Aadya Sharma was at Arun Jaitley Stadium when Rohit Sharma caressed his way to a brutally beautiful, record-breaking hundred against Afghanistan.

I am not going to tell you anything you don’t know about Rohit Sharma already.

There’s no point, really. We know the whole list: top tier white-ball batter, generational opener, World Cup superstar, six-hitting machine yada yada. The numbers fill in where the words fail.

For fifteen years, we’ve watched him ‘time’ the ball as well as anyone to exist in time. We all agree he is great.

But Rohit’s greatness can’t be measured in bullet points on his resumé. He is among the select few who has kept the sport watchable through its sickening journey of self-overdose. You might have seen him a gazillion times, but you’re still lulled by the familiarity of his style. It’s never monotonous.

The viewing comfort it lends has few parallels. Even a six – in its inherent sense the most brutal form of a hit – feels like a feather in a breeze off his bat. He has hit them more than anyone ever, but you are still not, simply put, bored.

Rohit’s batting has the magical charm to pull you towards the television: you’re scrambling through your toxically frenzied life, you spare a moment to glance at the stream, and there he is, floating about his crease, choosing deliveries with utmost elan and tossing them into the stands with a bat. It’s cricketing ASMR.

But television can never do justice to this art, as many inches as your screen might have. In live motion, Rohit’s batting assumes an added layer of ethereality.

The bowler errs, sends the new ball on his thigh pad. Shot. Deftly glided off his hips, the bat twisting the ball’s direction softly yet firmly. It’s like flapping a soft-bristled paintbrush on a new, smooth wall.

Flat surface. Short ball (don’t bowl that). Thwack. Half front foot, half back foot, rocking somewhere between the two worlds. Body pirouetting. Bat meets ball, shoots it away like a catapult.

Half-volley, just within reach. Ziiing. Arrow from a bow. The moment the ball hits the bat, carried to it by a half-stride but nothing more, it flits across the grass like a released bowstring.

Angled into the pads, clipped to long-on with a half-flick, half-drive. The ball hits the widest part of the bat and glides to the fence, smothered by the closing blade. The contact point is the equilibrium position of a bobbing pendulum.

To watch live, in Delhi, against Afghanistan, Rohit play all those shots, and more, was a supremely satisfying indulgence. He was fast, unsparing but still delicately beautiful. How he was all those things together can’t be defined really. There’s no single metric to explain Rohit in cricketing terms. His batting transcends those ordinary boundaries. And it feels so much more when it’s actually happening in front of you.

The sound off the bat is true and pure, the sixes hang in the air but still travel far, the extra ‘second’ that commentators rave about is evident in person. You feel you are there.

Suddenly, he’ll be adjusting the tee off his waist, gesturing animatedly at his partner, jog-trotting back and forth with princely unhurriedness, and doing all of those typical histrionics to break your trance. But he will also be timing the ball as good as the cricketing gods intended to, leaving you dazed.

For any of the 34,800 attendees in the stands, and a handful of others in the press box, Rohit’s live performance was a symphony they’d want to shout ‘encore’ for. It came in Kohli’s kingdom, his greatest contemporary, and flushed out years of one-day mediocrity at the venue, where he had averaged 22 before this one.

This wasn’t close to being Rohit’s finest century: the surface was dead, the bowling erratic, and the target hardly imposing. It was unlike most Rohit centuries too – usually, he likes to build into a slow start, get adjusted to the surface, and then breaks out. At Delhi, with the pitch placid, he had little trouble cracking open his shell early.

A couple of sweetly timed glances caught your attention. The pull got you hooked. By the time he was driving them with soothing laziness, both your palms were resting on your chin. Usually, a 63-ball ODI hundred would excite your blood into rushing quicker. When Rohit does it, it calms you. There’s no savagery, it’s all sweetness. He can cut fruits with a butter knife.

Wednesday under the Kotla lights was such a glorious evening, the cheat day to your strict dietary chart. The sport has raised your benchmark for excellence, and only the most extraordinary cricketing brilliance can have your time. In the assortment of quickly moving fine-dining on offer, Rohit’s batting is the comforting home food that you can gorge on to your heart’s content without the guilt of adding to your waist.

If you do ever get a chance, please do watch him bat in the flesh, purely for the aesthetics of it. Push back your seat a bit, hold onto any nibbly snack, and then immerse yourself in an imaginary bathtub. It will be worth all your time and money. And, unlike the game itself, it can never be overdone.

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