‘Manju . . .’ his father whimpered. ‘Is that a No?’
•
In the morning, Manjunath woke to the sound of the tennis ball bouncing off the brick wall in the backyard.
As he brushed his teeth, he smelled sweat. Radha, wet from practice, came to the door of the bathroom and stood watching him brush.
Suddenly, Manju felt someone pinching his left arm tight: and holding on to it.
‘Maybe if I keep pinching you like this, I will destroy your batting arm, Manju.’
Manju did not move his left arm; toothpaste oozed from his mouth as he stared at the flowing water.
‘Did you call Javed last night? Did he tell you not to return the scholarship to me?’
Through the corners of his eyes, he could see his elder brother scraping his fingernail against a canine tooth.
Radha pinched even harder: the pain in Manju’s left arm became maddening. Still offering no resistance, Manju leaned forward, and splashed himself with his right hand: he felt faint, he felt he could fly. If Radha pinched his nerve until his arm was damaged, he could tell them in England, I can’t play cricket anymore, but I can study forensic science and I want to join your London CSI team, please, and suddenly Manju laughed, and, as the cold water struck his face, he laughed again.
•
One morning, over 100 million years ago, India left Eden and went looking for Tibet. Tearing itself off from Gondwana, a primeval continent covered in rainforests and teeming with dinosaurs, a ‘V’-shaped chunk of land called India (accompanied at first by Madagascar) decided it wanted to join, for some godforsaken reason, South Asia.
For that ‘V’-shaped piece of land, the next 120–140 million years, needless to say, have been mostly a catastrophe.
Tommy Sir – after the death of his wife, he had allocated Saturday evenings to the enhancement of his draughtsmanship and colouring skills – now stood by an easel, painting the geological history of the Indian subcontinent. That history was, in his eyes, a tragic one. Eight panels had been completed, and were drying in a corner of the room; now he was filling in details of the giant volcanic eruptions that started sixty-five million years ago in the Deccan Plateau – releasing so much gas and smoke that the sky was darkened, the earth shuddered, and an Ice Age began, killing all the dinosaurs. Mexicans say it was their Yucatan meteor that did it – bullshit: our Deccan Plateau murdered the Tyrannosaurus. Fire and brimstone. You can still see the evidence of all that volcanic rage when you hike around Mahabaleshwar, as Tommy Sir did each year, by himself. The mountains, ridged and layered, consist of millions of tons of congealed lava; here and there you may see a jagged peak, carved like a stegosaurus’s spine, like a trophy kept by the Deccan Plateau of its most famous victim. Inside a giant amphitheatre formed by concave red cliffs, Tommy Sir had stood, observing the cataract of plastic bottles and cellophane rubbish left behind in the mountains by tourists – educated, English-speaking, middle-class tourists – and had wondered aloud: What happened to you, Mother India? Where are your fountains of fire now? How did we become this pathetic people?
We should never have joined Asia, never. Should have remained an island off Africa, super-Madagascar, inviolate: Atlantis!
Blowing on the easel to cool the paint on his volcanoes, he went to the window and looked down on Kalanagar.
‘It’s a moonlit night, Lata,’ he called to his daughter, who was in the kitchen. ‘You know what the Christians do on a night like this?’
He did not wait for her to answer.
‘Out there in the Bandstand, they are going mad. Boys and girls run out into the water and sit on rocks kissing and cuddling and godknowswhat-ing, and then the tide covers the rocks and they can’t come back – have to call the ambulance to rescue them! Are you listening to me, Lata?’
Lata, Tommy Sir’s daughter, worked at a bank in the Bandra-Kurla Financial Centre. A Maharashtra state-level volleyball player, she had dropped out of the sport after just missing the cut for the national team (because even if she had made the team, her father had told her, what future for a woman in sport?), and now managed Tommy Sir’s little Kalanagar flat, a role that she appeared content to play for the rest of her life, though her father still harangued her once a month to find a boy, a salaried boy of any religion or looks – even a Gujarati boy if all else failed – as long as hands, eyes, ears, nose, legs, and everything in between functioned. For what more can a girl want?
Incomprehensible Youth!
In the background, the radio played old film songs.
Lata, in the kitchen, hummed along and did the dishes.
From his desk Tommy Sir removed a packet of cigarettes and a manila folder full of sketches, war maps, and notes made in Marathi, Urdu and English. It bore the title: ‘1761: The soul breaks out of its encirclement. Notes for a proposed true history of the third battle of Panipat’. Looking over the elegant handwriting of his youth – how beautifully we Indians wrote in those days – Tommy Sir smiled, remembering that this project had once been a passion greater than cricket for him. For the Emperor Shivaji, the Peshwa Baji Rao and other successful Marathas, Tommy Sir cared nothing: in history, as in geology, failure excited and aroused him. Because only failure – the right kind of failure – has tragic grandeur. Plus, didn’t his blood boil at the thought that students across India were still learning about Panipat by reading Sir Jadunath Sarkar, that inveterate Maratha-basher? No one knew how close the Marathas had come to winning – after five hundred years of effeminately surrendering to invasions from Central Asia, an Indian army almost triumphed at Panipat. It was that close. No more than the space between Tommy Sir’s fingers. After being foxed and fooled by the Afghan king Abdali for months, after losing ally after ally to him, after running out of money and food, and then sitting passively within a trench for weeks while the enemy encircled and taunted them – in other words, after doing nearly everything humanly possible to ensure their own defeat – the Marathas, just before dawn on 14 January 1761, finally decided to fight. And how they fought. In this, one notes a resemblance to the way Indians once played test cricket. By noon on the day of battle, Abdali, stunned by the ferocity of the Maratha charge, told his soldiers to get his wives away to safety. Man’s soul, which is bogged down in a monkey’s body, and Mother India, bogged down in some lesser nation’s history, were both about to break free. That close.
Holding a cigarette in between his thumb and index finger, Tommy Sir put away the old manila folder. One of these days, one of these days. But for now – he lit the cigarette, and switched on the lamp over his computer – it was time to start his next column for the newspaper: ‘Some Boys Rise, Some Boys Fall: Legends of Bombay Cricket and My Role in Shaping Them Part 24’.
He stopped writing as soon as he began. The headache was starting again.
Biting on his cigarette, he used both index fingers to massage his forehead. Into this thin tense forehead had been crammed the entire history of Bombay cricket. Vijay Merchant’s technique, Ravi Shastri’s tenacity, Sunny Gavaskar’s craftiness. You can believe in the future, but you must worship the past. Tommy Sir worshipped all hundred and fifty years of Bombay cricket, but his forehead, of late, had begun to hurt.
Mean blood sugar had reached 141 in the last report. You have to control your stress, the young doctor at Lilavati Hospital had said. Control my—? Are you crazy?
After forty-one point five years of service to cricket, didn’t the men who ran cricket in Mumbai show more respect to one of those homeless girls that sell yellow balloons and blue wigs outside Wankhede stadium before an IPL game than they did to Tommy Sir? And why? Because Tommy Sir knew many things, but he did not know how to lie – and especially did not know how to utter the one big lie required today of everyone involved in the game of cricket, a lie that is dragged out over ten excruciating hours every match day by our chipmunk TV commentators, but which really boils down to a single deceitful statement: “Cricket in India still smells good.”
T
he old scout winced: oh, my forehead. My fore . . .
It must be the pollution, he thought, smoking his cigarette by the window. Or perhaps it was what he had read in the papers that morning. Out in Chembur, a man named ‘Metro’ Mahesh had been arrested by the police, for running a racket of illegal betting on international cricket matches. Of course he’d be walking free by evening. The politician to whom he sent up his betting money would call from New Delhi – or Dubai. The police would be promised a bigger cut next time. ‘Metro’ Mahesh. What a name. Just one of thousands doing the same work, all the way from Mumbai to the smallest villages in India, collecting bets from every bar, hotel, recreational club and police station. The worst part is the public know this – they know exactly what’s happening with the betting and the fixing – and they don’t care, they keep watching, they keep coming to the IPL matches.
Oh, my Darling, my Cricket. Phixed and Phucked.
Tommy Sir wanted to cry.
How did this thing, our shield and chivalry, our Roncesvalles and Excalibur, go over to the other side, and become part of the great nastiness?
He put both his hands on the windowsill for support, and leaned forward. You could hear it already, the whispering and the bargaining, the lies and corruption: it has just begun, and before the sun rises again, India will be sold and India will be bought, many, many times over. Tommy Sir smelled shit on the night air.
‘Manjunath Kumar,’ he said, and drew on his cigarette. As he exhaled, he saw the boy as though in one of Van Gogh’s paintings, smiling, backlit, meteors and shooting stars and falling stars behind him, the whole whirling universe, waiting for the boy to turn around and see. When you are that age you can go anywhere, become anything. ‘Manjunath Kumar,’ the old scout said again.
But when he raised his eyes from the street to the sky, Tommy Sir saw the full moon and thought of the Bandstand. Foam and spume washed over the young half-naked bodies, and in the dark he saw three digits, like a price put on all he had missed out on in life.
604.
Tommy Sir looked at the glowing tip of his cigarette. He dispersed, with a quick movement of the cigarette, the stars and galaxies behind Manju’s head.
I’ve waited more than forty years to paint you, and now I’ll paint you better than Van Gogh himself, my little cricketer.
604.
Return from England and set a new batting record for me.
Turning away from the window, Tommy Sir shouted: ‘I’m coming to the kitchen, Lata, I’m warning you. If you’ve done the dishes, I don’t want to see any lights left on in there. What was the electricity bill last month, can you please tell me the exact figure?’
With a final look at the full moon, he extinguished his cigarette on the windowsill.
•
A month passed before Radha asked:
‘How is Manju?’
‘In England,’ Mohan Kumar said, yawning on the bed.
‘I know that, father,’ Radha said, as he picked up his cricket bag. ‘What is he doing there? You talk to him on the phone, don’t you?’
‘You said you didn’t want to talk to him. I brought the phone to your ear and said, here is your brother, talk, ask him for batting tips from English County Cricket, and you said, no.’
Radha said nothing as his father got up and began talking about Manju’s life in the home of the game. Seizing one of the bats from near the fridge, Mohan Kumar demonstrated: See – see that fiendish Duke ball, keeps low, wobbles in the air, does things that it never does in India – but see how my Manju’s wrists have tamed the red ball, disciplined and broken its Britisher pride.
Letting his father make a fool of himself, Radha took a bat and left for practice.
The front door of his home, all of Radha Krishna Kumar’s life, had opened into a tunnel, which had led, via a fast train, straight to a cricket maidan or a practice net.
But today he took a left turn on his way to the train station and wandered to the compound of a Ganapati temple that also housed a cybercafe, with a black glass door, outside which lay a pile of men’s slippers.
Removing his shoes, pushing open the black glass door, Radha went into the cybercafe and discovered what it was that all the other boys in the world had been doing in their spare time.
While he had been fending off hard red balls thrown at his face by his father, they had been playing a video game that involved open-hatched cars, athletic women in skirts, and lots of shotguns. It was apparently called Grand Theft Auto (San Andreas).
Closing the door behind him, Radha put on his shoes and picked up his bag to return to cricket practice, when all at once, the temple bells rang.
Six weeks in England. Six weeks alone in England.
Radha Kumar shivered. Dropping his bag and pushing his way back into the dark cybercafe, he asked the boys: ‘Will you teach me to play this game?’
One year to Selection Day
TENTH STANDARD BEGINS
MANJUNATH KUMAR IS BACK FROM UK
After spending one and a half months at the J.F. Browns International School, Manchester, playing cricket and attending classes, Manju Kumar has just returned to Mumbai. To give you the correct perspective on the activities of Manju in UK, here are his observations as narrated orally to Shri Pramod Sawant, his school cricket coach.
‘In just six weeks I can say with the utmost confidence that I adapted superlatively to England. The scorecard speaks for itself. 1446 runs at an average of 45 is very respectable. Beyond the cricket field, I also attended classes at the school, where I showed a particular relish for science and mathematics, and made an effort to read the British newspapers every day. I visited a planetarium and two science museums. I most humbly thank Mr Karim Ali for giving me this exquisite opportunity to experience first-hand the uplifting culture of the United Kingdom.’
Members of the media may see Master Manjunath Kumar at the Cricket Club of India, where he will hold a press conference.
Contact:
Shri Pramod Sawant, ‘Head Coach’
Shri N.S. Kulkarni, ‘Designated Mentor’
‘Day-to-day life in England: your conclusions?’
‘It rains all day not just in the monsoons like here.’
‘What was the food like?’
‘The cheese is smelly.’
‘It sounds like you were homesick and eager to return to Amchi Mumbai.’
‘Every single day I missed my father and brother. Every single day I prayed to God to bring glory to my school even in the UK.’
‘What are your observations on the differences between India and England in terms of cricket?’
‘For them, it is just a game.’
(Well said.)
‘Will you go again to the UK?’
‘Certainly. As part of the Indian cricket team.’
(Bravo!)
‘Did you chase any English girls when you were there, Manju?’
‘Some things are best left private.’
(Ha ha!)
•
‘Press conference?’
‘He was brilliant, I say. A natural. Told them exactly what they wanted to hear. And all in a strange British accent. It’s called Mancunian. He said this in the press con. And furthermore: “I am looking forward to playing in the Kanga League. It will be a huge challenge to bat again in tropical conditions.” Tropical Conditions! Boy from a slum says all this in English!’
‘Press con? You should have told me, Tommy Sir. I am now the Brand Ambassador for South Australian red wines in India. Remember the time I took a planeload of children from Mumbai to Bowral? It did wonders for my profile in that part of the world. I could have arrived, dramatically, at this press con, like the Santa Claus of South Australian Red Wine if only you had communicated.’
‘Next time. Because guess who wants Manju to be their mascot? Kolkata. In the IPL.’
‘Great. He can start paying me off right now.’
‘No, no, I won’t allow it.’ Tommy Sir wagged a finger. ‘T
hat boy should not be exposed at this age to the IPL. He’ll pick up bad habit after bad habit. All those foreign cheerleaders. Too much sex in cricket these days. He’s just a boy.’
‘Cricket, cricket, cricket.’ Anand Mehta yawned indulgently. ‘. . . what a circus, anyway.’
‘A what?’ Tommy Sir inquired.
‘The slum kids beg you for money, you beg me, I beg my classmates, it’s just a big circus. Cricket.’
Tommy Sir left without saying goodbye.
Anand Mehta smoothed his moustache with a finger, and smiled. You had to feel sorry for that old man – so easy to hurt him, just say something bad about a game invented by medieval shepherds in Essex or Doublesex or some other such sex. Ridiculous creature, this Mister Tommy: all the insights and follies of a child, never traded in for the insights and follies of an adult. Anand Mehta yawned again.
For a soothing half an hour he read online about the twists and turns of the Battle of the Bulge, 1944, and then emailed an old girlfriend in New York, and then browsed on Twitter for Nietzsche quotations. He closed the laptop and returned it to his desk, next to the bottles of liquor, and then went and stood by the window.
The ocean, rolling in towards Nariman Point, struck a shore of black rocks in front of the National Centre for the Performing Arts – and then, moving again, the foaming water rolled past the low white Mediterranean wall of the NCPA, past the blue-glass building of the Indian Overseas Bank, past the Arcadia building (the very ugly Corporation Bank building behind it) and past Dalamal Chambers. And this, Anand Mehta thought – this citadel of brain-dead wealth, fortress of the world’s least educated elite, a place with ten thousand ways to mispronounce ‘swanky’ and ‘entrepreneur’ – this is what won’t let me in. Moving past Nariman Point, the surf subsided near the blue-tarpaulin-covered shanties. The exact spot where Ajmal Kasab came with the jihadis to kill us on 26/11. If only he’d done a better job.
I gave up Central Park for you, he yelled down at the city, you piece of shit!