Tent to Tests: The extraordinary journey of India's star opener

As a teenager sweating through hours-long batting sessions in a practice 'net' – a stifling space enclosed by plastic tarpaulin above his mentor's rudimentary gymnasium in Mumbai's seething northern suburbs – Yashasvi Jaiswal inscribed two simple words on his pads. 

One was the timeless sports psychology mantra later immortalised by fictional football coach Ted Lasso: Believe. 

The other was an achingly poignant reminder of the journey Jaiswal embarked upon when he left home aged 10 in search of a distantly improbable future: Become. 

For all the tales of street urchins-turned-superstars that enliven Asia's cricket canon, few equal the Dickens-esque chronicle of Jaiswal's rise and rise.

The youngest son of hardware store owner Bhupendra Jaiswal and his wife Kanchan, young Yashasvi's life growing up in the regional village of Suriyawan (population around 20,000) in Uttar Pradesh's famed carpet-weaving district of Bhadohi was cricket.

Like so many boys born at the start of this century, he idolised the nation's living deity Sachin Tendulkar and while playing street games with his peers he entertained fanciful thoughts he and Sachin might one day open the batting together for India. 

But the family business was barely generating enough to feed and school his older sisters and brother so, when their youngest announced he would make the 29-hour train journey to Mumbai (population then around 20 million), his parents made little effort to dissuade him.

"I just really wanted to play cricket but in India, in a village, it's not easy to get an opportunity," Jaiswal would later recount to the BBC's Test Match Special IPL podcast. 

"My seniors, they were telling me if you want to play cricket just go to Mumbai.  

"That one thing stuck in my head – whenever I went to sleep or when talking to my mum, I told her I wanted to go to Mumbai." 

The 10-year-old's only contact in India's most populated city (excluding urban areas) that peddles hope and heartbreak in not-so-equal measure, was an uncle whose small home in Worli bore no resemblance to those of the now-fashionable suburb's recent residents Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma.

However, the crowded daily commute from Worli to Azad Maidan – the 10 hectares of playing fields that forms cricket's throbbing heart in central Mumbai – was unsustainable for a skinny pre-adolescent boy lugging a borrowed playing kit. 

Rather than give up on his dream, Jaiswal found work in a dairy shop at Kalbadevi, a short walk from the Maidan and its non-stop daily carnival of organised matches, but was fired after two months for prioritising cricket over his chores. 

His few possessions thrown into the street by the disgruntled owner. 

Jaiswal's uncle then intervened and organised lodgings for his nephew at the Maidan clubhouse of the Muslim United Cricket Club where Jaiswal had started playing but, in reality, the boy was homeless. 

The 'clubhouse' was a canvas tent on the perimeter of the playing field that accommodated gardeners and ground staff who left Jaiswal in no doubt his ongoing tenancy was solely dependent on his capacity to score runs. 

He grasped the lifeline, which he figured would help his cricket by dint of pure proximity while also providing potential money-earning opportunities through scoring and umpiring, but life over the next couple of years proved unrelentingly harsh. 

While the tent provided shelter against Mumbai's draining heat and drenching rain, it did not come with staples such as food, electricity or bathroom facilities and Jaiswal was compelled to queue for public toilets at nearby Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus, one of India's busiest railway stations.

He would often go to sleep hungry rather than fight those he shared quarters with for meagre remains of the lentils, rice, flour and potatoes that formed the staff's daily diet, and would wait longingly for Sundays when chicken appeared on the menu. 

To sustain himself, Jaiswal found evening work with the owner of a roadside pani puri stall selling the popular deep-fried street snacks, but feared being noticed by his cricket teammates who had no idea as to his precarious circumstances. 

He took part in as many corporate cricket matches as possible to supplement his earnings, and would regularly wager with rival coaches and players by offering them 100 rupees (around $2) if they dismissed him while they would hand over the same amount if he got them out with his leg spin. 

Like any canny gambler, he backed his skills to beat the odds. 

"When I missed my mum I did cry," Jaiswal recalled a decade later. 

"I didn't tell people what was going on because I knew they would have told me to come home if I'm not comfortable.  

"I just told them I was fine."

But by late 2013, around the time he turned 12, the dream was fading against the harsh light of Mumbai's brutal reality even though he had vowed to his parents he would only return to Suriyawan once he established himself as a cricketer. 

Jaiswal's father decided to make the 1500km trek from Uttar Pradesh to bring his boy back, and that's when fate intervened. 

Jwala Singh, who two decades earlier made a cricket pilgrimage from the Uttar Pradesh village of Gorakhpur to Mumbai aged 13 in the unrealised hope of cracking the big time, was at Azad Maidan scouting for talent he could then hone at his Mumbai Cricket Club academy. 

Jwala was watching youngsters in a practice net bedevilled by a difficult pitch until a spindly left-hander went to the crease and immediately hit everything out of the middle of his combat-worn bat. 

Upon learning more about Jaiswal, the coach and mentor – who had also worked in a dairy shop and foraged for a livelihood on the tough streets of Mumbai in his youth – saw more than a boy who could time the cover off a cricket ball. 

"At 11, who comes to a city like Mumbai with a dream of playing for India?" Jwala would say semi-rhetorically years later. 

"It happens only in Bollywood movies."

As if penning such a script, Jwala offered his young protégé shelter, food and cricket tuition at his academy in suburban Santacruz, even further north than Jaiswal's uncle's place at Worli. 

Recognising the boy's physical weakness and propensity for knee injuries given his scant diet over recent years, Jwala set about strengthening his charge with regular meals as well as fitness sessions at nearby Juhu beach. 

Such was Jaiswal's drive to succeed his immediate obstacle was training too hard in the belief his wiry frame was physically weak. 

Jwala instead taught him the value of rest to balance alongside obsessive practice, and Jaiswal introduced an hour of yoga upon waking at 6am before beginning his daily regime of 4-5 hours batting. 

While the boy's work ethic was not unusual for India's teeming cohort of childhood cricket hopefuls, his mental strength told Jwala he had unearthed a special talent. 

A product of the unyielding ambition that led him to leave home while still a child, and the survival skills he had developed in the often feudal hierarchy of Indian society meant the only fear Jaiswal took on to the cricket field was of failure to score heavily. 

Certainly, being thrown into senior competition against experienced adults for Jwala's Mumbai Cricket Club barely raised the boy's pulse rate.

"I asked him 'aren't you nervous', but his reply was 'I found surviving in this city and getting a meal very challenging'," recalled Jwala, who was granted power of attorney over Jaiswal's affairs by the boy's parents and thus became his legal guardian. 

"'Here I just need to score sir. Don't worry, I can handle this'." 

Jaiswal's first step beyond the spirited if elementary Azad Maidan competitions was Mumbai's under-14 Giles Shield competition, a pathway for aspiring greats including Tendulkar and Rohit. 

In one memorable game for Fort's Anjuman Islam Urdu High School against Raja Shiva Vidyamandir (from Dadar), Jaiswal coupled an unbeaten innings of 319 with a match haul of 13 wickets. 

He then became the youngest player to debut in the top division of Mumbai's monsoon season Kanga League, where Tendulkar had also famously played at age 12. 

A year later, Jaiswal made his first international trip to the UK with former India Test opener Dilip Vengsarkar's Foundation which awarded him a scholarship worth 5000 rupees (around A$90) and a new bat. 

By age 13, Jaiswal had supplemented his triple century with three double hundreds and a dozen scores of 150-plus, in addition to claiming upwards of 150 wickets with his spin bowling.

As he continued to rack up records in Mumbai's under-16 and under-19 competitions, Jaiswal came to the attention of India's selectors. 

He might have been born a generation too late to bat alongside his boyhood hero, but as a 16-year-old he was selected with Tendulkar's son Arjun for an India under-19 tour to Sri Lanka. 

Prior to that trip, Sachin invited Jaiswal to his Mumbai home where he presented the awestruck youngster with a bat and chatted to him for around 40 minutes about their shared craft. 

Jaiswal's own celebrity rose exponentially when in October 2019 – nine months after making his first-class debut for Mumbai aged 17 – he became the youngest player to blaze a domestic one-day double hundred with 203 off 154 balls against Jharkhand. 

To help his prodigy maintain the perspective earned through their shared upbringings, Jwala counselled the teenager to eschew social media lest it prove a distraction or, potentially more damaging, a distortion. 

Instead, Jaiswal – a self-described "romantic guy" who once listed his favourite film as 'Titanic' because of his affinity for lead actor Kate Winslet and title-tune singer Celine Dion – pushed himself to learn English by reading newspapers and watching movies. 

But the accolades and ensuing rewards kept piling up.

Named player of the tournament at the men's Under-19 World Cup in 2020 where he topped the runs tally, he earned his maiden IPL contract (worth around A$450,000) later that year when installed to open alongside Australia's Steve Smith for Rajasthan Royals.

His most recent IPL deal with the same franchise is worth almost $750,000, with his value certain to rise further after belting the competition's fastest half-century (in 2023) off 13 deliveries. 

In his first full Ranji Trophy first-class season, he led Mumbai's charge to the final with three consecutive centuries and last year joined an elite club of India players including skippers Mohammad Azharuddin, Sourav Ganguly and Rohit to post a century on Test debut. 

Then Jaiswal etched himself into far more exclusive history earlier this year with scores of 209 (at Visakhapatnam) and 214no (Rajkot) against England.

It made him just the third India batter after Tendulkar's childhood friend Vinod Kambli (in 1993) and India's contemporary batting benchmark Kohli (in 2017) to post double hundreds in consecutive Tests. 

It was during a Harris Shield Mumbai school match on Azad Maidan in 1988 – quarter of a century before it became Yashasvi Jaiswal's home – that Tendulkar and Kambli's third-wicket partnership of 664 embedded them into India's consciousness. 

But neither of those future internationals had their hunger to reach the pinnacle fuelled by the formative memory of scrounging for a daily meal in the nation's biggest, most ruthlessly competitive city.

"In any situation I can manage, nothing frightens me," said Jaiswal who begins his first tour of Australia within 93 of smashing Virender Sehwag's (aged 25) benchmark as the youngest India opener to reach 1500 Test runs. 

"I keep fighting, that's my goal.  

"That mindset was built from there; there is nothing you get for free.  

"You have to do everything for yourself." 

NRMA Insurance Men's Test Series v India

First Test: November 22-26: Perth Stadium, 1.20pm AEDT

Second Test: December 6-10: Adelaide Oval, 3pm AEDT (D/N)

Third Test: December 14-18: The Gabba, Brisbane, 11.20am AEDT

Fourth Test: December 26-30: MCG, Melbourne, 10.30am AEDT

Fifth Test: January 3-7: SCG, Sydney, 10.30am AEDT

Australia squad: (first Test only) Pat Cummins (c), Scott Boland, Alex Carey (wk), Josh Hazlewood, Travis Head, Josh Inglis, Usman Khawaja, Marnus Labuschagne, Nathan Lyon, Mitch Marsh, Nathan McSweeney, Steve Smith, Mitchell Starc

India squad: Rohit Sharma (c), Jasprit Bumrah (vc), Yashasvi Jaiswal, Abhimanyu Easwaran, Shubman Gill, Virat Kohli, KL Rahul, Rishabh Pant, Sarfaraz Khan, Dhruv Jurel, Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, Mohammed Siraj, Akash Deep, Prasidh Krishna, Harshit Rana, Nitish Kumar Reddy, Washington Sundar. Reserves: Mukesh Kumar, Navdeep Saini, Khaleel Ahmed