Selection Day

  Manju, for the first time in his life, seriously considered conversion to Islam.

  ‘Do they all look like the Nawab of Pataudi, these gay mullahs?’

  ‘No, only I do. Idiot.’

  Javed sat by the bed, smelling of wet hair and a light musk cologne; Manju smiled and closed his eyes. Without opening them, Manju drew nearer to Javed, nearer the cologne. His finger ran down his friend’s neck to his chest.

  ‘Stop doing that.’

  Pushing him away, Javed stood up; he clacked his tongue. ‘You’re going to change your mind in two minutes. I know you.’

  Manju opened his eyes. ‘I won’t change my mind.’

  Javed regarded him with a frown, and then looked away.

  ‘Anyway, the first thing is to say goodbye to cricket. I have a plan.’

  Manju sighed. ‘What is this plan?’

  Simple: Manju was not going to leave Navi Mumbai today under any circumstances. The cricket people were not going to get their hands on him.

  Before he let him sleep, Javed asked Manju to surrender his cell phone. Sixteen missed calls. And twelve text messages.

  ‘Is this Tommy Sir’s number?’

  Manju said nothing.

  ‘You can’t talk to Tommy Sir, or he’ll spin your head and make you go back.’

  ‘I’ll kill Tommy Sir if I ever see him again. Seriously.’

  ‘Cool it, dude. You’re tired and confused. You’re talking crazy.’

  Unable to sleep, the young cricketer thrashed his legs on the golden bed, till he heard Javed say,

  ‘There’s something underneath it. Put your hand down there.’

  Manju’s hands searched – and came out with a comic book.

  As he lay in bed and read about the Fantastic Four, a sparrow flew into the room to sit on the blades of the ceiling fan. The stumpy fan trembled as the bird hopped from one blade to another. Watching that old fan, which seemed so familiar, Manju felt as if he had been living in that room for years and years.

  Covering his face with the comic book, he breathed in and out, his eyes still open. He was so tired of batting out of, breathing out of, living out of, going to sleep out of rage.

  •

  Around eleven, wrapped in a golden bedsheet, Manjunath awoke.

  Javed was sitting by the bed, examining his cell phone with a grin.

  ‘Tommy Sir has called you two hundred and forty-two times since you got here.’ He chuckled. ‘He’s still calling you. You can still go back.’ Javed offered him the phone, which was ringing again.

  Manju shook his head. The sparrow was still up there on the ceiling fan.

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes,’ Manju said. He let Javed keep his cell phone, and said, ‘I finished Fantastic Four. You have X-Men?’

  •

  The next day was Friday. While he was brushing his teeth, Javed said, sure, it was okay for him to go to Mumbai: no danger from cricket now.

  He took the train to Matunga station. At Ruia, he was called to the Principal’s office; Tommy Sir had informed them that he had run away.

  ‘I am not living with my father, sir. I am sixteen and a half years old.’

  The Principal pinched together the wings of his nose and shook his head.

  ‘My father is a violent man, who has beaten me in the past,’ Manju told him. ‘He may try to do so again. Being also an unintelligent man, he is unaware that I am now stronger than he is, and I might accidentally hurt him, or even kill him. In which case my only regret would be wasting the rest of my life in jail over a man like my father.’

  His fingers still pinching his nostrils, the Principal’s mouth opened.

  Manju took the train back to Vashi, and walked down the road, past the Golden Punjab Hotel, to Javed’s flat, to give him the good news: the college had agreed he need not live with his father.

  But when he returned to Javed’s flat there was another teenager sitting on the bed with the golden bedsheet, and sharing a cigarette with Javed.

  ‘Manju, this is my friend Ranjith,’ Javed said, putting a hand on the newcomer. ‘My dear Big Boss, that is Manju.’

  ‘Look at this chap,’ Ranjith said. ‘Where did you find this fellow, Javed?’

  ‘Cricket,’ Javed said.

  Manju and the boy on the bed examined each other. A tuft of blonde hair grew under Ranjith’s lower lip. He wore braces on his teeth, but had blue tattoos on each of his smooth arms, and smelled one part tobacco or pot, other part superior cologne.

  Manju’s nostrils suddenly longed for home. He waved away the cigarette smoke.

  Ranjith took a final drag at the cigarette, and then flicked it out of the window.

  ‘That must be the best place to find them, no? All that dressing up in white, so romantic.’

  Manju had never seen Javed like this before: he nodded demurely at everything Ranjith said, and hunched forward, arms folded across his chest, lips pursed tight, looking almost scared of the boy with the blond tuft.

  Ranjith slapped him on the back: Javed shook.

  ‘Buddy,’ Ranjith said, ‘we must all go to Mad Max racing in Powai. Have you told the little cricketer about the bike racing? Dude, Cricketer, you know that each of us takes his bike – you do have a bike, right? – and goes from Powai all the way to Bandra without stopping. Let the police shout, let them chase, we keep going. Because we aren’t frightened of the police, or anyone else, are we, Javed?’

  ‘No, we’re not frightened,’ Javed said, and laughed, almost painfully.

  Manju got it now: his own lies were deflating Javed. He was scared of the police. He was also scared of this boy, Ranjith.

  So when Ranjith asked, ‘Javed, are you ready for the challenge on Tuesday?’ Manju sat on the bed between the two.

  ‘Javed is not coming for Mad Max anymore,’ Manju declared. ‘You get caught by the police this time. Don’t get us into trouble.’

  Ranjith gaped. Manju heard Javed’s voice behind him.

  ‘Don’t talk to him like that. He’s my friend.’

  Ranjith smiled over Manju’s head. ‘Mad Max on Tuesday, Javed?’ He stood up.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t bring any inexperienced types along with you.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  The door slammed shut.

  Manju’s face had gone numb, like it did after his father slapped him: tears filled the corners of his eyes as he looked at the golden bedsheet, where Ranjith’s arse had left an impression. Maybe Javed had brought him to Navi Mumbai only to show him off to Ranjith and the rest of the Mad Max gang. Here is the boy who I took away from cricket. Here is my catch. And in a day or two, his cricket career finished, the maidservant would open the door, and say, ‘Get out.’

  Manju could feel Javed sitting right by him on the bed.

  Was he going to gloat now? Was he going to tease Manju for being a virgin? He looked at Javed: but he could not see into him. The only mind in the whole world he could not read was Javed’s: for what we discover, when we think we are discovering someone else’s thoughts, is our own diminished expectations of them. And the one person Manju could not create a diminished version of was this beak-nosed boy.

  ‘What? What are you angry about this time?’

  Each second that Ranjith was gone, Javed visibly reverted, sat more upright, and seemed more like himself.

  ‘I’m not going to Mad Max. Are you happy, Sir Manju? I just said I was going, to keep Ranjith quiet. Who wants to go to Powai anyway? This is where I want to go. Look up.’

  Javed sketched a ‘V’ in the air.

  He had it all planned out. As soon as the holidays came, Manju and he were going to rent a motorbike, and drive from Bangalore to Alur to see Radha, and from there to Mangalore, and then – Javed sketched that magic ‘V’ a third time, signifying the entire coast of India – drive top-speed all the way down to Kanyakumari, tip of the subcontinent, and there they were going to find that black rock that Swami Vivekananda had stood on with folded arms
and they were going to adopt the same macho posture and take selfies of each other and become very enlightened, and smoke a shit load of ganja. Manju had done ganja, right?

  ‘What motorbike are we going on?’ Manju had to ask.

  So Javed showed him, parked against the compound wall of his housing society: a black Royal Enfield bike, formerly his father’s.

  ‘Can I sit on it, Javed?’

  Yes! Of course! Captain – don’t be such an ass!’

  So Manju got to sit on a motorbike for the first time, touched its metal surface, gripped its handles, and smiled. When he got down, uncertain how to use the foot-stand, he leaned the bike against the compound wall; and then, with an elbow, he rammed into Javed, driving the taller boy back.

  ‘Don’t call me Captain. Don’t ever call me Captain again.’

  Javed chuckled.

  They played with the bike for three hours, and Javed showed Manju how to take it for a ride around the compound. Tomorrow they could start driving on the road.

  •

  ‘O, I do read Indian novels sometimes. But you know, Ms Rupinder, what we Indians want in literature, at least the kind written in English, is not literature at all, but flattery. We want to see ourselves depicted as soulful, sensitive, profound, valorous, wounded, tolerant and funny beings. All that Jhumpa Lahiri stuff. But the truth is, we are absolutely nothing of that kind. What are we, then, Ms Rupinder? We are animals of the jungle, who will eat our neighbour’s children in five minutes, and our own in ten. Keep this in mind before you do any business in this country.’

  And Anand Mehta sipped some more Diet Coke.

  Dressed in a grey business suit, holding a glass of sparkling water in her hand, young Ms Rupinder controlled her smile, and asked: ‘Has it been a bad day for you, then?’

  ‘You could say that,’ Anand Mehta smiled at his interlocutor. ‘I’ve been meeting hipsters all day. The sons of my classmates. All of them are stock-brokers like Daddy, but they’ve also become hipsters.’

  The young Punjabi-American businesswoman struggled again with laughter. ‘Hipsters? Here in India?’

  ‘O, yes, Ms Rupinder. Our trains aren’t running, our roads are full of potholes, but our cities are bounteous with hipsters. Without understanding what capitalism means, we’ve vaulted’ – Mehta made an aeroplane with his palm – ‘straight to post-capitalist decadence. What is an Indian, after all? Picture today’s young man from Mumbai or Delhi as a vulture above the nations, scavenging for his identity. He sees a pretty thing in Dubai, and he brings it home; he sees a pretty thing in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and he brings it home. One day he looks at his life, finds that it makes no sense at all, and then he turns to religion. Now, Ms Rupinder, I would like to give my portfolio folder, which has information about my two visionary ventures . . .’

  A Paradoxography is a book illuminated by monks in the Middle Ages, and in his New York years, Anand Mehta had once seen a whole bunch of Paradoxographies lying under a panel of glass at the Morgan Library: each page glistening with impossible creatures, centaurs, unicorns, half-man half-fish, fanged things tamed by the touch of a saint, that sort of thing. Right now, standing in this glittering hall of the Grand Hyatt Hotel, Mehta felt he was living inside a Paradoxography, surrounded by a bestiary of financial analysts, brokers and bankers who had been transformed, from the waist down, into Mother Teresa. Officially, it was a gathering of social entrepreneurs from around the world, looking for business in India. One man, a former Lehman banker, was now running a corporate social responsibility consultancy, and this chap, who had worked with Bill Miller at Legg Mason, had developed software that increased corporate donations to primary education by 25 per cent, and that white guy, once in junk bonds, was now in windmills. Mehta discovered from him that the big game in Indian bio-renewables was no longer Rice Husks. ‘It’s all about Elephant Grass these days. We have three fields in Assam already. What’s your big idea?’

  And young Ms Rupinder here, to whom he had just explained all about hipsters – authentic stock-broking Gujarati hipsters – represented a venture fund in Iowa City that apparently wanted to ‘both do well and do good in India’. Right up my alley, dear lady: Anand Mehta sipped more Diet Coke, as the young Punjabi-American woman, who reminded him in some ways of his own wife Asha, before she put on weight, examined the brochures in his folder.

  ‘This doesn’t interest me much,’ the American snapped her fingers at one brochure, ‘the old power plants. But this,’ she snapped at another, ‘tell me more about this.’

  ‘Modelled closely on the US college athletic scholarship programmes,’ Mehta added, as he told her all about young Manjunath Kumar, his fully sponsored little superman.

  ‘Except,’ Ms Rupinder said, as she returned the folder, ‘isn’t it illegal, what you’re doing? I mean, it would be in America: you can’t bribe boys to play football or basketball until they’re eighteen. Very strictly enforced. They send college coaches to prison all the time over this.’

  ‘Nothing’s illegal in India,’ Anand Mehta replied with a smile. ‘Because, technically, everything’s illegal in India. You see how it works, Ms Rupinder?’ He had not been wrong: this woman really did remind him of Asha.

  He gave her his card anyway.

  An hour later, done with the paradox-people and their bullshit, a little bit tipsy from all that free Indian champagne (he had promised Asha, who worried he was turning ‘psychotic’, that he wouldn’t drink for a month – but not that he wouldn’t reject free drinks), Mehta walked out of the hotel, and into an autorickshaw, and said, ‘Bandra Kurla Complex.’ Well before they came to the financial centre, he told the auto to stop at a bridge with a view of the Mithi river, and got down. Some shade of colour between grey and black, tinged with the dark green of the brave trees growing on its banks, the ravaged Mithi river, into which all the city’s effluent and shit flowed untreated, moved towards the ocean slowly, sluggishly, and indecisively – so human-like in its movement, Anand thought. In the middle of the river, an old man, shirtless above his blue lungi, rowed a boat with a single oar, as he searched for something in the murky water. What the fuck are you fishing for? Nothing lives in this toxic river of Mumbai. As if agreeing with Mehta’s assessment, the old man turned his boat around, and began moving back to shore. Now Anand Mehta’s sense of scale changed. He watched the old man struggle, with his thin tough arms, to take his little boat against the current. Pitted against a human’s strength, the dying river had become a powerful thing. ‘Do well and do good,’ Mehta said aloud and smiled. A decade ago, when he returned to India, Anand had imagined that matters would be as simple as floating along a river. Yes, he would lead the good life – servants, a big flat, a wife, home-cooked food, weekend fucks in air-conditioned hotels near technical colleges – but he would also do good things for his motherland. It would be simple enough, he had imagined. There would be Rotary Clubs and Blood Banks on every street – a man would just have to sign up and show his face on Sunday mornings; moral glow would be one of the ancillary benefits of living in India. Now, watching that old man strain his muscles to row his boat, Anand Mehta wondered: what if doing good in India was like going against the current? You can barely make a buck here, and in earning it, what if you end up screwing the poor, the people you imagined you would help a bit in your spare time? The boat struggled to reach dry land; Anand Mehta dreamed of New York.

  When the smell from the river became overpowering, he took an autorickshaw to Bandra, and from there a taxi over the Sea Link bridge and all the way to the Cricket Club, where he settled down into his favourite veranda table for tea and toast – which was precisely when the bombshell landed.

  Tommy Sir called and told.

  Manju was gone. After three years and two months, the cricket sponsorship programme was over. A table shook; breadcrumbs scattered and tea spilled on the tablecloth.

  ‘Gone?’ Mehta asked Tommy Sir. ‘Gone where? Gone why? What the fuck are you talking about? I could be on the
verge of getting some woman from a venture fund in Iowa City to take this boy from me, how can he be gone now?’

  ‘Goldenboy is gone,’ Tommy Sir said quietly. ‘He ran away. He didn’t come to the selection match in Shivaji Park. His career is over.’

  ‘Where is he now? With his brother? That other criminal?’

  ‘No. He’s in Navi Mumbai.’

  ‘Why has he gone to Navi Mumbai?’

  But Tommy Sir hung up.

  In the next few minutes, Anand Mehta came up with the following observations about cricket: that it was a fraud, and at the most fundamental level. Only ten countries play this game, and only five of them play it well. If we had any self-respect, we’d finally grow up as a people and play football. No: let’s not expose ourselves to real competition, much safer to be in a ‘world cup’ against St Kitts and Bangladesh. Self-obsession without self-belief: the very definition of the Indian middle class, which is why it loves this fraud sport.

  Poised to offer the world more deep thoughts about the gentleman’s game, Mehta heard:

  Shot! Bloody Good Shot!

  A blue screen on the veranda of the Cricket Club protected club members from the matches played in the Brabourne stadium; it rippled, and two boys in white rushed towards the dark red ball rolling about the base of the screen.

  Confronted by the sound and smell of an instant of real cricket, Mehta felt all his mighty observations turn to ashes.

  In the evening, after a tele-con with Rakesh the IAS officer’s son (whose cough, thank God, had improved), Mehta booked another flight to Delhi, to meet a political connection before taking the train to Dhanbad to work on his distressed power plant. He seemed to be in high spirits. ‘We’ll have to do battle out there for our power plant, Rakesh,’ he declared, ‘so let’s do battle.’

  But in truth, the end of his cricket sponsorship programme had shaken Anand Mehta more than he admitted even to himself, and he was going to need a long holiday when he returned to Mumbai.

  For this too, is hell: knowing you are not – and can never be – as good as you want to be.