The Indian man sitting across the shared table at a Goa restaurant on Sunday evening didn't know what to say. His spectacles twitched as he wiggled his nose in embarrassment. He stared at us through sad eyes, and left the air heavy with emptiness. He had been stunned into a frozen, frigid, flaccid silence.

That allowed the clamour of India's ongoing snotklap of New Zealand in the men's T20 World Cup final being beamed into the room from Ahmedabad to fill the void. After a few seconds of nothing but the crowd's surging expectation and Ravi Shastri's boom, Harsha Bogle's chat, Sunil Gavaskar's nous or Danny Morrison's twang - it's difficult to say which - the sad-eyed man managed: "Oh..."

Another few noisy seconds passed as he surveyed us with a mixture of pity for us and relief that he wasn't us.

"... I'm so sorry," he said finally in a chilled tone, and turned his attention back to the screen. Having been at ease talking to us moments earlier, he seemed suddenly wary. As if whatever it was that went so wrong at Eden Gardens on Wednesday might rub off on him and, by some kind of inexplicable osmosis, afflict India. He squirmed in his chair, apparently regretting having chosen a seat close to us.

It wasn't fair on him. He had, after all, asked a reasonable question: "Where are you from?"

By then we had chatted for a few minutes about this, that and the next thing concerning cricket. But the instant the dread words "South Africa" rent the muggy air like a black magic spell - a portent of an unsayable, unspeakable, unmentionable state of being - everything changed.

So, this is what the cricket world thinks of us now.

It's not that they lost their semifinal to New Zealand. That happens in various scenarios - when the opposition play better, when you end up on the sharp side of a knife edge, when someone makes an error in a key moment. No. It's that South Africa didn't turn up; abjectly so. Marco Jansen excepted, they were real nowhere men, sitting in their nowhere land, making all their nowhere plans for nobody.

And now, with a cruelty few avenues of life outside of sport can visit on the vanquished, three members of the World Cup squad have arrived in the land of the players against whom they suffered their long flat failure to launch.

Keshav Maharaj, George Linde and Jason Smith are in the squad that will start a T20I series against New Zealand in Mount Maunganui on Sunday. Why so soon? Why T20Is immediately after a World Cup in the format? Why as many as five of the wretched things?

In the wake of the Kiwis' monstering on Sunday, that goes for both teams. But at least the home side won't have to look their beaters and betters in the eye, like the South Africans will have to do.

Mercifully, Linde and Smith didn't play in the semifinal. But Maharaj did, and in the absence of Aiden Markram he has been loaded with the responsibility of captaining the team against New Zealand. Under more normal circumstances, that would be welcomed. Under these circumstances, not so much.

Maharaj is among the most mentally busy cricketers in the game, and is already influential in South Africa's decision-making on the field. Whether he has the skills and the emotional maturity to guide his team through what promises to be a tough time is a starkly different matter. That is no sleight on Maharaj - how many captains have what he will need in the coming days?

Doubtless he will talk in his press conferences about the importance of getting back onto the horse, of the fact that, despite everything, the sun came up the morning after the semi, of the show going on regardless of how anyone feels. But what will he tell his players? How will he react to those who weren't in India expressing what will amount to their condolences? How will he stop himself from showing the hurt?

Quinton de Kock, that most involuntarily honest of players, told the press during the World Cup that the South Africans hadn't dwelled on their loss to India in the breathlessly tight 2024 final in Barbados.

"We just forgot about it," De Kock said. "I don't think any of us wanted to speak about it. Everyone went home and went through their own process. We didn't need to talk about it as a team. That's pretty much it."

De Kock spoke the day before South Africa played India in Ahmedabad, where they confirmed their emergence from the 2024 disappointment by turning the tatters of an innings that teetered on 20/3 into a 76-run win. Who needs to talk about what happened two years ago when you can come back like that? Considering what has happened, maybe they should have talked.

"A lot of the time in a male environment, guys don't open up to each other," David Miller told Cricbuzz two days before the India game. He was talking about the value of the players having their partners with them on tour. They were here this time, just like they were in Barbados in 2024. There is plenty to talk about.

Any team can lose a tense game the way South Africa did in the final two years ago. But how a side who had been so dominant leading up to this year's semifinal, showing calm under pressure and beating the selfsame New Zealanders by seven wickets in the group stage, could perform so poorly when it mattered most will take hours of explaining.

The flight from India to New Zealand isn't as long as the journey from South Africa. Still, Maharaj, Linde and Smith would have had plenty of time to revisit what happened in Kolkata on Wednesday. That's if they wanted to. Or were able to. There is no better way to start that conversation than by looking each other in the eye and saying, "I'm so sorry."