If you love cricket but live in Bangkok, where the city’s sports bars focus mainly on football, it’s easy to feel like a member of an obscure subculture. That was how I felt in early November as I resumed a familiar search: checking for sports bars that planned to screen a match in India that I was eager to watch on a big screen.

That game in Mumbai was the last in a three-match series of tests — a form of cricket that takes up to five days to play and is regarded as the most outstanding form of the sport — between India and New Zealand. In a momentous reversal of form, unfancied New Zealand had already beaten the top-ranked Indians twice, winning the series. Now they were on the verge of a historic 3-0 series victory.

With a sense of momentous competition, I wanted to join other South Asian cricket fans in witnessing the drama about to unfold at the Wankhede Stadium, a storied landmark in the sprawling coastal Indian metropolis. Few expected a third successive Indian defeat, but that is how the match turned out, exemplifying the glorious uncertainties of the sport introduced by Britain to the countries it colonized in South Asia and elsewhere.

Like the game itself, the concept of cricketing uncertainty is embedded in South Asia’s sporting soul. And recent matches involving the region’s teams show why its appeal endures and grows. The year’s first demonstration of cricket’s ability to act as a leveler occurred in June in the U.S. and the West Indies, when cricketers from war-torn Afghanistan made the semifinals of the T20 World Cup (a shortened form of the game that takes only about three hours to play).

Although newcomers to the game, Afghanistan boasted a number of talented players who got their first taste of cricket as refugees in Pakistan. The Afghans scaled unprecedented heights, progressing further than top teams such as Pakistan and Australia. Their success even prompted the Taliban regime’s dour Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi to make a public video call congratulating team captain Rashid Khan.

In August, low-ranked Bangladesh featured in another on-field leveling moment with victory in both games in a two-match test series in Pakistan, a longtime cricketing power. The home side’s fall from grace prompted Wasim Akram, a Pakistani cricket legend, to sum up the defeat in one word: “Embarrassed!”

And then in September, Sri Lanka, where I played the game in childhood, brought glorious uncertainty to life with a sweeping victory in a two-match series in Galle against the higher-ranked New Zealanders. That success was accompanied by the blaring trumpets, beating drums and dancing spectators that have become traditional in the southern coastal town.

Not surprisingly, this sequence of triumphs (or in India’s case, dramatic defeats) has lit up social media, feeding the growing appetite among South Asians for coverage of games across the region. But it has also fostered a deepening of transnational bonds forged by cricket, creating common ground among people from different countries in the region in the face of gaping political, economic and cultural inequalities.

Increasingly, South Asians are reaching across national boundaries to chat about cricket in a way that reinforces a common sporting identity that marks them out from other subregions across Asia. In a way, this development is in line with the shifting tides of the game, since the subcontinent is now the center of gravity for international cricket.

Currently, five of its countries are among the 12 teams in the world that compete at test level — an elite grade reserved for full members of the International Cricket Council, the sport’s governing body.

For me, Bangkok’s sports bars — or at least the ones that show cricket matches — have become public examples of this sporting collective. In their raucous but friendly surroundings it has been easy to strike up conversations with strangers from countries such as India and Pakistan who are taking in the same game that has attracted me.

Cricket is what we chew on while sipping our drinks. And that is bringing us together, across national boundaries, even when, like India, our own teams are receiving a thumping.

Fairness compels me to mention that India is currently ranked top in T20 and one-day cricket — a form of the game that takes up to seven hours — and second in test cricket, behind only Australia, which is hosting the Indians for a five-match test series that began on Nov. 24 and will end in the first week of January.

The first match in that series, played in Perth, enabled the Indian team to bask in its own take on cricket as a leveler. The Indians crushed the Australians with a brilliant combination of bat and ball prowess, in conditions tailor-made for the hosts with a full day to spare. Now that’s something to discuss over a beer.