Then he closed his eyes and tightened his grip on his cricket bat: when the moment comes, when Radha Krishna Kumar scores his double century for India in the World Cup, when his name will be applauded in far-off and wonderful places like Cape Town and Christchurch and Trinidad, then we’ll see who is laughing.
When he opened his eyes Radha saw small white birds skimming the waves. The euphoria faded; his smile disappeared; he remembered his younger brother.
The boat docked; people shrieked; the girls held on to the seats for support and almost knocked Radha into the water.
When they reached Alibagh, the blonde and the boys walked down a grey beach. Radha kept his eyes on the water’s edge, where indistinct birds left deep black prints on the sand.
Sofia said, ‘You were saying something about Manju? I didn’t hear.’
Radha had seen something dark moving within the white surf – a turtle, or something like a turtle. He gnawed at his fingernails, and spat.
‘I said nothing about Manju.’
With his cricket bat in hand, he walked into the water, and the ocean swelled, mockingly, around his feet.
Two nights ago the TV had been on, and Radha, seeing Manju sitting on the ground and watching with narrowed eyes, had thought, CSI Las Vegas. But no: not CSI. It was a programme about the gays in America: they could now marry each other. He had stood behind his young brother, watching him watch the programme. Manju heard his breathing, and jumped, and turned the television off: it was that leap, more than anything else, that had made Radha’s heart pound.
Now he smashed his bat into the Arabian Sea.
Is the world’s second-best batsman a homo? And is the world’s best batsman, the one with a secret contract, not going to be selected for Mumbai? Radha waded deeper into the ocean. He bashed at the waves with his SG Sunny Tonny. ‘Weight-transfer issue.’ The phrase was as heavy as a death-sentence. His jeans were now wet above the ankles, and he felt their soaking mass pulling him down. Weight-transfer. What I wouldn’t give you, ocean, to make this problem go away. The water had risen to his knees. See, sometimes I have to drink a beer to go to sleep. And when I wake up, the eyelids do not want to open, and a voice in my head says, ‘What does the morning have to do with a man like you, who can’t even hold a bat?’ And then the voice says, ‘Your little brother is a homo, and you can’t hold a bat any more.’
Why? Why? Why?
Someone up there was rewriting the promised contract, and Radha Kumar, who could do nothing to undo the changes to the script, who had learnt – as his father had – what it meant to be only a man before he had learnt what it meant to be fully a man, bludgeoned the waves around him with his bat.
‘Radha!’ Someone was shouting at him. ‘Come back, are you crazy?’
The water rose above his knees now. Wading deeper into the sea, Radha Kumar raised his bat and looked around for that turtle.
•
While Manju slept in Mumbai, someone was thinking about him on the mainland.
A white moon moved over Navi Mumbai, and Javed Ansari had slipped from his bedroom, passed the couch on which his father snored, the cricket magazines his father had left on the dinner table in a pathetic attempt to revive his fading interest in cricket, opened a door, and walked, a free man, into the night. Vashi was deserted. Javed walked past a government school: click, click, he heard a rolled-up flag knocking against the metal pole in the school compound. A bike had toppled over outside the school; a policeman slept at a traffic light. Javed walked down the centre of the road, knowing that all the gates of the night were open to him. He could just kick at a door, go into someone’s flat and rob it, he thought, and half considered the idea before laughing into the darkness: U-ha, U-ha. Money was for idiots. Money and cricket were for idiots. He grabbed at the night air as if it were black, physical material, coal that his strong fist could crush into diamond.
Poetry.
Wiping the sweat off his forehead, Javed looked up: the moon waited white and immense over the earth, like a mandate to dream and create.
‘Sean Connery,’ he said out loud. Yeah, he had looked him up on the internet. Very handsome man, Manju: but seriously old, too.
With a grin, Javed directed a giant brain-wave right at the Tattvamasi Building in Chheda Nagar, Chembur.
Pass me the hammer, Miss Moneypenny. I’m a young Javed Ansari!
•
Over the next few weeks, Manju became aware that two parties were in open conflict for possession of something precious and hidden inside him: his future.
First, his father took Manju to the local Subramanya temple and made him put ten rupees into the collection box before reminding him to keep his end of the contract with God and drop out of education, as he had long ago promised his father he would (and as the great Sachin himself did, remember), to concentrate full-time on cricket. ‘Yes, Appa, I’ll do it,’ Manju said.
He went straight to a pay-phone near the train station, wiped the receiver clean with his shirt, and called Javed, who listened and said: ‘Unless you want to be a slave, you must never drop out of college.’
Manju, in principle, agreed.
He gave Javed his word, no matter what manipulation his father and Tommy Sir tried, he would study all day and all night for the exams, and would get into Ruia College.
But the next morning, he went to JJ Hospital morgue. The boys were practising cricket at Azad Maidan, and he, still in his cricket whites, just slipped down the road, and took the bus. He found the morgue and told the guard, ‘Let me in, please.’ The old man in khaki squinted at him: ‘Only doctors, interns or medical students are let in.’
‘But I play cricket,’ Manju had said.
‘Fine,’ the guard said. ‘Go on in.’
So at last Agent Grissom of the CSI Team (Las Vegas) walked into the JJ Hospital morgue (Mumbai) and suddenly shivered in the cold, and couldn’t go on.
‘Why not?’ Javed asked, when Manju, almost in tears, called him from a one-rupee pay-phone.
‘It smelled.’
‘Dead bodies smell. Didn’t you know?’
‘But Javed, it smelled.’
Finished. Manju could never again imagine himself Agent Grissom. He couldn’t even eat his food; his gorge felt full of all that was awful and real, and it came out of his eyes as tears.
How Javed laughed at the other end of the line.
‘Maybe I can go back to Manchester.’
‘Why? You think dead bodies don’t stink in Manchester? Idiot.’
Manju was so angry he announced he wouldn’t go to Ruia College. Or any college.
Two minutes later he dropped another rupee into the pay-phone, wiped the receiver clean again, and called Javed back to say, ‘Don’t tell anyone what I told you, okay? About the morgue?’
‘I won’t. But did you mean what you said, Manju, are you really not going to college?’
‘I mean it.’
‘You really are a slave. You think Javed Ansari wants to talk to slaves on the phone? I thought you were on my wavelength.’
Then, ten minutes later, Manju wiped the receiver clean a third time, and called Javed to inform him he was on the same wavelength.
•
August was almost over when one morning Manju tiptoed out of the boys’ bedroom, turned the tap in the sink, and ran three wet fingers through his hair.
‘Manju, don’t think I didn’t see you. Are you going to JJ Hospital morgue again? To look at naked dead women? Foreign naked dead women?’
Mohan Kumar followed the boy out of their flat; he leaned over the edge of the stairwell, hearing the boy’s quick footsteps, and boomed into the echoing airshaft: ‘Are you going to meet that Mohammedan cricketer at the morgue?’
From down below in the stairwell, Manju stopped and turned his face up to his father’s.
‘Why do you see that Javed Ansari so often?’ Mohan Kumar asked.
They stared. Then Manju stuck his tongue out at his father, and showed him his middle
finger.
‘Mongoose has got to you, my little Manju . . .’ his father whimpered. ‘Mongoose, Mongoose, Mon—’
‘Don’t call him that again!’ Manju shouted from below. ‘He’s my friend.’
He went out of the building, turned around, came back in, and this time shouted:
‘He’s my real father.’
•
Free! Manju steadied his bag on his shoulder and walked fast. The door of the Subramanya temple was open. Chanting in Sanskrit the priest exalted the dark deity with a flaming brass vessel. Manju bowed before the fire-garlanded idol and asked the God of Cricket for a big favour:
‘Please don’t let my father stop me from going to college.’
Done praying, he walked to the train station, stopped, remembered, and ran back to the temple to ask for another thing.
‘And please let Javed stop losing his hair.’
Half an hour later, Manju got off at the Matunga station and stood, in a crowd of teenagers, outside the gates of Ruia College.
The third List of Admissions had been pasted to a bulletin board on the other side of the college gate.
Manju had known already from the email and the letter, but he wanted to touch the admissions list. Touch it.
The gates were closed, so he walked back towards the station. They were playing tennis at the Matunga Gymkhana; someone threw a ball high up, and the act seemed to say ‘freedom’ in a way nothing in cricket could.
When Manju walked back to Ruia, the gates had just opened. The crowd rushed in.
Jostling against the others, he stood in front of the noticeboard where the admission list was posted; his heart began to pound.
Even as elbows and fingers poked into him, glancing over his shoulder to where he imagined Navi Mumbai would be, he fired, high over land and creek, a giant brainwave of his own.
Javed. Javed. We did it. I got into Ruia.
Three months to Selection Day
FIRST YEAR OF JUNIOR COLLEGE
The Banganga tank, in Walkeshwar, high above south Mumbai, late in the evening. This is one of the oldest parts of the city, and even now, with its temple bells and wandering cows and narrow streets, it retains the look of a village tucked inside the metropolis.
White tubelights shone around the enormous open tank, and ducks floated on the black water, as two young men walked down the old stone steps that led to the water. One of them was in stained cricket whites; the other wore a leather jacket over blue jeans.
‘Do you ever miss it?’
‘It, Sir Manju, being?’
‘Cricket.’
‘Only you would ask a question like that, Sir Manju.’
Just a fortnight into junior college, and Javed had reinvented his image. His long-sleeved white shirts had given way to T-shirts and a leather jacket; the gold earring was gone, and his wavy hair was now streaked with copper highlights. It was receding, so dyeing it was the right decision, Manju felt.
‘Never? You never miss it?’
‘Why . . . why . . . Sir Manju . . . why . . . would I miss that pro-puh-gun-duh and manipulation and mind-depopulation? I am no slave, Sir Manju.’
This was a new mannerism Javed had picked up, ever since he’d started junior college in Navi Mumbai: a pout of his lips, an exaggerated emphasis on a random word in a sentence, followed by a spitfire burst of syllables, all delivered with a lopsided grin and an unstable head, a confounding mannerism which reminded Manju of the cricket commentator Harsha Bhogle.
‘By the way, you like this place? I now come here sometimes on the weekend,’ Javed said. ‘There is some energy-wenergy here, isn’t there?’
On the final step above the water, the two boys sat down.
‘The monkeys are terrible around here,’ Javed said. ‘Watch out for your phone and wallet.’
Javed gestured at the vast black water and the searing reflections of the white tubelights. ‘Isn’t it beautiful, Manju? Isn’t it gorgeous?’
‘Gorgeous,’ Manju repeated. ‘This is gorgeous.’ He pinched Javed’s jacket between his fingers, and squeezed the rich dark leather.
Javed chuckled. ‘Don’t rape my jacket, man.’ He snapped his fingers at Manju, who reluctantly let go of the leather.
‘The jacket isn’t gorgeous, anyway. I am. Yes or no?’
Manju smirked.
‘Give me an answer, Manju.’
Javed thrashed his legs about when he did not get an answer.
Gorgeous.
From the figure of Javed, who was now spreadeagled on the steps in his leather jacket and tight blue jeans, Manju’s gaze moved to the tank and its skin of glossy black water. Gorgeous. It turned into a milky-white cloud: he remembered a morning when thick fog covered the Western Ghats as their bus climbed up the road, and the only things piercing through the fog were giant roses – no, not a rose, a mountain flower larger than the largest red rose on earth – and Manju felt he was flying high over the earth. When the sun finally pierced through the fog, the first thing he saw, seated on a low mountain wall, its enormous wings folded and its eyes intent on the bus, was a vulture.
Manju smiled with pleasure, and leaned back in stages until his neck touched a damp stone step. He shivered. Stretching out his hand, he pinched Javed’s leather jacket again.
‘Let go of my jacket, man. You’re crazy.’
I’m crazy? Manju thought. That was what people called Javed. Your rich crazy Muslim friend. Radha had told Manju, with much glee, about a rumour circulating among the cricketers that Javed Ansari (though now an ex-cricketer, still very much the focus of gossip) had been caught by the police a second time. On Independence Day. He and his friends had been driving about Powai without a licence: caught, taken to the station, and then bailed out – once again – by his father. Manju had been waiting for Javed to say something about the whole affair.
‘Don’t call me names. I don’t get arrested by the police.’
‘Who told you?’ Javed looked at him.
‘Everyone in cricket knows. Mad Max Gang. You guys must be idiots. No one else in all of Mumbai gets caught by the police for driving without a licence. Just your gang.’
‘Fuck cricket.’ Javed spat out the words at Manju, staining his face with saliva. ‘Fuck them all. They have no right to talk about me. It’s all pro-puh-gun-duh.’
‘I know, I know. Tatas Batting, McDonald’s Bowling. If you think cricket is for idiots, then why are you imitating the biggest idiot in cricket, Harsha Bhogle?’
When Javed became furious these days, his scalp went back several inches, and this hint of premature baldness highlighted the vein in his forehead even more prominently: how Manju loved the sight of that face – volatile, vicious, glowing with dark blood.
‘Fuck you,’ Javed said. ‘Stay here and rot here.’
And there were footsteps. Should I make the effort to run, Manju, tired from cricket practice, asked himself, or just wait till he comes back?
He waited: and sure enough Javed came back, and stood over him with folded arms.
‘I do not sound like Harsha Bhogle. Just say that, and I’ll go. And I’ll never see you again.’
‘It’s not that easy to leave cricket behind, is it, Sir Harsha Bhogle Ansari?’ Manju winked at him.
Javed nodded, as if agreeing with Manju.
‘You want to hear a poem, Manju? A Bhogle poem?’
‘Tell me.’
‘Listen:
‘Twilight is my mother’s favourite hour.
When I stand in it I am in her power.’
Manju couldn’t breathe. He stood up at once and climbed two steps to bring his face level with Javed’s.
‘That’s my mother! You bastard! You unwrite that poem at once. At once.’
‘Sorry, sorry, sorry, Sir Manju.’
Disdain, as Javed smiled, seemed to exude out of him like a musk, a secretion of his endocrinal glands, like something – Manju thought – you could milk out of his body and sell in small glass bottles in Bandra. (‘
Contempt: A New Fragrance for Men.’) Plunging his face into his black leather jacket he laughed into it. U-ha, U-ha, U-ha. By now Manju was familiar with Javed’s gruff cackle, both mocking and self-mocking – at once taunt, defiance, confession and plea. It was his way of saying, Yeah, I stole it, sorry, I shouldn’t have done it, fuck you.
They were even: friends with each other again. As they left Banganga village, and went through Walkeshwar, the lower part of Malabar Hill, they could see the lights of south Mumbai below them.
‘Come over to Navi Mumbai this weekend. Tell your father you have a cricket camp in Pune or shit.’
‘What about your father? What will he say if I come and stay with you?’ Manju asked.
‘He wants to see you. You know what my father calls me at home? The Nurse. Javed the nurse. It’s true. After my mother left him, I’ve been taking care of him.’ Javed stretched his neck from side to side; his voice softened. ‘When he falls ill, I put four Disprin tablets in a glass of water and bring it to him. Now my father says, Javed has forgotten me and is only a nurse to this Manjunath, so I want to see my competitor. Come this weekend.’
He reached over and touched Manju’s face, and the boy’s body warmed at his touch.
Someone blew a sharp horn; right behind them, traffic was moving down Malabar Hill.
When Javed lowered his hand, Manju picked up a stone and threw it at the city.
‘Can’t come. I have Young Lions. They’re doing a new television programme.’
‘You?’ Javed turned. ‘Wasn’t it Radha?’
‘This time it’s me.’ Manju tried to throw another stone, but Javed held his arm:
‘Are you happy to be on television? Tell me the truth.’
‘No. I’m stealing from Radha again.’
‘Don’t lie.’
‘I’m not a thief. Radha is the Young Lion.’
‘I said don’t lie to Javed. Are you happy to be on TV?’
Freeing his arm, Manju threw the second stone at Mumbai.
‘Yes!’
•
The thunderous opening chords of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra fill the darkness. A single stump stands in the middle of a pitch.