3 min readUpdated: Mar 25, 2026 10:32 AM IST
On his seventeenth birthday, touring Pakistan with the Indian team, Laxman Sivaramakrishnan was called to cut his birthday cake. A teammate looked at the cake Sunil Gavaskar had ordered and said: “Hey Sunny, you ordered the right colour cake. Such a dark chocolate cake for a dark boy.”
“I started crying and refused to cut the cake. Then Sunil Gavaskar had to pacify me and then I cut the cake with tears in my eyes,” Sivaramakrishnan told The Indian Express.
It was not the first time. At fourteen, a senior India batsman had mistaken him for ground staff at Chepauk and asked him to clean his shoes. In the Tamil Nadu dressing room, prominent players called him Karupa. When he fielded on the boundary in the north of India, crowds chanted Kalia.
At a hotel in Mumbai — now the Trident at Nariman Point — a gatekeeper refused to let him back in. He was part of the Indian team. The gatekeeper looked at his colour and his age and said there was no way he could be an India cricketer. He waited an hour for a teammate to vouch for him.
“After that I realised I should take the keys with me. But I would be trembling when I got near the gate for the fear of being rejected and kicked out again.” He was sixteen.
The Pakistan crowds had their own version. “Kalia, Kalia, Kalia.” For a month.
“All these things put me in a position where I had very low self-esteem as a person. And when you have such very low self-esteem at a tender age, you talk about confidence — it is very hard to build confidence. I always wanted to forget, forget, forget but deep down in your subconscious it’s always rooted and it comes out.
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“I was down completely and I didn’t want to see myself in the mirror. I would have a couple of drinks and go to sleep because I could not bear anything. Whenever I was awake I thought I was going to die.”
Sivaramakrishnan (back row, second from right) was part of the India team that won the 1985 Benson & Hedges World Championship of Cricket in Australia.
Liquor was the only thing that brought sleep.
“Sometimes when we were travelling in Dubai during IPL, there’s no speed limit. If the vehicle went very fast, something would tell me in my mind just to open the door and jump out. Somehow, something stopped me from doing anything silly.”
The hallucinations came at night. “You close your eyes, you see images that you can’t imagine. All very frightening. You open your eyes, there’s nothing. But you’re so tired that you want to sleep. You close your eyes — dreadful things. Open your eyes — nothing. Again you’re convinced there’s nothing wrong. Close your eyes. For a while. Again. Open your eyes. So there goes your sleep … ”
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The drinking made the depression worse. The depression made the drinking worse. “Every time you’ve managed to tangle yourself tighter and tighter. And you have the whole world outside saying, see, I told you. Liquor is the reason. I told you.”
