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DHAKA, Bangladesh -- The guy walking across the parking lot is famous. That's easy to tell from the reactions. Crowds part for him. Security guards mirror his every step. Other cricketers who made this same trip to the locker room tiptoed around the puddles. He strides over them, head up, confident. I am following an Indian cricket superstar, but I don't know who he is. That's the kind of trip this is going to be -- one of constant confusion and mystery.

I don't realize that Sachin Tendulkar is likely playing in his final World Cup, still searching for his first title. Tendulkar is probably the most famous man in India. He's so famous that people who worked for him are famous: a well-known Bollywood movie character is based on his first agent, Mark Mascarenhas, who died in a car wreck. Billboards with Sachin's photo blanket India's cities; every other commercial on television features his face. He's wildly rich. He is the greatest cricketer in the world. One of the greatest ever.

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My first day in Bangladesh, I'm sitting in the press box considering the journey ahead. Sambit Bal, the editor of ESPNcricinfo, sits next to me. If you are looking for someone with the opposite of my cricket knowledge, he's it. Back home, an Alabama fan had killed the trees at Toomer's Corner, and I was trying to explain the significance to him. This was big news to me. I'm a Southern boy, and I tend to believe that SEC football is the most important thing in the world. Only, Sambit has never heard of Auburn, or Alabama, doesn't know that they play college football, or that they are rivals. I fumble around. This is perhaps America's most intense rivalry. A fan just poisoned two 130-year-old oak trees. It's serious. I need an analogy.

Sehwag stays in. He crushes ball after ball. It's like watching Mark McGwire take batting practice. The dude has Popeye arms, and he's pounding the thing all over the yard. Fans call Sehwag the "Butcher of Najafgarh." He puts on a show. The cricket-mad Bangladeshi crowd oohs and ahs, just happy to be seeing the game in person.

Sehwag finally gets out with 175, an incredible total. After that, the game slows. India wins, and it's a little boring, frankly. Maybe it's because I don't know the rules, or because the scene in the street was exponentially more dramatic than the one in the stands, but the game itself seems anticlimactic. I've flown halfway around the planet, and I'm after more than an intellectual understanding of why cricket matters. There's a mystic place beyond the assignment. When the books are closed and the conversations about culture and history are over, I want to sit in a stadium and have the game explain itself to me.

One thing did happen -- a pressbox conversation during the game that will eat at me for the next week. I'm sitting with Sambit, and a guy comes up to chat. He's a former Indian cricket player turned broadcaster, Sanjay Manjrekar, and he's been captivated by Bangladesh's reaction to this World Cup opening in its capital. This pure love for cricket transports him to his past.

Kumar tells me about the history of the game. When he was growing up, championship cricket meant a Test match. White uniforms. Breaks for high tea. Unlimited overs. (An over is a set of six balls, sort of like an at-bat.) Games lasted for days. Sometimes nobody won. Cricket was designed to be played, not watched. "After five days," Kumar says, "it was frustrating for the spectators."

Modern attention spans began shrinking cricket. First came the World Cup format, which could be completed in a day, and is now 50 overs. More recently, the 20-over game has become popular with paying customers, an event stripped of nuance, played in the same amount of time as a baseball game.

We sit in the lower bleachers, the entire circle of green in front of us. An Australian player muscles a ball toward the boundary. A ball that hits or bounces over the boundary at the edge of the field is four runs; a ball that crosses it on the fly is six. Some Aussie hits are seen as gauche. Kumar clucks disapprovingly. I ask why. Old-school cricket fans don't like it when players cross the bat, which for baseball fans would be like if a right-handed hitter got an outside fastball and, instead of going the opposite way, turned and pulled it. It's vulgar. The ball should be hit in the direction from which it's pitched.

Have you ever heard that something "isn't cricket?" That's where the phrase comes from. To cross the bat isn't cricket. Sehwag crosses the bat. Constantly. He wants bombs. Fours and sixes. Sehwag revels in his vulgarity. Tendulkar, although a big hitter, plays with an old school respect. Kumar loves Sachin.

Bankim ignores him for a bit but gets the message. We pack our stuff. I check the scoreboard and work out some numbers. Zimbabwe is scoring 5.25 runs an over. It needs 5.26. It has a chance at the upset. I head up to the press box. I need to keep watching cricket, in person and on television, if I want a revelation. There will be a moment when it all becomes clear.

My New Delhi cab driver's name is Deepchand Yadav. He loves cricket. Once, the captain of India's 1983 World Cup champion team, Kapil Dev, rode in his car. Can you imagine?! Kapil Dev, in my cab! He hopes India will win this year's tournament. Everyone is very nervous. A billion dreams. Twenty-eight years of yearning. The team must win, for the billion, for its star.

Six years ago, worried about the lives of his wife and three children, he brought them to Delhi with him. "My family actually likes village," he says, "but I like Delhi because business purposes is good." Six years ago, he played cricket -- captain of his village team. But since his family came to the city, there's no time. He's never played cricket with his son.

His son is 10 years old. The boy plays cricket with friends in the street, wherever they can find a little space, five or six sharing a bat. The wheels turn. I ask Deepchand if I could play with them tomorrow. I've watched cricket, but I've never held a bat or struck a ball. Books take you only so far. The best way to know a sport is to play it with children.

"He never behaves badly," says Rahul Bhattacharya, once a popular young writer on cricket, now a novelist, "which Indians find very appealing. He's not had scandals with women or drugs. He's the idol for our children."

Before Sachin, typical Indian cricketers took few risks. For the first hour, shots were deflected, frustrating the bowler, tiring him out, forcing him into mistakes, a perfect sporting ethos in a country known for vein-popping passive-aggressiveness. Sachin changed that. His style was new. He swung a thick bat, heavier than Indians had used before.

He played with respect, but he also played with power. A recent book, "If Cricket Is a Religion, Sachin Is God," finds an important corollary to India's history in this. Before, because of a stagnant economy, nutrition was a problem. India couldn't outslug rivals. It needed spin bowlers and crafty batsmen. An inferiority complex developed. Despite his greatness, somewhere deep inside, Indian legend Sunil Gavaskar, who retired two years before Sachin debuted, seemed terribly insecure. After he became famous, he turned down a membership to London's exclusive Marylebone Cricket Club -- the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of cricket -- because, once, a guard there didn't recognize him. The slights burned until they became a part of him, his pilot light, defining both him and the nation he represented. Sachin isn't from that India.

The highway runs past ancient ruins, and the lights of the cricket ground. Tomorrow, I'll see South Africa-West Indies. Today, I'm going to play cricket with little Sachin and his friends. I've brought a surprise for him. It's a Sachin Tendulkar signature series cricket bat made from pure English willow. It'll be his first proper bat, and when Deepchand told him about it last night, Sachin had trouble going to sleep. We ride out toward the suburban slums. I'm twisting around to see the wrecked castle when Deepchand shouts, "You see elephant?"

There are elephants on the highway. There are elephant-sized metaphors shuffling alongside. This is a nation with a foot in both the past and present. India is at an end and a beginning. Over drinks in Delhi with my friends Candace and Lydia, we talk about this. Lydia is a correspondent for The New York Times and one of the world's experts on developing nations. Talking journalism with her is like talking cricket with Sachin. She cautions me to avoid trying to figure out what India is, or what it isn't, or to draw conclusions. "It leads you down all of these blind alleys," she tells me. "It defies all efforts to simplify."

She's right. I'm not sure what any of this means, or how cricket or Sachin fits into it, or even if he'll actually retire, but this is a critical time for the nation, just as it's a critical time for cricket. Their ambitions and threats are the same. Anyone who's here for even a few days can tell that.

Commercialism is a new mistress in sports. The Indian Premier League, which plays 20-over cricket, started three years ago. The creation of the IPL is India's Dodgers-leave-Brooklyn moment. Money is changing the sport. The change is seen by most as good. Any achievement by an Indian is good, something to be admired in the light. For many Indians, especially those who speak English and are trying to navigate the brave new world of economic revolution, the issue of identity is an important one. Excellence is tied up in that search. Indian writers are judged by the size of the advance, not the magic of their words. Indian artists are judged by the price fetched at auction, not the feelings they create in someone who stands before their canvas. Open the paper any random day to find an example. When famous Bollywood actress Aishwarya Rai met Dustin Hoffman at a Lakers game, the tabloids report, she talked to him about "new market-tapping agendas and global trends." Not acting. Not his construction of Benjamin Braddock or Ted Kramer. They didn't talk craft. They talked money. ff782bc1db