‘What is this thing you did to your eyes, Aryan?’
He opened his eyes to see Radha now touching one of his friend’s eyebrows.
The boy, Aryan, explained he had gone to a barber to ‘weave’ his eyebrows: sleeking them into a stylish line arching over his eyes. ‘My father would kill me,’ Radha said, as he traced a finger over the arch. ‘Once I go to England, then.’
Glancing up, Radha saw Manju, but pretended not to.
People had begun to say that Radha Kumar had his father’s face, but that inverted triangle formed by his grey eyes and his strong nose belonged entirely to their mother.
Watching his brother show off, Manju picked up the tennis ball they used for practice, and squeezed it in his right hand until it was warm and angry:
‘Behenchod! It’s late!’
Throwing the hot ball down at Radha, he made his admirers scatter.
Dressed, and with their cricket bags slung over their shoulders, the boys came to the living room to see Mrs Shastri, her hands folded on her son’s head, staring at their father.
On the sofa, Mohan Kumar sat without a word, looking at the blue wall above the television set.
‘He was telling me how I should give the boy regular check-ups and then he just –’ Mrs Shastri said. ‘He just . . .’
Mohan Kumar had let thick grey stubble overrun his face: but it was not a beard, it was a ‘statement’ – it was a ‘protest’, he said, against Tommy Sir’s step-by-step encroachment upon his paternal rights. He couldn’t even speak his mind these days; but when he stroked his beard, when he bit his lip, the boys knew what he wanted to say.
Manju had noticed that his father would sometimes stop speaking in mid-sentence, apparently to scratch his beard, and then he would look at the clock; sometimes he might even forget an ancient proverb. For two or three hours at a stretch they found him slumped on the sofa, or with his pen in his hand, alternately looking at the clock and attempting to make a mark on a blank sheet of paper.
Manju seized his inert father by the shoulder, and shook. ‘Appa. You’re doing it again. Doing it again. Stop.’
Emerging from his daydream, Mohan Kumar smiled at his son as one might at a headmaster, then looked at Mrs Shastri and her eight-year-old Rahul, and resumed his lecture on why only Cipromycin, bloodhound among antibiotics, can be trusted to sniff out, locate and exterminate even the most cunning of bacteria hiding inside an infected prostate gland.
•
On their way to class, students of the Ali Weinberg International School would occasionally hear residents of nearby buildings shout that their founder was a ‘thug’ before slamming down their windows. Depending on whom you spoke to, Karim Ali had either created this corner of Bandra or destroyed it, or done that peculiar thing to it, involving in equal parts creation and destruction, that happens sooner or later to every suburb in Mumbai. They said there was no room in this end of Bandra to build skyscrapers: Karim Ali found room. Had he threatened Catholic widowers to do so? Had he violated city zoning laws? Catholics are rich, they will survive, and this city’s laws were written to be broken. Karim Ali was now Founder Ali, patron of the new enlightenment, proprietor of Ali’s Educational Empire, comprising medical, dental, journalism, and many other colleges, to whose number more were being added year by year, but the Jewel in whose Crown would always be the Ali Weinberg International School (run in partnership with the Joseph P. Weinberg Memorial Institute of Lafayette, Mississippi), known for its headline-capturing cricket team, into which boys were recruited, with financial aid, if necessary, and from deep within the slums, if necessary.
Today, the Unseen Power and Guiding Genius of the Ali Weinberg School was paying his cricketers an extraordinary visit.
All sixty-five members of the junior, senior and standby teams, along with Coach Sawant, marched into the auditorium to find a bald, bantamweight man waiting for them on the stage. The ceiling lights shone off his smooth skull.
‘Remember what you promised me?’ Manju whispered. Radha, his features taut and expectant, smiled sardonically. Oh, he remembered. For Radha to visit a real morgue in England and take photos of the bodies under dissection: that was the only gift Manju wanted.
‘My dear batters and bowlers,’ declaimed the Founder’s ringing voice. ‘Your attention.’
His eyebrows, thick, salt-and-pepper, rose defiantly, and though his voice was calm, he examined the boys with a hint of anger in his set jaw.
‘My dear batters and bowlers. Only two problems exist in this country.’
He made a ‘V’ with his fingers.
‘Fundamentalism, terrorism, nutritional poverty, so on and so forth are not really problems, or more precisely, stem from two underlying and rarely discussed factors. First is anti-intellectualism.’ The anger in the Founder’s face rose palpably. ‘My dear batters and bowlers: we as Indians are becoming dumber and dumber with each generation until our children are now not even half as smart as Chinese children in standardized learning tests. I tell you there are people in this country who do not know whether Delhi is north or south of the Vindhyas. I am not making this up. The pressing need to fight anti-intellectualism in India persuaded me, after many years as a champion of multipurpose construction in the city of Mumbai, to set up the Karim Ali Foundation for Academic Excellence. You are all members of this great Academy, my dear batters and bowlers. Intellectualism and a calm mind is what we teach here. How does cricket fit in? For that we must understand the second problem facing India today. Sensationalism. In other words, our Indian media, which is the joke of the world.’
The Founder looked around.
‘My dear batters and bowlers, consider the following facts. One, our country is named for a river called the Indus. Two: The river Ganga has six times the volumetric capacity of the river Indus – and three – yet it is still shallower than the Grand Amazon, which is the most powerful river in the whole world by volume of water transported from endpoint to end-point. These are hard, solid facts. Why do I keep these and other such facts at my fingertips? Because facts are the only known remedy for the evil of sensation. I have created the best school in Mumbai, with the best facilities, the best faculty, the best resources. And yet the media ignore us, and choose instead to talk only about the Cathedral School. Campion School. Ambani School. The journalists of Mumbai ignore us until we feed them what they live and die for. Sensation. And the biggest sensation we have in this country is called cricket.’
The Founder closed his eyes, and opened them, and continued.
‘My dear batters and bowlers, last year we lost twice to Fatima School. We lost by fourteen runs in Giles Trophy, by eight wickets in Harris Shield. My dear batters and bowlers. You cannot lose again this year: you must win for me. When you win the wonderful Harris Shield for me, everyone in Mumbai, including press, papers, radio and TV, will applaud our new but already sensationally prestigious school.’
Founder Ali stood silent; his lips showed just the hint of a smile; he allowed anticipation to grow.
‘To bring us glory in the Harris Shield, I have decided to groom a new captain for this school’s team. Having watched all my sons at play for many months now, I decided that this future captain, who will go to England on my scholarship, is . . .’
The boys clapped, and started a chant: ‘Ra-dha. Ra-dha.’
Manju searched for Javed’s face in the crowd. You said Radha was not going to make the team!
‘No, not that Kumar,’ said the bald man on the stage, motioning for the boys to quieten down. ‘Not that one.’
Manju was still searching for Javed; but all at once everyone seemed to be looking at him. Why? His heart began to beat against his ribcage. His mouth open, Manju turned to the stage to see Founder Ali pointing a finger straight at him.
‘This Kumar will go to England.’
Looking back, Manjunath could never recollect what he said to Radha at that point, or whether he did say anything: because the next thing he remembered, he was up
on the stage, beside Founder Ali; and when he gazed down, he saw, in the vortex below him, Javed Ansari’s face, smiling, and his brother’s face, not smiling.
Then he heard someone say, ‘My dear humble young son,’ and felt a fatherly hand on his shoulder.
‘My dear batters and bowlers, I’ve watched this humble young son of mine bat many times before this. He didn’t see me, but I saw him at Shivaji Park when he scored a superlative 237 not out against Anjuman-i-Islam, and he didn’t see me, but I saw his magniloquent 163 in 120 balls against the Ambani school. That was a most satisfying knock. This young son of mine can bat like an angel, and he can bat like a devil. What I love most about this humble young son is his heart, which is as capacious as an African lion’s. My son is khadoos: when he’s given out leg before or caught behind, he controverts the umpire and refuses to leave the crease. That’s the spirit. That’s the rage. Now I command him, humble young son Kumar, go to England, learn on their classical green lawns the subtle secrets of cricket and come back to India a super sensation!’
And with that the Founder drew the cricketer to his bosom and held him tight, while the boys cheered and chanted the name of the correct Kumar, who continued to look thoroughly appalled.
•
The truth was, he had known that Karim Ali was watching him for weeks before the announcement of the scholarship. Other boys told him the Founder was coming to cricket matches – they had thought that he was spying on Radha Krishna. But Javed had whispered: ‘You’re the one he’s come to watch, Manju.’ Javed wasn’t going to get the scholarship: he had written a poem about Karim Ali, pasted it on the noticeboard, and had been suspended from school for a week.
‘Bat better than your best today,’ Javed urged, during the match against Ambani when Manju scored his big century. Manju knew he was becoming good: frighteningly good. It was like running downhill – like cycling downhill – when some force much greater than you is helping you urges, ‘Faster, faster.’ He was a Natural. High above Javed’s head, he saw the golden fruit – England – and stood on his shoulders to pluck it: Founder Ali had approved. In the Founder’s office, Manju was hugged, offered chai, and told many important details about the military, moral, and economic disposition of England – most of them dealing with the year 1066, a key date in that remarkable little island’s history – before being sent home with a wealth of hard, factual information about the United Kingdom in his head and a warm press release in his hands:
Young ‘Braggado of the Bat’ takes on Great Britain
Press Contact: J. Satish
Corporate Relations, Karim Ali Group (022) 2390-3468
•
England!
It fell on him like crimson dye on a dry leaf in Chem Lab, exposing a network of nerves and sensitive ends: a secret life.
England! Six weeks in England! Without his father!
•
‘There was a magician who came to our village with an elephant, one day, boys. An elephant in chains. You just couldn’t see the chains. We are all elephants in chains too, we three Kumars. And the magician’s name is Karim Ali. He’s playing with us. He’s setting one of us against the other.’
Mohan Kumar scratched his left ankle. As was usual in the evenings, his breath smelled of a paternal mix of Hercules rum and Limca.
The wrong young Kumar, bent over at the sink, was splashing water on his cheeks.
‘You should have spat in the face of Karim Ali and given the scholarship back right away!’ Mohan shouted at Manju. ‘You should not have taken what is rightfully your elder brother’s!’
Radha, who had been sitting at the dinner table without a word, picked up his bat and left for the door.
‘Radha,’ his father pleaded. ‘Radha, come back, we’ll work out a plan together. We’ll make Manju return what he stole—’
At this Radha stopped, and kicked over a little table.
When his father whimpered, ‘The landlord will keep our deposit if you do things like this. He expects us to keep the flat clean,’ Radha came back from the hallway, bent, picked up the table, and flung it at the wall of the living room.
That was what he thought of the landlord’s deposit.
•
From the window came the noise of a rubber ball hitting a brick wall. But Mohan Kumar was locked in the toilet.
‘Javed,’ Manju whispered into the land-line phone in the living room, twirling the black wire around his fingers, and looking at the toilet door, ‘they are making me give the England scholarship back.’
‘You idiot,’ Javed said, ‘if I am not going to England, fine, but you should go. You’re the only one on my wavelength. Don’t let your father fuck with you. Do you want me to come over and bash him up?’
Manju laughed, but his laughter died away.
‘Javed. But the scholarship is my brother’s. I stole it.’
‘Bullshit,’ Javed said. ‘You are much better than your brother.’
‘What should I do, Javed?’
‘Do? Do? You’ve already done it. You’ve got your scholarship. I’m going to send you a letter when you are in England, and it will say: “Manju, my little one, are you actually having fun?” Because you need to relax, man.’
Javed laughed, and Manju already felt himself relax.
‘Just tell your father, if you give back the scholarship, Founder Ali will award it to Javed Ansari. Because they’re both Muslims. He’ll believe that. You’re not alone, Manju: remember that. You’re never going to be alone ever again.’
•
England! A drop of my semen is going to England for six weeks! Mohan Kumar closed his eyes. He dreamed of the laterite arch built by the unknown king, the starry skies above, and the croaking bullfrogs on the forest floor. Tears of vindication entered his eyes – England, on a fully paid scholarship, my little drop, my baby boy! – and he wanted to hug his little Manju.
But from the backyard he heard the sound of a rubber ball on a brick wall, and he had to open his eyes.
Towards the end of the previous year, Mohan Kumar had decided to slap Radha a few times, after his batting average fell below 40, but Tommy Sir had intervened, explaining that it was not Radha’s fault. The elder Kumar had developed a ‘weight-transfer problem’. Tommy Sir had seen it before. The body grows so suddenly that it is no longer used to its own new momentum. Radha had shot up; he was becoming a handsome young man, and this was ruining him as a cricketer. Because his body now made him hop when he went on the back foot, the same bowlers whom until recently he had been thrashing around the park were now getting him out clean bowled.
But Manju: now he had stayed compact. The voice was breaking but the body was not growing. The centre of gravity stayed low. Think of Lara. Gavasakar. Tendulkar.
But a father has a plan, and a contract with God, and the offspring had to follow this plan and this contract, and it was not Manjunath who was meant to go to England this year. Down his right arm Mohan Kumar felt a nerve twitch. Let me fix it, Mohan, it said: let me hammer the scholarship out of the wrong son and into the right one.
•
A brick wall stands in Bowral, New South Wales. Once upon a time, a boy appeared before the wall and threw a tennis ball at it. It bounced back; so he hit it with his wooden bat. He kept on doing this and kept on doing this until he became Sir Donald Bradman, the world’s greatest batsman.
A brick wall stands behind the Tattvamasi Building in Chembur, Mumbai. A boy has thrown a tennis ball at the wall, but he has no wooden bat in his hands. It bounces, and hits him on the side of his neck. He tosses it back at the wall. This time, he wants it to hit him on the face.
‘Radha,’ said his younger brother. ‘Radha.’
Radha threw the ball at the brick wall again, but this time Manju extended his foot like a football defender and kicked it out of their compound.
Raising his bat, Radha looked at his brother.
And Manju knew he should not have stopped his brother from hurting himself: for no
w he would hurt others.
‘When we played Fatima in Ghatkopar,’ Radha said, ‘you were out. LBW. Plumb. That umpire let you go on batting.’
With a hunch and a goblin face, Radha showed his younger brother how he had looked as he stood at the crease.
A window opened above them. From the fourth floor, a moustached man with a raised eyebrow looked to his left and looked to his right, and hissed:
‘They’re all listening to you, boys. The neighbours have a high opinion of me.’
At the window, Mohan Kumar reached inside his banian and scratched at his chest hair.
‘No, they don’t!’ Radha shouted at his father. ‘You know what they call you around here? Mad antibiotic uncle. Go inside and drink some more Hercules rum.’
Mohan Kumar stared at one son, and then at the other, nodded, and shut the window.
An hour later, Manjunath stood shirtless in front of the mirror in his bedroom, which was lit by the tube-light in the living room; from down below, he could hear the ball hitting the brick wall. He turned from side to side, looking at his naked torso in the mirror, and made his muscles bigger.
Maybe the veins would emerge in England.
As he stood half-naked before the mirror, a creature three parts Hercules rum and one part his father sat on his bed.
‘It’s all because Radha kicked me that day in Ballard Estate. Because he tried to murder me. God has punished him. I think he has started shaving, don’t you? But a contract is a contract, and Radha was the chosen one. Manju, if you love your father, you must tell Principal Patricia that it is all a mistake and she must phone Founder Ali. First thing in the morning.’
Manju thought ‘England’: in his mind’s eye, he saw a plane flying over the silver ocean, flying direct to a British dissecting table where Grissom and Nick were waiting for Agent Manjunath to join them in their next autopsy.
Sitting upright on the bed in one motion without using his hands, Manju shouted at his father: ‘I am not alone!’ He turned his face to the ceiling and shouted: ‘I am never again going to be alone!’