Not even a taxi filled to the gunwales with the saccharine saxophone that Kenny G dares to label jazz can take the edge off Durban’s weather. It’s wild out there, and it’s less than three hours before the scheduled start of the first men’s T20I between South Africa and India at Kingsmead.

The clouds hang low, heavy and dirty with intent, waiting to exhale. The wind turns the fronds of tall palms into giant serrated blades that dip threateningly earthward. To the east, when the enveloping green relents and allows flashes of the wider reality, the Indian Ocean reveals itself as a grumpy, grey, mean marl. To the west, the sugarcane fields brood darkly over serpentine curves of land surely alive with pythons, cobras, and mambas, green and black. The air itself is like warm, wet felt; more chewable than breathable.

It’s like this all the way from King Shaka Airport, past Kingsmead and through Durban’s hardbitten city streets heaving with traffic to the more genteel hills and dales of the Berea. Once old money lived here. Now it is reinvented as a vast but quaint accommodation hive. Lockboxes litter lintels like leeches.

You want blue skies? Try somewhere else. But, importantly, it’s not raining. Because Durban and cricket know a few things about rain. Six men’s ODIs have been washed out at Kingsmead, more than at any other South African ground. That’s twice as many as at Centurion, and five more than at St. George’s Park and in Bloemfontein, Benoni and Potch. Unsurprisingly, Kingsmead is the only venue in South Africa where a men’s T20I has been abandoned to the elements. Surprisingly, none of the eight women’s white-ball internationals in Durban have suffered that fate.

Would something similar befall Friday’s game? It was the first time South Africans could see their team in the flesh since the Newlands Test in January, and the first time Durbanites could do so since December last year. At least, they should have been able to – that December match was the washed out T20I, which didn’t get as far as the toss, nevermind a ball being bowled. Curiously, the South Africans’ opponents in all three of those games were India.

And so from the Berea to Kingsmead with another taxi driver, who says, “You’re dressed like…” He pauses to fish the word from his mind, and reels it in with a pointed finger and a smile: “… like December!” It’s amazing what a porkpie hat and a floral shirt can do on a grim afternoon in a city longing for the downtime of the festive season at the end of the year.

Just as amazing is what a smile can do. Its friendly light bounces upwards and punches a hole of blue into all that glum grey. At least, that’s what seems to happen. By the time the floodlights loom, the clearing has broken its banks and spread. Kingsmead is tangled up in blue.

Just more than an hour before gametime, Heinrich Strydom, the chief executive of KwaZulu-Natal Cricket, stands on an outside landing at the northern end of the ground. He glances up and to the south-east. “It looks,” he says, searching the sky for evidence that might contradict what he is about to say, “that we might just get a window.”

Indeed, it does. Not least because the wind is coming from the north-east. Bothersome squalls are pumped in from the south. If the wind blows from over the Berea – to the north-west – and brings the clouds, it can rain for a hattrick of days. A north-easterly is a blessing to cricket, cricketers, and the crowds who come to watch.

Come they did on Friday. As many as 15,615 of them, or just short of a full house. Many of them would struggle to be identified as Indian. Most of them wore South Africa shirts. Durban is, after all, the most Asian city in the country. A group of them on the grass banks beyond the north-eastern boundary confused many: they wore shirts the same colour as South Africa’s players, and waved Indian flags.

The crowd saw Nonkululeko Mlaba, a bona fide KZN hero, carry the series trophy onto the ground. They heard the recorded audio of India’s national anthem cut in and out, and then restart to be sung in its dignified entirety. Then they saw the Indians try to puncture the sky repeatedly, using all the violence that wasn’t in the taxi driver’s smile to make the most of a pitch fairly bursting with runs.

Sanju Samson batted like his biblical surnamesake might have, hammering his first 50 off 27 balls and his second off seven fewer. He shared stands of 66 off 37 with Suryakumar Yadav and 77 off 34 with Tilak Varma. Shared is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in that sentence – Samson scored almost 60% of the runs in the two partnerships.

Samson matched timing with power to hit more than 80% percent of his 107 in fours and sixes, more than half in the latter alone. His innings was a seminar in suppleness and strength, a thing thought out and thwacked up and over in equal measure.

But when it was over, India’s innings faded like the clouds had done from the sky above. Unlike smiles, which are not subject to gravity, balls that are hit up must come down. And when they did on Friday, several from a stratospheric height, the South Africans held their nerve and their catches.

Indeed, India’s slide started before Samson’s hair was cut. They were 167/2 in the 15th, batting at 11.52 runs an over, when Varma heaved Keshav Maharaj into Marco Jansen’s hands at square leg. Samson went six balls later, caught by Tristan Stubbs on the midwicket fence off Nqabayomzi Peter.

From Varma’s dismissal, India lost six wickets for 35 runs in the last 33 balls of their innings. Gerald Coetzee, playing his first international since May because of injury and a conditioning break, bowled as if he was trying to spontaneously combust and took 3/37. Jansen, who has also been injured and reconditioned, got away with an economy rate of 6.00 – no mean feat under the circumstances.

India should have reached 250, but the 202/8 they made seemed challenging enough. Would it hold a South African line-up almost restored to its T20 World Cup potency by the return of Tristan Stubbs and Heinrich Klaasen?

Before the question could be answered, Mlaba and another KZN hero, Shaun Pollock, appeared on the outfield to accept their Kingsmead Celebration blazers – this previously dowdy, now dolled up ground has been hosting international cricket for a century this year. The SA20 has helped give Strydom more than a million dollars to use on sprucing up the place, and it shows. New restaurants and hospitality facilities have brightened and enlivened Kingsmead, and even though a water outage struck the ground on Friday, it didn’t look as if the spectators noticed.

Also between innings, two people inside transparent plastic spheres several metres in diameter contested a race towards a set of giant inflatable stumps, which were duly bowled over in satisfying fashion.

But not as satisfying as it would have been for India and their supporters to see the home side bowled over for 141 in 17.5 overs with Varun Chakaravarthy and Ravi Bishnoi taking three wickets each.

Ryan Rickelton, Miller, Klaasen and Jansen made starts they didn’t finish, and Coetzee hit 23 off 11 before being suffering a scrambling runout after Maharaj slapped a full toss from Arshdeep Singh to extra cover and set off to trigger Suryakumar’s direct hit.

Debutant Andile Simelane made his presence felt by hoisting his first ball as an international, bowled to him by Bishnoi, over long-on for six. His teammates might have been shocked into silence by that. At their meeting on Thursday night, Simelane told them he had hit his first delivery as a professional over the boundary.

There was an unusual amount of six-hitting or attempted six-hitting on the night. Twenty-two flew in all, amounting to nearly 40% of all the runs scored. Here’s why: a sponsor is putting up a travel voucher worth more than USD5,500 for the longest six hit in every match in the series. Rickelton claimed the prize on Friday.

That amount of money will take you a lot further than Durban. Maybe to somewhere you can be confident the skies are blue, and taxi drivers smile.