It was a day of mourning - the anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi's assassination - but the Jaitley wore a celebratory air. Entry was free, there were injuries trying to enter (a Ranji group match!) and in speculations about when queueing began, 4am turned into a consensus. On the road adjoining the medieval Kotla ruins, a municipal tempo blared Punjabi hip-hop at a festive volume, and there was a beat of hip-hop in the Delhi squad names - a Money Grewal, even if no longer a Prince Choudhary - and certainly in the jet-black Porsche Panamera Turbo (personalised number plate, obviously) that ferried Virat Kohli from his Gurugram mansion.
Kohli no longer lives in Delhi, or entirely in India, basing himself out of Mumbai and London; and as further incongruous reminder of his itineracy, the faithful threw themselves into un-ironical chants of "RCB". No longer a resident, but Virat Kohli is as Delhi as a fight. To tell a Delhiite that Kohli is not one of them is to say a reflection lies. So, no matter that he was playing a Ranji match after 12 years, and no matter that it was enforced: he was here, he is here!
Here, too, was Kartik, posing for photographs. A lookalike from Chandigarh, donned in an India Test baggy, his beard groomed in perfect homage. Eight lakh followers on Insta, he tells me, from eight years of being like Kohli. I want to save his number. What came after Kartik? "You can write Kohli." Inside the stadium a poster proclaimed: "There is no kingdom without King Kohli."
The first day Virat Kohli spent almost entirely in the field, and almost exclusively in the slips. Two Gautam Gambhirs loomed over him - the name staring down from each wing on the stand usually likened to a giant parking lot, yet also resembling a gargantuan concrete spider on its back. The Gambhir stand that held, according to one scribe, "more people in this one Ranji match than in the entire five years when Gambhir was sent back to play Ranji". There were eleven thousand in, perhaps twelve, maybe fifteen. Nobody could remember a bigger Ranji crowd in recent times.
An hour into Kohli's first Ranji match in 12 years a man ran on to the field and touched his feet. As he fled away Kohli directed the security not to thrash the fellow, which is as Delhi a gesture as a thrashing, the line between belligerence and benevolence perennially fine, the stuff that maintains the charge between its people.
A full 24 hours later, the crowd had occasion to cheer the demise of their No. 3, the rising star Yash Dhull, a former Under-19 World Cup winning captain no less, like the man about to replace him. Kohli stood up from the plastic chair at the boundary rope, gripping his bat with his customary bottom hand. As he commenced his walk to the pitch, as if choreographed, the four thousand-odd in the adjoining Bishan Singh Bedi stand each raised an arm, phone cameras trained upon their subject.
No Indian batter before Kohli had cut quite a figure like Kohli: so shorn of body fat, borne out of so obsessive a diet, with such impressive delts and traps over so lean a torso. Accordingly, there were no curves, no rounds for his sleeveless sweater to negotiate; it fell on him as it would a mannequin. "Visionary," was his former trainer Basu Shanker's word when I spoke to him during the 2023 World Cup. "He started preparing himself like an Olympic athlete". In that tournament Kohli scored 765 runs, the highest ever at a World Cup.
In the long format, however, his numbers have gone from contraction to recession.
Over 39 Tests in the last five years, the average has plummeted from a commanding 55, into the 46s now; his strike rate in the period has retarded into the stodgy 40s. He averages 30 in this time, while his big-four rivals, Kane Williamson, Joe Root and Steven Smith do 64, 54 and 45. Of batters with 20 innings or more, Kohli comes in ninth - on the Indian list, that is. In the world he is 64th. Put another way, he has been, middling, mediocre, medium, for a third of his Test career.
What explains his steady descent to the perfectly ordinary? What ails this exceptional athlete?
Prarabdha, proposed Swami Premanand Maharaj, the guru Kohli and his family visited after the Australia tour, (I am translating and condensing here) the karmic debt within a group of people that can overwhelm the excellence of one's practice. My friend and former colleague Sidharth Monga, a proponent of luck as a measurable parameter, conjectured that Kohli enjoyed an excess of such luck in his prime and is enduring a deficit now. Karma, luck, vast forces. Perhaps it's just his off-side play.
His eighth ball Kohli was beaten outside off stump, drawn into a drive by Kunal Yadav, a fine, full ball that seamed away. The next ball, short of a length and in that channel just outside the channel, Kohli fenced at. He was lucky to miss again.
Ian Chappell used to tell a story about Garfield Sobers. Mark Mascarenhas, the television mogul, asked the great man about the secret to batting during a late-night session. Nothing to it, said Sobers, in his 60s, on his feet in a trice to demonstrate: if it's up, hit it so - pouncing forwards to drive; if it's short, hit it so, dancing back to cut. In her remarkable new biography of Frank Worrell, Sobers tells Vaneisa Baksh that as a boy he would watch the great batters from the crowds on the boundary line - not their strokes, "I wasn't interested in that. I used to watch their movements and watch the pitch of the ball and length to see what they do to that kind of ball, how they move."
It has been extraordinary to watch a great off-side player's offside game fray away; extraordinary to consider that he chose to simply not explore one entire half of off-side play.
Three years ago, after a laudable 79 off 201 balls in Cape Town, Sanjay Manjrekar was prescient in insisting that "he's got to look at this method of scoring runs" - the method being a such a pronounced commitment to front-foot play that it turned gradually into a monomania. It is hard to think of a great batter so mute on the cut: a natural scoring shot, making fewer demands on technique or courage than other attacking shots. The Indian legacy in the stroke is rich. Vijay Merchant's storied late cut, Gundappa Viswanath's legendary square cut. Sachin Tendulkar cut, of course, and also punched thrillingly off the back-foot with a vertical bat. Virender Sehwag almost based a career on it: if he wasn't cutting you to pieces it was probably because he was upper-cutting you.
Fourteenth ball, Kohli hit his first boundary, a sizzling straight drive off the seamer Himanshu Sangwan, providing a moment of deliverance to the crowd.
A touch of Mohammad Azharuddin about the stroke, the wrists coming into play, the right leg raised back from the knee as he completed the shot. Something of the Azhar spirit in it, too - the times he had a point to prove and nothing to lose. The next ball Kohli advanced down the track again; the ball darted in between bat and pad; he lost his shape, his grip on the bat and his off stump, which went cartwheeling, while he looked ruefully down at a spot on the pitch. As he walked back to the Virat Kohli Pavilion, again a choreography went off in the stands, this time a synchronised outward procession - an exodus.
It's difficult to embrace failure with a smile and keep going, said the guru in his short discourse to Kohli, but God gives you that ability. On the surface of it he had certainly been smiley, laughy, chatty, meeting with old friends, their children, encouraging young team-mates.
Coming back to Delhi, for Delhi, had possibly tapped into something deeper. A home left is a more poignant thing than a home inhabited. In a conversation with Jatin Sapru, one of those conversations in which Kohli so articulately attends to the Kohli brand, he recalled: "I know when I used to be on a Scooty going around playing games and, you know, trying to make a mark. I don't forget those days." He gestured with his fingers. "I can still feel it." Delhi doesn't leave you the option of not feeling. You feel it all: the noxious air in your throat, the bone-chilling nip of a winter morning, the dust-laden loo that blows in the brutal summer, in which the euphemistic "hot-weather tournaments" proceed.
Soon he was in training gear, yapping away. He was the lowest scorer for his side, the only one in single digits.
Outside the stadium, two youngsters from Greater Noida, glumly held up their poster. "Here for King Kohli. Comeback Loading." They were taking off now but planned to return at the end of the day to witness a felicitation ceremony for Virat Kohli.