Willow & Wickets: The Cricket Tour of India

Dawn on Shivaji Park — the nursery that raised Tendulkar — watching coaches drill ten-year-olds with Test-match seriousness. Then inside Wankhede Stadium on a non-match day: the dressing rooms, the pitch square, the stand named for the boy from the park you stood on this morning.

The main event: a full day's international or IPL cricket from hospitality seats on the shaded side, lunch and analysis with your host between sessions. Sixty thousand Mumbaikars will explain, at full volume, why this is the best place on earth to watch the game. They are correct.

Fly to Delhi and pad up. A private net session at a first-class academy: bowling machine set to your courage, a former Ranji coach correcting a lifetime of backyard technique, and video analysis over lunch. Evening at the Feroz Shah Kotla — the ground where Kumble took all ten.

Cricket as India's second civil service: morning in the galis of old Delhi where gully cricket owns every through-lane, a collector's private museum of blades and blazers, and an evening mushaira of cricket writers and commentators arguing beautifully over dinner in your honour.

Fly north until the boundary rope meets the Himalaya. The HPCA stadium at Dharamshala sits at 1,450 metres with the Dhauladhar range as sightscreen — cricket's most photographed backdrop. Private ground access, tea in the pavilion, and the mountains doing the rest.

Morning match with a local club side on a village ground terraced out of the hillside — you bat, the mountains field. Afternoon among the prayer wheels and pines of McLeod Ganj, where novice monks play a fierce tape-ball format between prayers, and will absolutely accept your challenge.

A last mountain breakfast, a last look at the ground from the ridge, and the flight home via Delhi. You leave with a coached cover drive, a village cap presented at the boundary, and the settled conviction that the game's true home has six thousand metres of sightscreen.