Selection Day

  Radha came near the tent with all the other cricketers but remained outside: he could not go in and face them again.

  Two homeless men squatted nearby, watching the cricket. A black hen, after clucking around them, came to peck at the earth at Radha’s feet, making him shiver.

  ‘Sorry I got you out, man. No hard feelings, no?’

  Having slipped during the game, Deennawaz Shah, the young Pace Terror, was limping over to the tent, rolling up his white trousers to expose the red wound on his shin.

  He smiled at Radha, in a docile, even ingratiating way, and said: ‘Give me some water, man.’

  Deennawaz turned back towards the cricket. From behind him, Radha observed the boy’s small neck.

  Whack! The sound of the ball striking the meat of the bat made Deenawaz look up with an open mouth.

  ‘Your brother is on fire today. He’s pulling good-length balls. Fast balls. And off the front foot. Give me some water, dude.’

  His jaw clenched, Radha thought of Javed Ansari: he was the one to blame for everything. Everyone knew he was the homo. When he thought of ‘J. A.’, he saw a boiling pot of steam behind which his baby brother’s face was hidden.

  Radha was now right behind Deennawaz: close enough to see where the bone thickened on the boy’s neck and the downy hair started to climb down his back. One Muslim would do as well as another.

  His tongue curled up like a bull’s to touch his upper lip: and the right hand that was no longer good for cricket turned into a fist.

  Deennawaz was about to turn around to ask again for water, when he felt something hit him at the top of his neck, pounding him like a sledgehammer, compressing the length of his backbone, until the tip of his spine almost pierced through skin.

  The cricket stopped when the players heard the scream.

  •

  Instructing his father to stand still for a moment, Manju signed the guard’s register for both of them. The lift waited behind a collapsible lattice gate. There was no lift-boy inside: just a cold wooden stool. Getting in, Manju held the lattice gate open for his father.

  Then the lift rose.

  ‘The moment we get home, there will be news of Radha, just you see. He’ll call and tell me where he is.’

  A small sickly figure, coughing from its diaphragm, opened the door of Anand Mehta’s flat on the thirteenth floor. Manju could see that the room behind him was dark, except for a table-lamp, where Mr Mehta sat holding a glass filled with a golden liquid.

  ‘They’re here, Anand,’ the man with the coughing fit said hoarsely.

  ‘Come in. Rakesh, you sit right here. I’ll handle these people.’

  Manju pushed against his father, to force him to enter the room.

  Anand Mehta got up and walked about the dark room with the glass in his hand, sipping from it as he glanced at Manju and his father; the coughing man who had opened the door sat on the beige sofa and ran his fingers up and down its leather arms.

  Manju and his father stood.

  ‘Where is this famous thug and terrorist of yours, Radha Krishna? The police haven’t found him yet. Rakesh, this is the younger boy in the sponsorship. He must be a criminal too. You watch out for your wallet.’

  ‘Sir, I come to you shamed and publicly humiliated that my son has attacked his fellow cricketer. There is a saying in our language, he who steals an elephant is a thief. He who steals a peanut is also a—’

  ‘Shut up!’

  Anand Mehta pointed a finger at father and at son. He put his glass down on the silent television. A cloth-covered object sat on the TV; unwrapping it, Anand Mehta picked up his cell phone, which he read, and then covered it again in the white cloth.

  ‘I took your idea, you fuck. I covered my phone in a hankie. Keeps the germs away, you said. What about the big fat germ known as Mohan Kumar? Do you know what this Deennawaz Shah’s uncle wanted from me? 75,000 rupees in compensation. 75,000. Tommy Sir brings that man here and tells me, please pay him. Otherwise he’s going to file an FIR against Radha for assaulting his nephew. They had to put Deennawaz Shah in hospital, your boy hit him so hard. After which, still crazy, he tried to strangulate him right there, and would have done so, if the others hadn’t . . . I’ve been paying and paying and paying you people for years.’

  Joining his palms together, Mohan Kumar tried to bend down and touch Anand Mehta’s shoes.

  ‘Don’t touch me. Go back. Go back. I’m sick of being fucked and fooled around by you. Bloody Mexican bartender thinks he owns the whole fucking bar.’

  The sickly man on the sofa cracked his knuckles.

  Now Mohan turned, and reached for the shoes of the man with the loud knuckles.

  ‘Don’t bow to him, bow to me,’ Anand Mehta shouted. ‘I own this bar.’

  ‘Don’t shout at my father.’

  ‘What?’ Mehta looked at the boy.

  ‘My father is not very strong these days. It’s not his fault, what Radha did today. It’s not Radha’s fault, either.’

  ‘You talking to me?’

  Anand Mehta put his hand on Manju’s head, and rubbed the boy’s hair. He kept his hand there.

  ‘Say what you said again. Say what you just said, a second time.’

  Manju looked at the dark carpet. A violent coughing from the sofa dragged the carpet back and forth.

  ‘You listen to me, golden boy. I’m dealing with the mafia in Dhanbad. Do you understand? Rakesh here is an IAS officer’s son. He’s helping me handle mafia there. I don’t even want to think about cricket, I don’t even want to think about Mumbai anymore. Why? We’ve got a power plant near Dhanbad and we’re turning it around. Do you know the operating capacity? Four hundred thousand units of electricity a month, and current operating output zilch. When we turn it around, we make six crores a month. Do you know how much money that is, you fuck? And you make me waste my time here? Of course there are problems. Of course. Everyone in the district has lined up for a bribe. Instant the plant starts working, it gets worse. The phone will ring every hour. Hello, I am your Member of Parliament. I’m sending fifteen men from my village. Employ them or I’ll murder you and fuck your wife. You understand what this means? If I say jump, you jump. And right now I’m saying, you and your brother have fucked me over enough. Where is that criminal boy now?’

  Manju said, ‘I think he is on his way to our village, sir. They will hide him from the police.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  Anand Mehta’s face had become darker and older, and made Manju remember the night he had invaded their home.

  ‘Sir’ Manju could smell, all the way in the pit of his stomach, the liquor on Anand Mehta’s breath. He had to speak or retch. ‘Sir. Sir. Sir. I don’t want to play cricket any more after today.’

  The air-conditioning was working strongly, and Manju rubbed his forearms up and down.

  ‘I did this thing to my brother today. I won’t play after this. I want to stop and study forensic—’

  ‘Shut up!’ the two men said together, and then Anand Mehta informed Mohan Kumar: ‘I’m the one who says Shut up in this room.’

  The sickly man coughed a bit; Anand Mehta pointed a finger at Manju.

  ‘Golden Boy: in one minute I’m going to tell you, do something, and you will bloody well do exactly that.’

  He opened a cabinet and took out a bottle and poured two full glasses.

  Mohan took one glass, emptied it and put it down. Anand Mehta’s finger pointed at Manju, and then at the second glass.

  But Manju said, ‘No.’

  ‘Do you want me to tell the police where your brother has gone?’

  Manju picked up the glass, closed his eyes, and drank. His small body convulsed.

  Anand Mehta smiled.

  ‘And there’s a bill to pay. For this scotch. Good Indian scotch. Nothing is free for you people any more. It’s my bar. Start paying me.’

  Mohan Kumar took out his wallet, and held it out, and Anand Mehta removed the only large note, a hundred-rupee bill, fro
m it.

  When they finally made it outside the building, Mohan saw his Manju bend over, stick out his tongue like a happy jackass, and vomit on the pavement.

  The gates had closed behind them.

  ‘Let’s go to the police, Appa. Let’s both go to the police right now,’ Manju said, as he wiped his lips clean. ‘He made me drink that. Right in front of you. And you did nothing.’

  Mohan Kumar said nothing; his shirt stuck to his body.

  Manju came close and examined his immobile father. He saw no eyes, no lips, no features; and he realized that for all these years, his father had not had a face. All these years, there had been no secret contract with God, no scientific method, no antibiotics and no ancient wisdom: just Fear.

  Manju turned and observed: not one adult walking around him in the night had a face.

  •

  ‘The first point we have to establish is this. Did Javed tell you, or did he not tell you that exactly this kind of thing would happen to you if you kept playing cricket?’

  Leaving his father before the gates of Anand Mehta’s housing society, Manju had crossed the road to a grocery store with a yellow pay-phone. The store-owner had a black tear-like birthmark running from his eye to his nose, giving him the look of one born to sorrow; he flicked through a copy of the Mumbai Sun, entirely indifferent to Manju, who stood beside him sobbing on the phone.

  ‘. . . don’t be a bastard. Tell me what I should do, Javed. Just tell me.’

  ‘Bastard? You’re calling me a bastard? I shouldn’t even talk to you. I told you, you keep playing cricket, I’ll stop talking to you. And I keep my word.’

  ‘Javed, everything bad that happened today, what Radha did, this is all my fault. You don’t know the story. You don’t know half the story.’

  ‘Manju: it’s nobody’s fault. Your father is fucking you in the head again. Leave him now.’

  ‘Leave and go where, Javed?’

  ‘Come to Navi Mumbai. I have my own flat now. You’ll be safe here.’

  Manju heard, on the other end of the line, the sound of Javed’s jaws moving and crushing darkness.

  He would be safe there. Javed would protect him.

  The store-owner kept turning the pages of his Mumbai Sun.

  ‘Come stay with me, Manju. How many times do I have to say it?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘But one thing: don’t call me till you’re ready to give up cricket and come here. Javed Ansari won’t break his word again. No more calls from you will be taken. Everyone in my house has received instructions. Because I worry you will come to Navi Mumbai, say “Fuck cricket, I am here for good,” and next morning decide to go back to Daddy.’

  The phone went dead. Manju replaced the receiver; the store-owner folded his newspaper, placed it on his desk, and smiled. This act of kindness refreshed Manju, but then he saw the story on the last page of the newspaper:

  Woman Kills Husband, But Not Without A Reason, Police Say

  The 32-year old wife of a building contractor who murdered her husband yesterday in horrifying circumstances, as reported in this paper, did so only after discovering that he had been having an affair – with another man, the police have disclosed. The full story of this lurid act of revenge, the police say, forces us to reconsider . . .

  ‘Everything alright?’ the store-owner asked.

  ‘Everything is perfectly alright, sir,’ Manju replied.

  And then added a smile to his statement.

  •

  Perched upside down on the telephone wires along the road, parakeets screeched at the passengers in the bus.

  Radha Krishna Kumar licked his lips to rid them of the coating of metal. He had slept with his face against the bars, and now, when he moved his head, there was pain, as if a wrench had been left behind in his neck.

  Radha saw hills in the distance, and day breaking over them. The bus had come to a stop, and the passengers had descended to line up in front of a man pouring tea from a stainless-steel kettle.

  He had caught the bus from Crawford Market the night before, as his brother had suspected he would. He was on his way to his village, to his uncle Revanna’s house, where he would be safer than at home: his uncle would never hand him over to the Mumbai police.

  When the engine restarted, a baby whimpered; Radha saw a black sobbing face, raw, wet, rising in front of him, like something just lifted out of the primeval pond: and then rising further, towards the ceiling of the bus. Its father was lifting the baby high up, so it could see there was nothing to fear from the noise: the child saw, and squealed. But to Radha’s ears it had roared like a lion in the jungle. He turned to the iron bars of the window in tears. My father never did that for me; never held me up like that so I could roar over the noise of the world. He watched the inverted parakeets. He wanted to bite the rusting bars of the window; yes, bite and break them, one by one: how else was he to tell God what he thought of having been given a man like Mohan Kumar for a father?

  When he looked up at the sky, the light of the new day seemed unbearable: for what did the morning have to do with a man like him, a man who was no longer good for cricket?

  ‘Close your eyes, Radha,’ a voice whispered; he obeyed. Fingers snapped in the dark; and then he saw, beneath a rusty grille, black water, which foamed and parted to reveal a domed creature with quick limbs rising up into the light.

  A small soft voice said: ‘Radha Krishna Kumar, elder brother of Manjunath Kumar, the morning will always have something to do with a man like you.’ Then the turtle sank back into the deep. Radha’s soiled and tensed body relaxed; though the light now struck his face directly, he slept.

  •

  To call, after you have been told not to call; to press the redial button after the dial tone has been silenced; to sleep with the phone next to your pillow in the hope that it will wake you up in the middle of the night; these are new experiences for a sixteen-year-old.

  Not a word in twenty days. Three weeks tomorrow.

  You can’t even pick up the phone when you know it’s me, Javed?

  Sitting in the last seat of a bus, Manju wore his earphones as he scrolled down the songs on his cell phone to find Eminem. Around him were Mumbai’s most promising under-19 players, selected by the Cricket Association; they were on their way to the P. J. Hindu Gymkhana for a ‘Friendly’.

  Manju had raised a round wall of music around him: yet in its centre, he sat, exposed, naked to any pair of eyes that knew of the pain that one boy could inflict on another.

  Someone turned to look at him, and at once the wall was breached: so Manju hid his deepest troubles behind others. There was only bad news of Radha from the village: their relatives complained that he sat in a corner and said nothing but ‘Punish me.’ And every day, as soon as Manju opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was Anand Mehta Sir ordering him to suck his whisky. There? Happy? He glared at the boy who was looking at him.

  Happy that I have troubles that someone like you can understand as troubles?

  Now he closed his eyes and thought of how Javed was treating him, just because he hadn’t left everything and gone to Navi Mumbai.

  I am not slave, he had texted him six times. You are not nice to me. Four times. I am coming but I can’t come right now. Twice.

  No reply.

  Now he wanted Javed’s hair to fall. Let it be eaten up, in widening bays of bald skin. Let that Muslim boy become ugly. Let him wish he had never met Manjunath Kumar.

  Slowing as it passed Chowpatty beach, the white bus stopped in front of the P. J. Hindu Gymkhana. When Manju opened his eyes he saw Tommy Sir standing outside.

  He clutched his cricket bag, pushed his way out of the bus, stopped and realized that the old scout had been waiting for him.

  Tommy Sir started to say something but Manju walked right past him.

  Tommy Sir found him in the dressing room of the pavilion, apart from all the other boys, earphones still plugged in to his cell phone.

 
Tommy Sir removed one of the boy’s earphones, put it into his own ear, and indicated his approval.

  ‘English music? Good. I too like English music.’ He relinquished the earphones but placed a hand on the boy’s thigh. ‘Manju. We have to talk. Look at me, I say, look at me. How is Radha doing? Is he okay?’

  The boy looked at him as if he failed to understand. Then Manju’s features changed.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Manju. Look at me. Answer my question.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the boy said.

  So Tommy Sir asked the question again, and for the third time, Manju, in the voice of one who was unmistakably enjoying himself, replied:

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Tommy Sir took a while to understand what was happening.

  All the other boys left the dressing room.

  Tommy Sir reached out to seize Manju’s shoulder to shake some sense into him, but his hand stopped in mid-air.

  Staring back at Tommy Sir, Manjunath Kumar looked like a Doberman barely restrained by a metal fence. Remembering what his elder brother had done to Deennawaz Shah, the violence in the blood of this family, Tommy Sir checked himself. But he hadn’t been scared of anything his whole life – and he certainly wasn’t going to be scared in a boys’ changing room.

  ‘Manju,’ he said, ‘because the selection match the other day was disrupted by your brother, everyone’s a bit nervous about the two Kumars, and the selectors just want to make sure you’re okay, so you have to come to Shivaji Park tomorrow and show—’

  Tommy Sir stopped breathing, for Manju’s face had turned darker and even more vicious.

  ‘You crazy, bloody . . .’ Tommy Sir first considered giving the boy a good slap on the head, but changed his mind, and then considered retreating from the room gracefully, but finally just turned and fled.

  •

  Posed like a hero in the old Hollywood movies, his right foot on the sea wall of Marine Drive, his head erect and scanning the ocean, white hair trembling in the breeze, Tommy Sir thought, ‘If I don’t have a cigarette, my brain will burst open.’ Having left the gymkhana, he had crossed the road for safety (glancing over his shoulder to make sure Manju wasn’t following), then continued to the other side of Marine Drive, and gone a distance for further safety, before stopping at the sight of an ocean liner that had entered into Back Bay. Though it was a life-long rule never to do this thing in the open, where some young impressionable boy might spot him, Tommy Sir now took out his packet of cigarettes and tapped on it.