‘Don’t call him a loser,’ Javed said.
‘Why not?’
‘His father died the other day. His name is Jamshed. I heard the boys talking.’
‘So what if his father died?’ Manju asked. ‘I’ll call him what I want.’
Pudgy little ‘Loser’ – Jamshed Cutleriwala, the world’s worst offspinner – took five fat steps to his bowling mark; he wiped his forehead and got ready to bowl.
Manju examined the spinner’s body. All that jiggling fat.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Everyone wait.’
Manju walked to square leg, removed his chest-guard, and threw it at his feet; then threw his helmet at his chest-guard, and then, reaching into his trousers, pulled out the triangular box from around his underwear and threw it at his helmet.
Before he could get back to the crease, he heard a voice: ‘Put your helmet back on. Then put your centre pad back on.’
He turned around to see Javed right behind him.
‘Why?’ Manju asked. ‘When a real bowler comes to bowl, then I’ll wear a helmet and centre pad. Not till then.’
‘Put the helmet back on. I told you his father died. Don’t insult him.’
‘I told you, I don’t care.’
Javed’s forehead expanded: a large vein stood out.
‘You and your brother still didn’t say sorry for what you wrote on my chest-guard,’ he whispered, gritting his teeth.
‘And we won’t ever say sorry for that,’ Manju replied. ‘And we’ll do it again after this match.’
He drove ‘Loser’s’ next ball to the extra-cover boundary, hitting it so hard it reached the adjacent field where another match was being played, and scored a four there too.
When it was ‘Loser’s’ turn to bowl again, Javed was on strike.
The first delivery was a full toss – but Javed did something strange with his bat that puzzled everyone – and the ball dropped dead. Even the umpire whistled. Manju licked his upper lip from this side to that, and from that side to this. Javed Ansari, nephew of a Ranji Trophy player, sophisticated newspaper interviewee, suddenly can’t hit a full toss.
Fat ‘Loser’ was walking to the top of his run-up; and though no one spoke, Manju thought he could hear a voice inside his head say, quite distinctly, ‘I’m going to get out now. Watch me, Manju.’
The next ball was a long hop.
Javed Ansari took a step back, his long white sleeves rippling as the bat’s edge struck the ball. Jamshed ‘Loser’ Cutleriwala stared at the ball’s arc, open-mouthed, before screaming:
‘Catch it!’
The fielder at mid-wicket, who for two days had been watching so many balls fly over his head, realized that this one was coming straight to him; he raised a pair of trembling hands. And then everyone was running up to him, except for ‘Loser’ Cutleriwala, who turned to the Ali Weinberg tent and made an obscene gesture.
Under the bougainvilleas, a voice grew ecstatic – I told you boys Jamshed could do it! Chauhan, hug the bowler for me! – Hug hug hug. Let’s get them all out in the next twenty minutes – Do it for your Coach, boys. I’ve been sitting in the sun for two days.
THIRD DAY: MORNING
257–350 RUNS
A half-naked man, swinging a mallet, pounds a wooden cot to pieces near the Cross Maidan. Up goes the hammer: there it stops. He has heard a louder noise than the one he is making: it is coming from inside the maidan.
Setting down the mallet, he joins the spectators.
‘What’s going on?’
‘That little fellow has batted for two full days. This is the third morning. Still batting. He had a partner but that boy got out. This one goes on.’
‘What stamina. Imagine when he grows up.’
‘He already has a double century. He’s going to make 300.’
‘300? No, he’s already made 300.’
‘The short ones are always better. “Small frame, big fame.” It’s an ancient saying in our language.’
‘Which language is that?’
‘I’m from here, boss. Born and brought up in Mumbai like you. Or were you?’
‘Can we just watch the cricket, please? Can we just watch the cricket for once?’
More spectators gather. Contracting his sweat-oiled muscles, the labourer continues smashing the wooden frame; pausing only when his blows are again drowned out by those produced by the little man with the cricket bat.
THIRD DAY: TEATIME
351– 450 RUNS
Tommy Sir was trembling. Not because of anything so crude as the fact that Manju, having broken his brother’s record for the highest score in Mumbai school cricket, was now all but certain to become the first under-18 in the city’s history to go past 500 runs in a single innings. No. He was trembling because to watch young Manjunath was to observe a remarkable fusion. See: in the old days of cricket there used to be good technique and bad technique. There was such a thing as proper footwork, playing within the ‘V’. But then the new cricket, twenty-twenty, American-style, came along. Bad technique became good. Batsmen withdrew their front foot. They lofted the ball in the air. They reverse-swept; they switch-hit. Now a batsman had to have two techniques, good and bad, and two cricketing personalities, traditional and maverick, and produce the right one on the right occasion: and this confusion undoes even the best batsmen – who loft when they should block and block when they should loft. But as Tommy Sir observed the continuing evolution of Manju’s batting it occurred to him that this boy, who was switching at will between classical and contemporary footwork, between ‘good’ technique and ‘bad’, was fusing his two cricketing personalities into something new and flawless – and unprecedented in the history of Bombay cricket.
CLOSE OF THIRD DAY
FINAL SCORE: 497
At the close of the third day’s play, the Mumbai Sun had sent a reporter over to the Cross Maidan with a camera crew. Holding a mike to Manju’s face she asked:
‘What happened when you reached the 497-run mark, Manju? Why didn’t you go on?’
The boy’s gear was off him. His shirt was soiled; his hair was wet; but his body was dark and radiant with victory. Behind him his father stood with folded arms; and his lips were puckered as he listened to his son say, ‘I made 300, and then 400, and then 450. But I don’t know why I got out at 497.’
The reporter turned to the camera:
‘Manjunath Kumar just missed becoming the first school batsman in a hundred and fifty years of Mumbai school cricket to score 500.’
She turned back to the champion:
‘Manju, how do you feel?’
‘Satisfied. Happy.’
‘Happy that you missed the global record of 500 by just three runs?’
‘Unhappy about that.’
‘Do you want to play for Mumbai?’
‘I dream of that every day.’
‘Do you also dream about playing in the World Cup?’
‘Yes I dream about that every day too.’
‘Your brother is also a record-breaking batsman. Which of you is better?’
‘He has a secret contract with God, and I do not.’
•
Now she interviewed the father, on crutches (the victim of a tumble down stairs), who gazed into the camera, and said:
‘Manjunath, my second child, is more complex. As a boy he used to eat stones and glass and other strange things. Chappals too. I had to work hard to make him a normal person. Shall I explain with examples?’
As Mohan Kumar informed the world about his methods in nutrition and pharmacology, Tommy Sir came and sat down by Manju, who was looking at the sky. Tommy Sir scraped the side of the boy’s face with his fingernail:
‘Shave.’
It had happened to Tommy Sir before: the boys he was mentoring became men on his watch.
‘Looks bad on television, otherwise.’
Manju scratched the back of his neck and asked: ‘Where is Javed?’
‘Forget him. Everyone knows you?
??re better than Javed. The way he got out, it was ridiculous.’
‘Javed got out on purpose. The way he was batting, he would have made 500 first.’
‘Forget that Javed. Posh creature like him will never make the team, too delicate. You know he writes poems and gives them to the other boys, and they all laugh. But you. You are almost as good as Radha now. Manju: listen. Do you know how much you improve every single time I see you bat? Now listen: you are going to play for Mumbai, I know it. Marathi kathin nahin. Tu lavkar shikshi. You must learn Marathi. Good for the back foot. Manju, are you listening?’
This was not all Narayanrao Sadashivrao Kulkarni wanted to tell the boy, but it was time for a photo shoot with the Mumbai Sun.
‘I don’t want to do it,’ the boy said.
Tommy Sir stared.
Manju stared back. The dark groove in his forehead, the one that tilted left, flickered to life.
‘It’s twilight,’ he said, looking up at the sky. ‘It was my mother’s . . .’
‘Go, you duffer: go.’ Tommy Sir slapped the tired boy on the back, harder than he meant to.
Then he watched, his arms folded, as the photographer for the Mumbai Sun made the virtually quintuple-centurion sit on a stone-roller, the victorious bat over his shoulder like Hercules’ club, and asked him for a Young Sachin smile.
After complying with a series of big smiles, and after the cameras were done with him, Manjunath Kumar, everyone’s darling, no doubt overcome by fatigue and attention, raised the bat which had made 497 runs and swung it down on the stone-roller. As all of them watched, he raised and swung it four more times until it broke down the middle.
•
On Sunday – three days after Manju’s 497 – visitors were still arriving at the Tattvamasi Building. The latest were two strangers, husband and wife, who had come by taxi (taxi!) all the way from Colaba. They had a son of their own, a cricketer, naturally – would the father of Manjunath Kumar kindly offer a few tips? No, Mohan Kumar wagged a finger at them, no, he won’t, he will not. Because are you, as parents, prepared to earn the lifelong hatred of your children while doing what is, scientifically speaking, necessary for greatness? Just this morning, for instance, Radha, his own eldest son, had accused him of needlessly extracting his tonsils through minor surgery at JJ Hospital – when everyone knows that tonsils attract infections which have to be treated by expensive Azithromycin, once a day, or even more expensive Amoxycillin plus Potassium Clavulanate, three times a day. Dangers of all kinds lie in the paths of young men today: do you know how many new cases of male VDs are reported daily from JJ Hospital? Devilish thing, the male urinary system, the father of two boys said (demonstrating with his fingers) – excellent internal flushing, tough for bacteria to get into, but if they do sneak in, with all that tubing and piping around the bladder . . . Finished! Maybe Cipromycin can clean it up, maybe not. Remember my words: a young man, a healthy young man, is always being stalked by parasites with big hungry eyes. You haven’t come to see Radha? Oh, the young one. Manjooooooo! Mohan Kumar, followed by the Colaba couple who were eager to pose for a ‘selfie’ with the cricketing super-star, strode into the boys’ room shouting: Manjoooooo! Stop being shy like a girl! Come out and meet new people!
•
With a copy of the Mumbai Sun that showed him sitting victorious on the stone-roller, the boy had walked all the way from Pedder Road to Kemps Corner and then up Nepeansea Road into Priyadarshini Park.
In one corner of the park, under the trees, a group of old men and women were inhaling and exhaling together – Hu! Ha! Hu! Hiding behind a tree, Manju spied on the other corner of the park, where, inside the oval loop of a jogging track, a dark beak-nosed boy, wearing knee-high orange socks trimmed with red, was playing football by himself.
Behind him, an ocean smashed into the park’s edge.
It was Sunday. Javed Ansari, exactly as he had described in his newspaper interview, was practising football in Priyadarshini Park.
Hu! Ha! Hu! Though he was hidden, something told Manju that Javed, out there on the football field, knew he was being watched, and that he also knew by whom he was being watched. Hu! – Manju’s body trembled: as they raised and lowered their arms, the senior citizens directed wicked grins at him.
Manju’s intuition proved right, because Javed suddenly stopped playing. Abandoning the football, he came running over to the trees to investigate. Hitching his orange socks up with his free hand, he looked this way, and that way, but – Hu! Ha! Hu! – found nothing hidden behind the trees but vigorous retirees.
•
On Tuesday, at last, the two boys met.
After passing so many black sewers, so many concrete towers, so many patches of grassy wasteland onto which slums encroach, you finally reach, somewhere within Kandivali West, a little Eden: a green field where boys practise cricket inside blue nets propped up on bamboo canes. Beside the green field is an old shed with a metal staircase leading up to its terrace; an awning supported by wooden poles is covered by blue tarpaulin in the manner of slum huts. This shed, legendary in Bombay cricket, birth-place of many a Ranji Trophy batsmen, bears the sign Payyade Sports Club.
As Manju approached the club grounds, a black Honda City stopped behind him. A door opened and ‘J. A.’ stepped out.
One look at him and Manju knew that they had both arrived at the club early for the exact same reason: to see if the other would also be there.
It was the day after Lakshmi Puja. A mess of firecracker wrappers, extinguished sparklers, charred rockets and mounds of ash covered the cricket ground. A bonfire burnt outside the compound wall.
Maintaining a good distance between them, the boys unpacked their gear. Javed began stretching, alternately touching his toes.
As he had rehearsed all morning, Manju put his hands on his hips, and expressed himself in English:
‘Are you Mahatma Gandhi?’
Javed, still touching his toes, regarded Manju curiously.
Who continued: ‘You didn’t hear me just now? Why did you get out to the fat boy? To make me look bad, no?’
‘I heard, Captain, I heard you.’
Straightening himself, Javed shook his body loose, and asked:
‘What is it you want? Why are you here, little Manju?’
His temples flexed and moved back; his eyes, unlike Manju’s, became narrower when he was angry.
Manju responded by looking Mr ‘J. A.’s’ body up and down, with his tongue sticking out, the way the boys did when starting a fight in the slum.
‘Just say you think you are as great as Mahatma Gandhi, then I’ll go. That’s all I want.’
U-ha, U-ha, U-ha. Javed chuckled. Passing his cricket bat from hand to hand, he chopped the air and drove it towards Manju’s face.
Manju felt the skin tighten over his forehead, while the base of his neck turned warm. He left Javed and walked to where the other boys had gathered: You were born in 94, idiot. You’re not going to make the under-17. Shut up, you homo. My birthday is July 3, so do I make the cut for this year’s Selection Day or next year’s?
In the pavilion, the coach of the Payyade Sports Club was on the phone: Ten thousand rupees. It’s for your own son, after all. He’ll learn from retired Ranji players. And we’ll put in a word on Selection Day, we’ll godfather him, don’t worry about that . . .
Manju walked around the pavilion, turned, came back, and stood in front of Javed, who, done with his stretches, was changing for the game.
‘Why did you get out on purpose?’
‘Don’t be such a slave.’ Javed grinned, exposing his sickle-shaped dimples, and making Manju’s ears expand with shame. ‘I heard you smashed your bat after the interview. Is that true?’
‘Yes.’
Javed grinned again. ‘You’re a cricket terrorist, boy. I like it.’
‘No,’ Manju said.
‘What does your father do?’ Javed asked, as he strapped on his pads.
Manju, apparently doing a bit of
pre-game stretching himself, turned his neck to one side.
‘Business,’ he said, as he turned his neck to the other side. ‘What does your father do?’
‘Textbooks, scientific textbooks. He imports them from Canada and sells them here. But the truth is,’ Javed said, ‘I’m his business. He wants to make me captain of India. Another question for you. Can you swim?’
Manju looked at Javed.
‘No.’
‘Drive?’
‘No.’
‘Hm.’
Javed smiled. He turned the rubber handle of his bat round and round to tighten it.
Manju looked down at Javed’s huge white shoes; in his mind they disappeared, revealing a giant’s pair of naked feet.
‘Stop looking at my shoes. Stop looking at me. Go away. You want to know why Javed Ansari got out on purpose to that boy you called “Loser”? You won’t. Because I don’t like you. I never liked you. You stare at me too much.’
Manju stared. Javed resumed his warm-up exercises with his bat.
‘Where is your mother?’ Javed asked, freezing his bat in mid-air. ‘I see only your father. Mine’s living in Bangalore. She gave my father divorce. Same story with yours?’
Slap! Slap! Javed struck the bat against the sides of his shoes.
‘You know you have the world’s biggest eyes? Seriously.’ Manju moved his head. Javed continued, ‘Do you drive? I’ve got my car here. I can teach you to drive. Right now if you want.’
‘My father will teach me.’
U-ha, U-ha, U-ha. Again. Manju begged his shoes to take him away.
A small man in a startlingly white uniform approached them, holding up a red BlackBerry for his master. Javed looked at it, frowned, and gave it back to the man in uniform, who wiped it clean with a corner of his shirt, and said something in a low voice.
‘My driver says something funny is going on over there.’
Manju followed Javed to the barbed-wire fence that separated them from the next compound. A gang of street boys were playing something. One of them wore a very large and strange brown glove; another was throwing a white ball at the glove.
‘This is what they play in America?’ Manju asked.