Reverting to a 36-year-old seamer, who would turn 38 when India defend their crown in 2028, is not so much a panic choice as it is a reward for his exemplary consistency in IPL. He will, hypothetically, offer instant solutions to the puzzles that had confounded India’s bowling firm in Jasprit Bumrah’s absence. An immense repertoire of skills and control, variations matched by few bowlers in the squad, if not the world; a wealth of experience amid a pool of callow bowlers acquainting with the international rigours; a quiet guiding force that could shepherd the young pack to harness their untapped gifts; a knack of wearing different roles, and for the sake of immediacy, a familiarity with the caprices of Chinnaswamy.

In 18 games in the paradise of sixes, he has snaffled 26 wickets and bled 8.45 runs, commendable numbers when you consider the demons piquing the bowlers. Short boundaries, early onset of dew and pan-cake surfaces. Last IPL season, six of the 10 totals were in excess of 200. Twice were 200 totals overhauled. RCB lost only one of the five games, and Bhuvneshwar gobbled up 11 wickets and maintained an economy rate of 7.8 runs an over. The wicket-spreadsheet shows that he ejected batsmen in every phase of the game, with the new-ball in the power-play, as an enforcer in his rare middle-over cameos, and a devil at the death. He was one of the pillars behind RCB’s maiden title run (28 wickets at 17).

He produced a season the selectors could no longer ignore. It’s hard to cast a blind eye to his craft, in perpetual evolution, in search of bowling zen. It’s a familiar and fascinating story of upward trajectory, like a bird collecting all the colourful feathers it could and dancing with the hues. The boy born with durable fingers and a wrist that could make a piece of dead leather recite doomed verses for batsmen. Who consigned the great Sachin Tendulkar to his first first-ball zilch in domestic cricket and learned to swing the ball away from the right hander. Who added pace and skid, gulped up the cutter menu, devoured the slower-ball variations, and mastered deception with different lengths, and the wobble seam. Who suffered the sort of injuries that would have ended careers, but is still in search of perfection. “Never seen a better student of the game,” his mentor and friend Praveen Kumar once told this daily.

Whether he is a short-term fix with a side experimenting to find the perfect fast-bowling permutation is unsure, but he offers dimensions incredibly rare in the format. A bowler who could seamlessly switch his lengths, with little discernible change in his action; who reads the batsman’s mind like a clairvoyant, who has the cricketing intuition to understand which ball to bowl at which batsman at which time with an unhurried awareness.

He would be unlike any other seamer the West Indies batsmen had faced in this series. He swings and seams the ball. So did Arshdeep, but Bhuvi does with better control. He doesn’t hurry batsmen with pace like the Yadavs, Mayank and Prince, but disorients their reflexes with slower balls. He creates that illusion in batsmen—he is fast when batsmen think he is slow; he is slow when batsmen assume he is skiddy. He is a one-man encyclopaedia for all the tricks and guiles the format has seen—paradoxically for a bowler once misconstrued as a mismatch in this format.

He embodies everything Morkel wants from his seamers, as he detailed in the press conference. “It’s about the bowler on the night there assessing the conditions,” he began his verbal treatise. “Is the ball swinging? Is the ball seeming? If it’s not swinging, how can we create angles on the crease? Can we be smarter in terms of if the batsman hits us off our lengths? Or are we going to go to plan B quickly?”

An admission came next: “At the moment that is something that we’ve not been good at.” And something Bhuvneshwar often is extremely good at.

Yet, given the format’s fickleness, it could be that Bhuvneshwar could endure a horrible night back into international cricket if he indeed returns. No bowler, not even Bumrah, is weather-proof in this format. But a fervent hope that he could make the difference lurks. To believe that a bowler could be the antidote in a batsmen-smitten world itself is a nod to the masterful, yet metamorphosing art of Bhuvneshwar.