Juggling cricket with a toddler in tow

Sana Mir, the former Pakistan captain, believes her good friend and long-time teammate Nain Abidi's world usually operates in two moods - confident and overconfident. Much of that was tested in April 2021.

Nearly two years after giving birth to her son Abbas, an event that had forced her into premature retirement, Abidi sensed an opportunity to make a comeback to international cricket - if not for Pakistan then at least the USA, where she had moved with her husband Asad.

So, the brief 13-day trip back to Pakistan held two motives for her. One, to celebrate the birthday of her son with family and friends, which wasn't possible in the previous year due to the COVID-19 outbreak. And secondly, to train and be ready for the camp that was scheduled to be held in Dallas later in the month.

"As an international cricketer, they just expect you to turn up and perform, not knowing what you're going through," Abidi says, holding high expectations of herself.

To make sure she was ready for the challenge, she called up her coach Sagheer, the younger brother of Zaheer Abbas, and requested him to give her full attention for those 12 days of training. He agreed and even arranged for four matches, apart from the usual training sessions.

The Zaheer Abbas Cricket Academy, in Karachi, was a 45-minute drive from her mother's house, where she would leave her kid before heading for training. Aiman Anwar, the Pakistan cricketer, would pick her up and drop her back home. One day, just when they reached the ground, Abidi got a call from her mother. Having spent the better part of his young life being raised solely by his mother, Abbas was struggling to adapt to the new routine.

"Abbas is not comfortable around strangers," she explains. "So I would feed him and put him to sleep before leaving. But when my mother called, he had woken up and noticed that I wasn't around. She said, 'Abbas is crying. Hicchki le kar ro raha hai (uncontrollably). I'm unable to handle him. Can you come back and take him with you?'

"I had just travelled 45 minutes one way, now I had to travel the same distance back. 'How can I play cricket like this?' I wondered. For a fleeting moment, I was angry."

Sagheer gave Abidi his car to drive back; and amidst the chaos of Karachi streets, with several thoughts running in her head, she returned to pick up her child. "I was driving in Pakistan after nearly two years. I had lost touch of driving on those roads where cars are passing you by from all sides and honking incessantly. I picked him up and returned to the ground, travelling another 45 minutes."

"Neend mein chote sahab tunn the (He was still sleepy). While I was practising, he fell asleep on the grass. A cricket ground is no place for a child to be sleeping. I removed my helmet, my gloves and pads, picked him up in my arms and sat for the rest of the day."

She couldn't practice that day, so she asked her husband, Asad, to take care of the kid when she isn't around. But that wasn't enough to bring her focus back to cricket. "The issue was that Abbas was reliant on me. He wouldn't eat if I was not feeding him. So that thought would always worry me: 'What if he's not eating?'. Even though I would leave only after feeding him in the morning, my matches would go on till evening. I wasn't sure if someone else would have been able to feed him. I was extremely stressed. I wanted to cry and scream. There were times when I would think: "Should I be doing all this?"

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If not for the natural high self-belief that Mir talks about, it would have been impossible for Abidi to return to cricket. The first centurion for Pakistan in ODIs, she was one of Pakistan's highest run-getters in limited overs cricket when she got married in January 2017. Soon after the 50-over World Cup that year, she had taken a brief sabbatical from cricket. She returned for the Asia Cup in 2018 but went on a six-month break again to be with her husband, who was working in the USA.

"Being in a long-distance relationship wasn't easy for me. Marriage is a commitment and I wanted to remain fair to it," she says. "I was supposed to return to Pakistan in December 2018 and resume my cricket from 2019. But during my stay in USA, I found out that I was pregnant.

"I wasn't expecting it but who isn't happy to become a mother? I was happy, so were my family members."

It came at a time when she was getting offers from multiple teams to play in Bangladesh's domestic leagues, where she had performed well in 2017. There were opportunities to play for clubs in USA. "Cricket was calling me."

The pregnancy, however, meant a long break from cricket. "There was a bit of sadness that my cricket would end but I wasn't entirely disappointed knowing that. I had played 13 years of international cricket till then."