Pelé’s first World Cup in 1958 was the start of a new era of football and in many senses of a whole new world

The images are of two kinds: the posed ones and the action ones. In most of the action shots that ball is his constant accompaniment, as if it’s a personal pet he has brought to the party, a round creature belonging only to him which other half-pant wearing adult men are foolishly, sometimes with great violence, trying to take away from him.

Around 1970 the football itself is a shape-shifting object. In India, while the cricket ball seems to be eternally unchanged, the footballs are still from earlier times, formed of elongated leather chom-choms globed together.

In all the monochrome pictures of the stripling teenager at his first World Cup, the ball is a white blurry thing. In the first colour photos of a World Cup – Chile 1962 – it has changed to a light ochre, the chom-choms of yore now flattened into a stitch pattern to create a smoother orb.

It’s in the build-up to Mexico 1970 that we’re first introduced to the famous ‘Telstar’ with its tessellation of black pentagons and white hexagons. So this, then, becomes the familiar colour combination over decades: a canary yellow jersey with green detailing, blue shorts and a ball that stays black and white through all the colour footage and photographs. To which, if you add the most famous man to wear the Brazil kit, you get dark brown limbs frozen in graphic poetry.

The name itself seems almost designed to spread across the world, across different tongues. Two simple syllables, no consonant at the end to complicate things – Pele. Later, when you hear him on TV pronounce it himself or when other Brazilians refer to him you understand that the stress is on the second syllable, pe-ley, but for the longest time he is Pele, close to the Bangla variation for ‘get’, peley.

As that 1970 World Cup unfolds, the name gains prominence. Somewhere, kids like me become more and more aware that this is a black man, a non-gora, who is far better than anybody in the world.
Back in history there has been Jesse Owens upsetting Hitler’s racist apple-cart at the Berlin Olympics. More recently there is this phenomenon who rules boxing, a black American fellow called Cassius Clay who has then renamed himself Muhammad Ali.

In terms of team sports that desis commonly play, we have the legendary Dhyan Chand and our great hockey teams, in cricket you have a double assault on white supremacy, Indians and Pakistanis from one side and the unbelievable West Indians from the other, and within that West Indian team you have heroes like Garry Sobers.

I can’t remember if Films Division had some clip of Pele playing in Mexico; though the TV coverage was in colour, the FD clip would’ve been in governmental monochrome. It’s only many years later, when colour TV comes to India, when they start showing FIFA World Cup live with archival segments in the lead-ups to matches that I would’ve first properly seen Pele in action. In effect, many Indians would’ve been introduced to a dribbling, leaping, scoring Pele at the same time as they were to Diego Maradona at his peak.

Let’s leave the mobius strip of comparisons for later. Let us understand that the thin 17-year-old playing the match against France in 1958, was one of us, a kid from an obscure slum in a poor, tropical ‘third world’ country.

Let us watch as he inserts himself between two defenders to receive the lofted pass, as he turns away from one defender to face the other. Sandwiched between the two there seems nowhere for him to go, except if you’ve ever been in a crowd, say on the Calcutta Maidan or at Chowpatty in Bombay, you know there is always a way. So what happens next fills you with elation and laughter more than it surprises you – Pele does slip past but at the same time he yanks the leash on his trusty companion to make it leap over the second defender and return to his feet.

The two initial defenders are turned into Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, from aspiring princes into befuddled frogs, the other two running towards Pele are so late they’re going to have to take the next train. The goalie is still computing why his switchboard has suddenly gone to black. The shot into goal has a nonchalance, it is the act of a lazy man briefly acting quickly, a guy having a siesta brushing away a pesky fly. Let us watch this moment from 1958 and realise that this was the beginning, not just of a new era of football but in many senses of a whole new world.