On the sidelines of the Miracle at Eden book launch by former India captain and current president of the Cricket Association of Bengal, Sourav Ganguly, in Kolkata, the story feels less like history and more like something still in motion.
Some details refuse to fade. They sit in the mind like muscle memory, surfacing precise and intact.
“0448415319 -5322.”
Former TheHindu and Sportstar photographer V. V. Krishnan says it without pause. It is the receiver number of the old photo department. It comes out the way it must have—hundreds of times a day, in an era when images were transferred not by upload but by instinct, coordination, and routine.
“I had already gone through 30 rolls in Mumbai and still had another 30 in my bag, each with 36 exposures. Given how quickly that game ended, I assumed I wouldn’t need more.”
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That was the logic Krishnan arrived in Kolkata with. The first Test had wrapped up in three days. Film, in those days, was currency. You didn’t waste it on possibilities.
“What I didn’t anticipate was just how extraordinary the Eden Gardens Test would turn out to be.”
Over five days, as a follow-on turned into folklore, restraint gave way to instinct.
“Over the course of that match, I ended up shooting 60 rolls.”
It is a staggering number when you pause to consider it. Not indulgence, but compulsion. Because something about that Test demanded to be documented in excess, as if even the photographer sensed this was slipping beyond the ordinary.
And yet, for all the frames, one image stayed.
“VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid were walking back to the dressing room at stumps on Day 4. Sensing the enormity of what they had just achieved, I stopped them and asked if they would sit outside the dressing room, still in their batting gear, soaked in sweat.”
| Photo Credit:
V. V. KRISHNAN
The photo in question.
| Photo Credit:
V. V. KRISHNAN
We often romanticise candidness, as if the best moments are the ones caught unaware. This wasn’t one of them.
“It wasn’t a candid frame. I asked them to hold that moment for me.”
There is something revealing in that admission. That even in the middle of one of the greatest rearguards the game has seen, there was room for pause. For awareness. For collaboration between subject and storyteller.
“Despite their exhaustion, they agreed without hesitation.”
Why? That is where the story shifts from event to relationship.
“That photograph exists because of the trust they placed in me and in the publication I represented.”
It is easy, 25 years on, to compress Eden 2001 into a sequence of numbers. Follow-on. 281. A target turned improbable, then inevitable. But that risks missing the quieter architecture of the moment. The decisions made off the scoreboard. A photographer choosing not to ration film. Two batters choosing to sit when every instinct should have told them to walk on.
As Laxman and Dravid walked back that evening, they had already altered the course of the match. What Krishnan did was ensure they altered memory too.
Miracle at Eden will revisit the innings, the spells, and the result. But perhaps its truest companion lies in that single, deliberate frame. Not a miracle captured by chance, but one held in place, just long enough to endure.
Published on Mar 30, 2026
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