As if decked out with wings of its own, the ball is soaring against the sea breeze, way up into the Mumbai night. T20 is cricket's most violent offering. The format has sent generations of batters into bleak gymnasiums full of variously shaped heavy metal objects to build explosive strength into shoulders, chest, arms, abdominals, and obliques, to prime them to better thump balls into concrete stands lined with plastic bucket seating.
But when Sanju Samson is in this kind of flow state the hard physics of the act of batting melts away. There is so little violence there. His bat butterfly-kisses the ball, and as if a whisper has passed and permission has been given, the ball squeals away on a high and euphoric trajectory, rotating giddily as it travels, back somersault after back somersault after back somersault.
In the the bucket seats bolted on to the concrete of the Wankhede are more than 33,000, almost all of them decked out in India powder blue. As their voices rise in unison the volume swells like a cloud for the ball to land in, but the ball itself has other ideas, leaping off the top tier of the Sachin Tendulkar Stand until finally someone collars the thing down below and ends this adventure.
It's all right though. The ball gets to be thrown into the outfield again, and into the hands of Jofra Archer, who will bowl again at Samson, and then, hopefully, another whisper from his bat, and it gets to go on another rapturous little journey.
We are in the third over of India's innings. It will turn out to be perhaps the most consequential of the match. Archer had been all over Samson in the T20I series played a little over a year ago in India - Archer taking his wicket three times, as Samson laboured to 25 runs off 23 balls against him. On this night, before the ball's flight into the top tier of the Sachin Tendulkar Stand, Archer could have had Samson's wicket, but Harry Brook at mid-on couldn't hold on, the ball springing mischievously out of reverse-cupped hands.
Perhaps the ball knew what we all were about to witness, and what Samson was feeling in his bones. People in creative endeavours know what a flow state is about. Guitarists will talk about how when in their greatest moments, they feel only their hands, the glorious music pouring from their instrument seemingly appearing out of thin air. Painters have this too. Writers have spectacular paragraphs appear on the page without overthinking brains ever once intervening.
T20s have rightly been overrun by data-driven analyses, the numbers, match-ups, and vital tools to ensuring long-term success and predictability, as corporate concerns increasingly dominate the game. But even the data has not quantified everything.
The six into the top tier of the Sachin Tendulkar Stand came two balls after the dropped catch. Laer in that same over, Samson delicately deflected a ball to the deep third boundary. Off the first ball of that same dropped-catch over, he'd smoked one through midwicket for four. When you're in this headspace, the mistakes - fingertips touching one wrong string, the brush making a single errant stroke - seem to matter less because only the big picture is in view.
In chess, the other sport India currently excels at, the greatest practitioners speak of the game becoming like a language when they are playing their best - their opponent's next move not a studied calculation anymore, but a word in a sentence they already know the meaning of. You are in a place of such sublime focus that you intuit what is about to happen next. When Archer came back in the 13th over, Samson hit two of his slower balls for six. All up, he reaped 38 runs off 14 Archer balls. History, numbers, match-ups, like hard physics, melt away.
"Last time when we played them in home conditions, five games we played England, I think Jofra was definitely a very effective bowler at that time. So I had to do some preparation. I had to be a bit more clear in my head how I'm going to face it. I think I was a bit more confident that I just played a really good innings couple of days ago. So I think I need to take that confidence forward and that kind of helped me to tackle the bowlers today."
The India wicketkeeper-batter speaks about his innings, missing out on two centuries and on facing Archer
Samson is the closest thing this India top order has to an artist, and the greatest artists stretch the edges of their genre. Shivam Dube would never have been able to play an innings worth 43 off 25 at No. 4 without Samson having blazed his trail. Later Jacob Bethell produced an entirely different sort of T20 masterpiece, but had it not been for Samson sending the Wankhede's night into the stratosphere, and India to 253, Bethell would not have quite had such a broad canvas.
And in a flow state, there is no stage you feel you cannot conquer. On Sunday in Kolkata, Samson had brought a full stadium to raptures on the eastern corner of India's vast peninsula. On the western edge on Sunday, he had an entirely different audience in ecstasy. In the lush southern state of Kerala, from where he hails, social media has been going bonkers for most of the week, and will almost certainly come vociferously alive again now.
Let him live here for a bit, is all Samson asks. After the match, he was quizzed on the good luck he enjoyed because of Brook dropping him on 15. "I've had my share of bad luck as well. Today, I got one in my favour, and I took it quietly."
Quietly, meaning, he had no reason to care much for it. Or for the history against Archer. Or for the sense of occasion. He was in the midst of producing a second successive T20I spectacular. And when you're batting this well, the remainder of reality melts away.