Professor Ramesh Tendulkar, 66, the man who gave India the cricketing equivalent of a nuclear bomb, passed away in the early hours of Wednesday morning. He had been suffering from a heart ailment for the past several months and had undergone angioplasty a few months back.

As the news of his death spread around the city, there was instant sympathy for Sachin, ruminations about a Sachin-less team's fate at the World Cup, and endless debate each laced with authoritative, intimate knowledge about the superstar's options: should he return? If so, return and then go back to England, or the inconceivable not go back at all? There are no answers yet. Torn between shouldering a nation's cricketing hopes and carrying the cold body of his father on life's final journey, Sachin Tendulkar air-dashed home late on Wednesday night. The grey skies fromLeicestershire the temporary abode of the Indian cricket team in England to Mumbai offering symbolic sympathy from heavens above.

Only, in his hometown, the emotion for Tendulkar was more tangible. ``Perhaps all of us should take out advertisements in newspapers saying, `Sachin, we are with you.' It's the least we can do considering that he has given the country so much,'' said Dr LD Engineer, the executive administrator at Breach Candy Hospital where Sachin's daughter Sara was born and where Ramesh Tendulkar had been admitted a few months earlier.

Outside quiet, middle-class Sahitya Sahwas Colony at Bandra, where the Tendulkars reside, stray fans gathered quietly, curiously. But most respected the notice put outside by the fiercely-private family announcing Ramesh Tendulkar's demise and requesting people not to offer condolences.Ramesh Tendulkar was a gold medallist from the Bombay University in BA and MA. A well-known poet and critic, he was the head of the Marathi department in Kirti College, wherehe taught for three decades. None of his four children, three of them from his first wife who incidentally was the sister of Sachin's mother Rajni, were with him at the time of his death. The eldest son, Nitin, a flight purser with Air-India was on flying duty in Chicago, Ajit was in Paris and Sachin, of course, was in England while daughter Savita, with whom the professor spent 20 days recently in Pune, was with her in-laws.

``Dad never told me about his problems. He did not want to upset me,'' Sachin told a confidant who was one of the few, along with Vinod Kambli's family, to visit the Tendulkar household to pay their last respects. The mortal remains of Professor Tendulkar will be consigned to flames at the crematorium at Shivaji Park not very far from the hallowed precints where young Sachin honed his cricketing talents on Thursday morning. Only after this and most probably a family conclave will Sachin's plans be made known. For the Tendulkars, the loss of the patriarch is immeasurable. And if thispent-up pain gains expression in Sachin's batting, life may not be too happy for Sachin's opponents either.