun understood that the family name carried a certain responsibility.
By adolescence, she knew how easily a photograph could be separated from its circumstances and made to tell a story she had no hand in writing. She learnt to weigh her words carefully and kept her personal life closer than many of her friends did. Unkind comments usually went unanswered unless she felt “200 per cent sure” of her take.
A recent social media post used an airport video as an invitation to comment on her body. “There is a very fine line between journalism and trying to make things sensational. When that happened, I thought, I don’t care, I’m going to say something.” She still leaves room for doubt before speaking, although age has changed what she considers unworthy of her silence. “I would let things pass when I was younger. Maybe I was too naive. Now that is shifting, where I’m like, Okay, it’s time to push back.”
When our conversation turns to marriage, it begins with Arjun’s March wedding to Saaniya Chandhok. She tags her brother as a “very cricket boy” who was content to let his family run the machinery leading up to D-day. It’s hard to imagine the quiet, pristine room we’re currently sitting in was once the hub of all the wedding planning. Sara and Chandhok, accompanied by both their mothers, became the nucleus, moving from food tastings to decor meetings as they pieced together the wedding that would take place in Mumbai, drawing on both the bride’s Punjabi and the groom’s Maharashtrian traditions.
Sara got me thinking about the everyday changes marriage brings. My sister and I have lived together for over a decade, away from our home city. The prospect of no longer sharing the same life as our own marriage plans hit the calendar has started to feel a little like watching the co-lead who has shared my set for years get written into another household’s storyline—new location, a new co-star and fewer scenes in the same living room. Sara had less cause for such melodrama. Cricket had already accustomed their sibling relationship to some distance, and Chandhok had been her friend for eight years before becoming her sister-in-law. In this new season, nobody had been written out and the new cast member was already family. “I feel like that was a great trial round for me,” she says. “Now I know what I want and what I don’t want.” So what does Sara want? When she was younger, she imagined a large wedding and was convinced she would be a pastel bride. Now she is leaning towards a smaller celebration, perhaps a red bridal look. “I’m a Libra, very indecisive. Who knows?” she shrugs. “Maybe I’ll go with green.”
