Do you like to be addressed as Your Excellency, Mr Pele? a reporter in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata (then Calcutta) asked the football legend during his three-day-trip to play an exhibition game with his star-studded team New York Cosmos 45 years ago.
The Brazilian star, then 37, gave a "disarming smile and burst into laughter," reported The Hindustan Standard newspaper, a day before the game on 24 September, 1977 against Mohun Bagan, a storied local team and one of the oldest football clubs in Asia.
India's football-crazy city was agog with excitement over Pele's first game in India at the iconic Eden Gardens stadium, which then accommodated more than 60,000 spectators. Mohun Bagan, the papers said, had spent nearly 1.7 million rupees to get Pele and the glamorous US club to play in the city. Around 35,000 policemen would be deployed to control rowdy fans. Tickets were priced between five and 60 rupees.
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The papers variously called him "King Pele" and "The Emperor". The Hindustan Standard rhapsodized: "Without appearing to be even immodest, let alone vain and arrogant, Pele can compare himself with the other all-time greats in history like Leonardo da Vinci and Beethoven. Maybe to connoisseurs of the game, Pele's football is as rapturously beautiful as the Mona Lisa or the Ninth Symphony".
The build up to the game was intense. Pele - and that too in Calcutta is unbelievable, said a tea shop billboard. A local paper ran a graphics-led series on its front page explaining how Pele played his game. The star's name featured in advertisements for health drinks. Long queues of fans to buy "lottery coupons" - tickets would be sold after a draw - snaked outside football grounds. An astrologer played spoilsport, predicting Pele would fall ill and would not be able to play the entire duration of the game.
When Pele arrived in an Air India plane from Tokyo - Cosmos Club was ending a two-week goodwill trip to Asia, with stops in Japan and China - around midnight on 22 September all hell broke loose. Mass hysteria had gripped the city.
Newspapers reported a sea of screaming fans inside and outside the airport. Cries of "Long live Pele!" rent the air. "I have never seen such a crowd at this time in the night outside the airport. Fans have come from all over the city and the suburbs," a reporter with the Ananda Bazar Patrika, the largest-selling Bengali newspaper, wrote.
On the tarmac a wave of fans brandishing garlands broke through the security cordon and surged towards the Boeing 707 plane. Pele stepped out of the plane, his fingers in his familiar V salute, and went back inside after seeing the scrum below, according to the papers. Only after the police dispersed the crowd, the footballer stepped out with wife, Rosemeri, followed by the rest of the team, that included stars like Brazil's World Cup-winning team member Carlos Alberto Torres and Italian player Giorgio Chinaglia. They went to the terminal building, where Pele told waiting reporters: "I am tired, will see you in the field."