I was not supposed to be in Mumbai.
My flight back to San Francisco had been booked for Thursday evening, connecting through Dubai. The Middle East airspace situation had other ideas. Flight cancelled. Rebooking impossible for at least 48 hours. And so, with my laptop bag, my overpriced business class pyjamas, and the mild existential fatigue of someone who has been in transit too many times this year, I found myself being handed a hotel card for two more nights at a property a fifteen-minute drive from where I was born.
I have lived in London from the age of nine. I moved to the United States at twenty-six for a role at a company that makes software used by roughly a third of the planet, and which I am contractually not allowed to name in personal essays. I have held a British passport for most of my adult life. I have stood at Lord's and cheered for England. I have done the full English at Sunday morning cricket with colleagues in Twickenham. I wear both jerseys in my heart, simultaneously and without apology.
But Mumbai has never stopped being home. Not really.
Sanjay
By five in the evening I had settled the hotel room question, answered forty-three emails that could have been one email, and made my way down to the lounge. The match was already on the television in the corner, the pre-game coverage loud with analysis and expectation. India were hosting. Wankhede was sold out. The pitch was going to be a belter.
I asked the man behind the bar if they were showing it all evening.
He looked at me as if I had asked whether Mumbai had traffic.
His name was Sanjay. He had been at this hotel for eleven years. He did not ask me how I took my chai. He watched me for about four seconds, then disappeared into the small kitchen behind the bar and came back with a glass that was exactly right: strong, spiced just enough that you could taste the cardamom without it announcing itself, sweetened with what I am reasonably certain was a small amount of jaggery rather than white sugar, and served at a temperature that suggested someone had thought about the human mouth rather than just boiling a pot.
I did not say anything. I just picked it up, took the first sip, and settled in.
The Game
If you did not watch it, here is what you missed: a cricket match that had absolutely no right to be as good as it was.
India batted first. Sanju Samson, who plays with the kind of liquid confidence that makes you slightly angry if you are bowling at him, made 89. The middle order applied themselves with intelligence. By the time the innings closed, the scoreboard read 253 for 7. In a T20 World Cup semi-final. At Wankhede. The crowd, already loud from the first ball, moved into a register that I felt somewhere behind my sternum.
Then England came out to bat.
I have complicated feelings about Jacob Bethell. He is twenty-one, he is English, and on the night of March 5th, 2026, he played one of the finest T20 innings I have ever witnessed, making 105 off what felt like forty-three balls, hitting sixes into the Mumbai night air with a cheerfulness that suggested he had not read the script. The England chase was serious. More than serious. With four overs left, they needed fewer runs than seemed fair and the lounge, which by this point contained eight other guests and Sanjay, had gone very quiet.
Sanjay refilled my chai without being asked. He did not take his eyes off the screen.
The Seventh Run
India won by 7 runs. Not by a distance. Not with anything to spare. Seven runs, after 499 were scored across the two innings, thirty-four sixes struck across a Mumbai sky, and approximately four hundred thousand heartbeats in that lounge that I am accounting for conservatively.
When the last wicket fell, the eight guests looked at each other. One couple who I had established earlier were from Nottingham said something very English and very good-natured. The others, a mix of Indian businessmen and a family from Pune who had been watching with the focused silence of people who have done this before, exhaled collectively in a way that sounded like a language.
I had both hands around the chai glass. It had long gone cold. I did not care.
Here is the thing about growing up between two countries, two passports, two sets of cricket loyalties: you develop a very specific emotional vocabulary for moments like this. Part of me was happy for England (Bethell deserved a hundred in a winning cause; someday he will have one). Most of me was something else entirely. Something that does not have a clean English word for it.
The Hindi word is garv. Pride. But that is too small a translation. It is pride that has geography in it, that is connected to a specific piece of ground, a specific city, a particular smell of street food coming through a hotel window at night.
On Being Stuck
Here is what I have been thinking about since the final wicket fell.
I have been to India eleven times in the past eight years. Work trips, family visits, a conference in Hyderabad that I mostly spent eating. Not once in those eleven visits have I sat in a hotel lounge in Mumbai for three hours watching India play cricket with a glass of chai that someone made properly, surrounded by strangers who were all watching the same thing with the same held breath.
The cancelled flight gave me that.
I am not recommending the current Middle East airspace situation as a travel strategy. I have friends and colleagues stranded in genuinely difficult circumstances and it is serious. But I am saying: if you find yourself unexpectedly extended in India, do not spend the extra time staring at a rebooking portal. Go downstairs. Find the lounge, or the chai stall, or the street corner with the best view. Something extraordinary may be happening there.
India are in the T20 World Cup final. They play New Zealand at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad. Sanjay, when I told him I might try to get a ticket, said something quietly that I am going to choose to interpret as encouragement.
My flight has been rebooked for Saturday. I have not yet decided whether to take it.
The T20 World Cup 2026 semi-final was played at Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai, on 5 March 2026. India beat England by 7 runs, scoring 253/7 to England's 246/7. India face New Zealand in the final at the Narendra Modi Stadium, Ahmedabad. Match reports via ESPNcricinfo and ICC.
Rohan Mehta is a Mumbai-born technology professional based in San Francisco. He writes occasionally about cricket, chai, and the specific loneliness of being very far from home.