Selection Day

  Javed nodded. He too had forgotten what it was called.

  In a state of wonder, the two boys watched the throwing and catching on the other side of the fence. How silken the movements of that oversized brown glove, how prehensile the catcher’s forearm, rotating to the left to intercept the hard white ball.

  Javed broke the spell.

  ‘Softball, this is?’ he shouted at the boys.

  ‘Base-o-ball, uncle! Base-o-ball!’

  The two cricketers put their hands on the fence and leaned forward.

  ‘Who teaches you this game?’

  ‘We have a coach, uncle. He’s from the YMCA, he’ll be here soon. Now watch me, uncle. Can you cricketers do this?’

  The boy now threw the white ball with a brute force they had never seen in cricket. The pitcher turned to the two boys in white and showed his teeth.

  ‘Better than cricket, no? Come over, uncle, we’ll convert both of you to base-o-ball.’

  Javed climbed over the fence. Manju placed a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Shouldn’t we go back?’

  ‘No.’ Javed called to him from the other side of the fence. He winked.

  ‘Come over this side, play baseball – since you’re so bad at cricket.’

  Manju climbed over too.

  The cricketers stepped through wild grass; dragonflies flew around them. Soon Manju and Javed were running circles around the baseball players, throwing gloves and stones and handfuls of grass at each other: ‘Kambli! You’re Kambliiiii!’ Behind them, as they chased each other, they heard the hard white baseball smacking into the glove.

  Laughing wildly, they fell down into the grass.

  ‘What is the story with your father, man? Does he . . . ?’ Javed pantomimed a man having a drink.

  ‘Shut up. What is the story with your father?’ Manju asked. ‘He wants you to leave cricket. In every interview he says this.’

  ‘He just wants to look good on TV. Don’t you know fathers by now?’

  Manju was still thinking this over when he felt someone take hold of him by the chin; trained by his father’s touch, Manju froze, and let the alien hand turn his face from side to side.

  ‘U-ha. Someone needs to shave. U-ha.’

  Still offering no resistance, Manju said: ‘My father won’t let us.’

  Javed let him go.

  ‘So? Do it anyway.’

  Manju shook his head.

  ‘Not brave enough?’ Hands rubbed through Manju’s spiky hair. ‘Not brave-rave-shave enough? See, I made another poem about you.’

  Waiting for Javed to remove his fingers from his hair, Manju – horrified beyond words, Manju – thrilled beyond words – demanded:

  ‘Yours never hit you? Never?’

  ‘No one hits their sons in the city, Captain. Only a chutney salesman from the village does that.’

  ‘Don’t talk about my father like that.’

  Javed shrugged.

  ‘What do you want to study in junior college?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Manju said, and added at once, ‘I want to do science.’

  ‘Too much work. Go for commerce.’

  ‘I want to be a forensic scientist.’

  Javed’s lips parted.

  ‘CSI?’

  Manju nodded.

  ‘You want to cut open dead bodies? I think you have a problem. Mental problem.’

  Happy for no good reason he could tell, Manju bent and drummed his hands on his knees. I have a Men-tal pro-blem, he thought, and, sucking in his lower lip, gave a final flourish to his drum roll.

  ‘Your mother’s what, divorced or dead?’

  Manju lay still and let Javed’s shadow cover a part of his face; he did nothing as Javed took his arm, and rolled up the short sleeve, exposing his arm all the way to the top of the bicep.

  ‘As I thought,’ Javed said. ‘You’re not really dark.’ Biting his lip, Javed forced the shirt all the way back to the top of Manju’s shoulder, where the skin had the pallor of something rarely exposed to the sun.

  ‘See?’

  Manju saw his naked arm, smiled, and said: ‘My brother is better than you at cricket.’

  It worked: Javed let his arm go. The shirt again covered the pale flesh.

  ‘Your brother won’t make the team, Manju. He’s got a weight-transfer problem.’

  Manju tried to pull his short sleeve further down his arm.

  ‘Fuck off. My brother has what?’

  ‘Sorry, Manju. Sorry.’ Javed shrugged. ‘Your brother is the best cricketer in the whole world, and he will make it onto the team. Happy? Which college will you go to?’

  Manju closed his eyes and frowned: he could still sense that Javed was watching him, watching the left-slanting, rather stylish, furrow in between his eyes. He smiled.

  ‘I’ll never get into Science.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ Javed sat down beside him. ‘Your father?’

  Manju swallowed. His heart beat hard against his ribs. ‘You need 80 per cent for science admissions.’

  ‘Wake up!’ Javed clapped right before his eyes. ‘Wake up! You never heard of the sports quota in admission?’ Javed was almost shouting now. ‘You don’t even need that. I see you answering all of Tommy Sir’s questions. What was Sobers’ batting average against left-arm orthodox spin, all that Wisden bumshit. You know what I read? Have you heard of George Orwell?’

  ‘Which college should I go for?’

  ‘Go to Ruia. Best for Science. Do you know of The Animal Farm? And by the way, what happened to your mother? I’m asking you a second time.’

  Manju took Javed’s palm in his hand and said, ‘Twilight is my mother’s favourite hour.’

  ‘What?’ Javed asked.

  So Manju kept talking.

  ‘She had this thing in her right hand’ – he traced his finger down the webbing on Javed’s palm, describing a groove. ‘Nitric acid fell on her hand at the goldsmith’s shop when they were working on the old jewellery. Where the acid went, it left a deep mark, and that mark was how I knew that it was my mother and not a fake when she came home after she’d been gone for a long time. Before I let her touch me I would say: “Show me your hand, woman,” and I would check for the nitric acid mark.’

  Looking at his hand, held tight in Manju’s, Javed asked: ‘Your mother disappeared and came back?’

  Manju dropped Javed’s hand and covered his mouth with his fingers. He was appalled by what he had just done. Even more scary was the thought that maybe he had babbled about the secret groove in her palm, something he had not told even Radha, only because Javed had asked twice about his mother. Manju had a horrible premonition about intimacy: it could be this simple, this could be how something starts – just because he asks you twice to tell him your story.

  ‘My brother can squeeze his cock into seven colours. He says he can do twenty-four but it’s really just seven,’ Manju said. He looked at Javed. Both laughed, and Manju, helpless to stop, continued:

  ‘Even if I get the marks, my father won’t let me go to junior college.’

  Javed, with a smile, placed a finger on his lips. They had been found.

  ‘You two!’ Coach Pramod Sawant stood with both his hands on the fence, panting. ‘You two!’

  ‘They were supposed to play base-o-ball with us, uncle,’ the boy with the big glove shouted. ‘But then they started to play with each other!’

  •

  The next morning, Mumbai’s interschool cricket schedule brought them together again, at the P. J. Hindu Gymkhana.

  Manju woke up that day and found that he could not get out of bed. He yawned; he stretched, he turned from side to side. Raising his head, he saw that his legs were trembling.

  At midday the tall boy wearing a blue cap with the initials ‘J. A.’ stood fielding at long leg. When the wind blew, the dust rose around him: and in that dust, Manju saw a boy sprint, attack, gather and throw the ball back without breaking stride. Manju searched Javed Ansari’s long body, half expect
ing to find an ‘H’ branded on his shirt or trousers.

  In the drinks break, Javed stood in the tent, near the twenty-litre bottle of mineral water; he was talking to someone on his red BlackBerry. Manju went up to the big bottle and poured himself a plastic cup.

  Javed put down his BlackBerry, turned to Manju and asked:

  ‘Do you actually like cricket?’

  Manju thought he had either heard the question wrong, or that he was being mocked, shamefully.

  ‘Wasn’t that baseball much better? I’ve been reading about baseball on the internet. Do you know of Baby Ruth? He’s like their Bradman: but better. Do you want to go back with me and play baseball with those slum boys one day?’

  Manju thought: Is that how he sees me, too? As a slum boy?

  ‘We live in Chembur,’ Manju said. ‘In a housing society. We have air-conditioning.’

  ‘Chembur?’ Javed looked at him sideways. ‘Chembur smells. Too many factories there.’

  Manju felt his ears turning hot.

  After that they did not talk again until Ali Weinberg played Fatima at the Oval. In the afternoon, watching his team bat from the dark players’ tent, Manju was conscious of a presence on a plastic chair next to him – someone who had just stripped off his white shirt, and was sucking a bottle of water. Manju got up from his chair, and was about to leave the tent, when a voice from behind him said, ‘I wrote a poem about you, Manju. Do you want to hear it?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘If you don’t to want to hear it, then see it. Turn round.’

  ‘No. I won’t,’ Manju said.

  ‘Turn round and see the poem I wrote for you,’ the voice said again. There was no one else in the tent. Manju could hear someone removing his clothes.

  When he finally turned around, Javed had stripped off his trousers, revealing his white underwear.

  And Manju watched a poem.

  Beyond the tent, sunlight and cricket continued, and the world kept turning; here, in the darkness, ‘J. A.’, stripped to his briefs, down on all fours, lifted himself up on his wrists and the tips of his toes. Slowly he turned his wrists around till they faced Manju. He grunted, awakening a giant vein on the side of his arm, and raised his toes off the earth. He was supported only by his wrists now. ‘Watch me,’ he said. Manju’s lips parted. ‘Watch me.’ Inside the dark tent, his near-naked adversary, cheeks puffed out and forehead swollen up, was parallel to the earth.

  Moving back, step by step, until his back was pressed against the taut fabric of the tent, Manju stood still, as if someone had held a knife to his throat.

  •

  That Saturday (Ali Weinberg v. Rizvi Springfield), as Javed batted in Shivaji Park, someone in the crowd – Mumbai’s most discerning cricketing audience – shouted: ‘Makad.’ Monkey. In the argot of Shivaji Park, ‘makad’ was a term of honour: it meant Javed could bat, bowl, field, run, he could do anything.

  The nickname brought a smile to Manju’s lips.

  The next day he went to a paan shop by Chembur station, gave an old man a rupee, wiped the receiver of the shop’s yellow pay-phone against his shirt, as his father had taught him to, and dialled a number.

  When the phone was answered, without introducing himself, Manju asked: ‘I don’t know what my father will do, and what your father will do if they find out, but do you want to practise together with me from now on?’

  There was a pause, and the voice of the Makad said, ‘Why not, man?’

  •

  Being both an atheist and a cricketer, Tommy Sir was twice as superstitious as other men, and when he felt something fall on his hair from a tree on the seaside promenade at Carter Road, and move down his forehead and nose like quicksilver, his immediate thought was that it was a sign from heaven.

  This was reconfirmed when Tommy Sir discovered that what had fallen on him was a caterpillar, a little green dynamo, by this time going down his chin towards his neck.

  The old scout had just come from a meeting where he had given Anand Mehta tremendous news: Radha Krishna Kumar was about to go to England for six weeks . . . ‘No, he is not!’ shouted the investor, who had not yet heard the key word.

  ‘On a scholarship?’ Tommy Sir finally got through.

  Someone else was paying? Delighted.

  ‘Founder Ali called me. He complimented me, as no one in the Mumbai Cricket Association has ever done, on my excellent work, and then he said he would personally come to the school today to give “My son, young Master Kumar” his scholarship and plane ticket to England. His own words. He called Radha his son.’

  Tommy Sir picked the caterpillar off his neck, and examined it. Look at its legs go, he thought; look at the brio in this fellow. Like a worm drawn by Van Gogh. He raised it up with care to observe it against the elemental backdrop of the Arabian Sea.

  His viewing pleasure was interrupted by the passing of a group of bearded young men in loose white cotton clothing. Forgetting about the caterpillar, he watched the men in white intently. Muslims, probably from Uttar Pradesh, the nation’s barely governable heartland. Behind them followed half a dozen women, dressed from head-to-toe in black burka. There was visual evidence of it every day: the biggest change in India, happening right in front of everyone’s eyes. The Muslim population was growing. In number and in religious fervour. Not that the increase in their number, due to an exponentially higher birth rate, was in itself a problem for Tommy Sir, who had no issues with either Christians or Muslims – point one, a universalized misanthropy protected him from such petty resentments (all men smell, after all), and point two, who are the most passionate cricketers in the whole wide world? Muslims! Yet Tommy Sir, watching the young women in all black follow the young men in all white, worried. He worried that the fecundity and the fundamentalism together were going to bake a nice big Christmas cake for India in about twenty years. Burka here, fatwa there. Sharia for all. Personally, of course, Tommy Sir didn’t approve of buggery – normal sex was filthy enough, and the thought of men doing that to each other was nearly enough to make him faint – but this is a free country, let the chaps do what they want in the shadows. The Taliban, however, used to bury men behind brick walls simply because they were gays. What will happen to fellows like Pramod Sawant if the Fundos take over here too? Lots of people worry, about this and other things, but no one dares say it out loud. Because they’ll surround you at once and call you a name: racist! In nothing can we Indians find the right balance, not even in tolerance.

  Suddenly remembering the caterpillar, Tommy Sir looked all around him.

  Didn’t matter that he couldn’t find it now: it had been a sign.

  See, right now, at the Kalanagar Signal, there was a big bank advertisement that said: ‘When Sachin Tendulkar dreamed of becoming the world’s greatest batsman, so did Ajit Tendulkar.’ But if Tommy Sir looked hard enough, it changed before his eyes and became: ‘When Radha (and/or Manju Kumar) dreamed of becoming the world’s greatest batsman (and/or batsmen), so did Narayanrao Sadashivaro Kulkarni, known to all as Tommy Sir.’

  Fear intruded on his fantasy. The U. P. Muslims, turning around, were heading back towards him. With his instinctive courtesy, he stepped aside to let them pass, then sat down on the wall of the promenade, and looked at the wilderness of rock, rubbish and dead trees that kept the ocean a few yards away from Carter Road.

  He laughed.

  Near the water’s edge, a pipe sputtered slow black water, and in the sewage that trickled to the ocean he spotted a crab hunting for its food – emerald-backed, slime-coated, iridescent, with many moving red arms, many moving plans. ‘Anand Mehta,’ said Tommy Sir, and looked around for someone to share the joke with, but saw only U. P. Muslims everywhere.

  •

  Manjunath Kumar was changing. The fat was leaving his face, but the pimples were larger. His eyes were more heavily lidded than they had been in childhood. His voice had not yet broken, but his gaze, like an adolescent’s, seemed always to be recoiling from something that h
ad just noticed it. He had developed a sly grin, and an annoying new way of chuckling. While he still spoke Kannada to his father and Hindi to his brother, now he uttered entire sentences in English. He wore a baseball cap all the time, possibly to make himself look taller than his five foot two inches. He was more brazen, and at the same time, more secretive. The moment he realized that he was being observed, by his father, by his brother, by the neighbour, Mrs Shastri, or sometimes, when no one else was around, even by ‘B.B. Balasubramaniam’, the landlord’s name-plate hammered into the door, he withdrew his new mannerisms and hid them behind a dark face and scowl: as if this thing, his new personality, were one of those secret science experiments of his boyhood.

  In the morning, standing half-naked before the mirror, he puffed out his cheeks, and flexed his arms, gritting his teeth. Nothing. Manju turned his head from left to right to check. Absolutely nothing. Though his forearms were thick, he had none of those sexy veins that should bulge from a man’s biceps when he made a muscle. He moved closer to the mirror, until his breath fogged it. His tongue extended and touched itself. This is what he had always assumed he tasted like: cold glass.

  Then his tongue disappeared.

  Scraping her way on her knees as she mopped the floor with a wet rag, the maidservant had entered the boys’ bedroom; in the mirror, her narrow eyes found his.

  Buttoning himself up, Manju went to the living room, where his father was talking to Mrs Shastri, the most starstruck of their neighbours, who was visiting, as usual, with her eight-year-old son Rahul, a prospective batsman.

  ‘No: it is not enough to start thinking when they are six or seven. You start before that. You start from the moment the sperm enters the egg, and creates the zygote.’

  Manju went to the window with a view of the brick-wall courtyard where they had once practised cricket, and which Radha had nowadays turned into a darbar-hall where he held court, bat in hand, to a gang of local admirers.

  ‘You know what I like best about being with a girl? When she’s just washed her hair, and you’re holding her, and the wind blows right over her head, bringing all the shampoo into your nose, and you go . . . Ummmm.’

  High above his brother, closing his eyes and inhaling deeply from a phantom head of shampooed hair, Manju whispered, ‘Ummmmmmm.’