The tin door opened; one brother came out, and so the other had to go in.
Now safe, Radha buttoned up his shirt, looking at the dark sky; he whistled. He put his hands on his thighs, spread his legs, and walked like a duck. To build strength on the insides of his thighs. Mohan Kumar, after minutely analysing his older son’s body, had pronounced the quadriceps as the problematic area of Radha’s athletic anatomy.
The brothers had exchanged their roles; inside the closed tin door, Manju was now the one making noises—outside, Radha eavesdropped.
‘Didn’t you take off your shirt and chaddi out there, while I was looking at your brother?’
‘Sorry, Appa.’
‘Don’t move. Manju. What are you doing? Stay still. You think you’ll insult me now? You think you’ll treat me like Tommy Sir or Coach Sawant?’
‘Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.’
The boy shrieked from inside the closed tin door. Outside, Radha kept walking with his arms on his legs like a duck, as his father had taught him, conscious with every step of the need to build up his weak inner thighs and overcome the flaw in his otherwise perfect body.
Inside, done with the teeth, tongue, forehead, neck, chest and stomach, Mohan Kumar was checking his second son’s particular area of recalcitrance: his failure, his refusal to take proper care of a sportsman’s penis.
‘Pull the foreskin back, each and every time you do number one, each and every time you bathe – pull it all the way back, otherwise it will become filthy, and filth will become septic, and we’ll need to operate on it. Which your father doesn’t have money for.’
Manju stood with arched back: his father had moved his foreskin back scientifically and now touched him with a finger. Manju felt his body splitting in two where his father touched. He said something.
‘What did you say?’ Mohan stared at his son. ‘Did you say “Enough of this shit?” Did you?’
Manju shook his head. Certainly he had not said that. So his father zipped him up: weekly inspection done.
Leaning against the wall as his sons did their pre-sleep stretching exercises, Mohan Kumar made a call to his village in Alur, to check on the status of a piece of ancestral land that was tangled in litigation; the boys saw their father use his cell phone as if it were two parts of a walkie-talkie, placing it in front of his mouth when he spoke, and transferring it back to his ear to listen.
Already in bed, waiting for his father to turn the lights out, Manju watched his elder brother dry himself, and lie down in the bed next to his. He watched his father stand by Radha’s skull and whisper into it: ‘Go to sleep with one thought, son. What is that one thought?’
‘That I should be the world’s best batsman.’
Manju knew it was coming. He stiffened his body; then his father whispered into his skull:
‘And your turn, Manju. Quickly, so I can turn the lights off.’
When the boy said nothing, his father’s voice changed, turning high-pitched and whining.
‘. . . fighting with his own father. Complex Boy. Fighting with his own . . .’
And he tickled Manju in the stomach until the boy gave in and said, ‘. . . second-best batsman . . .’ and ‘I love you, I love you.’
Manju’s legs were still thrashing and his big powerful eyes were shining. Because his father’s expert fingers were warming his tummy.
‘Angry with me?’ Mohan said.
‘Stop. Stop!’
‘You’re angry with me, Manju. I look into your heart and see the truth. No one has loved your poor old father in his life but you, Manju, and now even you fight with him. Listening? Yes, I know you are. The one thing I never had in life was a friend, Manju. A friend is someone who sees the best in you when everyone else sees the worst. I never had that. I only had you, my second son, to talk to.’
At last the man was gone to his side of the green curtain, and the world was quiet and dark, but beneath their closed eyelids both boys were awake.
‘Did he touch your balls this time?’ Radha said to the dark, as his brother sniffled in his bed.
‘Yes.’
‘Anything else?’
‘No. That’s all he ever does with me. With you?’
‘The same. Just examines my balls and cock. And lets me go. But I hate it.’
‘I hate it too.’
‘Manju,’ Radha said. ‘We’re going to be rich soon. You know this, right?’
He reached over and shook his brother. Radha had been, since the start of time, chief consoler and psychiatrist to the world’s second-best, but most intelligent, and most complex, young cricketer.
‘Manju, you know the first thing I’m going to do with the money? Buy you a bat. And you know from where? You know from where?’
Radha gave his little brother a good shake.
‘You do know from where.’
Every Sunday Radha took his brother to Dhobi Talao, the city’s sporting equipment district, full of shops glutted with fresh willow and lipstick-red match-quality balls covered in crackly cellophane. There the two boys went window-shopping from Metro Cinema all the way to a back lane, where, below a balcony with a red paper star from last Christmas and in between a store that sold golden sporting trophies and another that sold hard liquor in 180ml ‘quarters’, like the starting and finishing points of the average Indian male’s trajectory in life, was an open door that exhaled fragrant Kashmiri and English willow: Alfredo Athletic Centre. Some men are hand-made by God, Manju felt, and some are machine-made – Mr Alfredo, for sure, was machine-cut. With waxed moustache, black bowtie, and the halogen lights shining off his bald head, Mr Alfredo would kindly open a glass case to show the brothers a row of his best imported bats; kindly let them gaze at the best imported bats and discuss the best imported bats, and on some days, when in the kindliest of kindly moods, even let them touch the best imported bats. The moment they got that sponsorship cash, Radha Krishna Kumar and the world’s second-best batsman would wrap it in a handkerchief and run to Dhobi Talao and – and –?
‘SG Sonny Tonny.’ Radha tickled his brother. ‘Genuine English Willow! Wombat Select! World Cup Edition Yuvraj Singh Signature Edition! I’m taking your best imported, Kindly Alfredo – or your moustache!’
•
Closing the door of his home behind him so his sons could sleep, Mohan Kumar looked around, made sure he was alone, and then, by the light of a fluorescent streetlamp, slit open an envelope he had brought from the bank. The first instalment of the sponsorship money. Five thousand rupees in fresh cash. Rubbing the crisp notes between his fingers, he mentally divided them into three piles. One for the boys’ present (cricket equipment), one for the boys’ future (savings bank), and one pile (for this was a man who honours his contracts) for God, to be dropped into His collection box at the Chheda Nagar temple. He put the cash back in its envelope, leaned against the door of his home, and looked up at the night sky. He dialled on a phantom phone, waited till Lord Subramanya picked up in heaven, and then, both imitating and mocking the way in which the Indian elite speak English, told the God of Cricket: ‘Thank you soooooooo much, thaaaaaaaaank you s’much, Thank you soooo . . .’
•
Just inside the forest stood an old arch made of red laterite. No one knew who built this arch; but this kind of stone was not found anywhere nearby, and some people remembered that there was once a statue of a king on top of it. After sunset, people avoided this arch, because elephants and wild boar were known to sleep under it; but one boy was brave enough to go near it at night, and he found the spot loud with bullfrogs and louder with the twinkling of the millions of stars against which the arch etched its black shape. Sitting down on the forest floor, he looked up at all the stars, and felt himself a boy apart from all other boys in the world, resplendent, an uncrowned Adam.
Mohan Kumar had grown up in the poorest end of a poor taluk: Ratnagirihalli in Alur, in the foothills of the Western Ghats. As a boy, each morning at four, he stood on the back of an open lorry th
at took him to a coffee estate. There he signed his name in a long green register. Then he cleared twigs, dropped sunna from his forefingers in white circles around the plants, and watered the bushes, taking more care of the Arabica, and less care of the Robusta. At ten o’clock, the man supervising the estate paid him three and a half rupees, and he climbed back onto the open lorry. There was school for the rest of the day. He learnt to read and write. This was something new for his family. His dowry went up. Sex: with a prostitute out in the fields; marriage: to a girl from his own caste; employment: to the landowner who had hired his father; pilgrimage: to Kukke Subramanya, in the mountains of the Western Ghats, as soon as his wife fell pregnant. All this was as it had been for generations in his family.
But one morning a neighbour yelled, ‘Who is going to pay for the window?’
The window that had been broken by Mohan Kumar’s son in the most recent game of cricket.
Mohan looked at the broken glass and remembered what a boy in Mumbai had done to the windows in his neighbourhood. A boy named Sachin Tendulkar.
Now Mohan Kumar stood by passing trains and trucks and saw them in a different light. He observed highways and mighty things in a different light. He saw the sun, high over the peaks of the Western Ghats, charge from cloud to cloud like a soul in transmigration.
Mohan, Mohan – how people laughed. Why Mumbai? Take your son to Bangalore to learn cricket – it’s closer, cheaper!
Bombay it had to be. Mohan Kumar put his wife and Radha and his second son Manju into a bus and then into two trains before they descended into VT station in Mumbai to take a third train to his cousin’s small tin-roofed hut in a slum in Dahisar that was famous for its mechanical flour-mill, which ground wheat early morning and red chillies late morning. ‘Anything I touch in Mumbai turns into powder like that flour-mill makes,’ Mohan wrote to his brother Revanna back in the village. He had tried photocopying books, binding them, and selling them near the station; the police arrested him and kept him in lockup for a night. Ten lakh books are sold in black in Mumbai every day and he has to be put in lockup! Big Thief Walks Free. Small Thief Gets Caught. A year later he discovered his wife was fucking a Christian man near the train station. He waited for her, and bolted the door behind her. Never tell your mother lies, never tell your wife secrets. That was a golden proverb, why had he ever forgotten it? He made up for it with his hands. Nothing more than a man’s natural right, but next morning the social workers – six of them – barged in and told him to stop hitting his wife, or else go to jail again. Can you believe what they do to a man in this city? One night he returned home, and found that she had run away with his money and his honour. So he had nothing left; he lay in bed, and stared at the ceiling, and thought, I should just kill myself.
‘Get up, Mohan,’ a voice said. Though there was no one else in the room, he heard fingers snapping in the dark.
‘Why?’ he asked.
The invisible fingers snapped a second time: ‘Because I say so. Don’t you know who I am?’
Destiny, I suppose, he thought, and rose, and breathed in the crisp, energizing air of crisis.
Taking the bus all the way to a spot in Bandra where one could observe the new skyscrapers of Prabhadevi and Lower Parel, Mohan Kumar clenched a fist and held it over the kingdoms of Mumbai; after closing an eye to perfect the illusion, he brought his fist down on the city.
Except to grow a thin black moustache – a ‘statement’, he declared, of protest against his ill luck with women – he never complained; he never again looked back; he simply transferred all his hopes in life onto young Radha Kumar.
Old Sharadha came in every day to do the cooking. She made chutneys from green mango, lemon and raw guava, and Mohan Kumar tried to sell them. This meant that every day he cycled around Mumbai swallowing insults more pungent than any chutney he took with him; yet every night when he lay down to bed, he could say: ‘Today my son has become a stronger and better batsman.’ Mohan made Radha hold the cricket bat low down on the handle, exactly as Sachin had done. At the age of five he made Radha grow his hair long and pose with the bat for a black-and-white photo exactly as Sachin, Bacchus-haired, had posed at that age. At the age of seven he took Radha by train to Shivaji Park to listen to Ramakant Achrekar, exactly as seven-year-old Sachin had been taken to sit at the great Achrekar’s feet to learn the science of batsmanship.
Around this time, his second son also began to break windows when he was playing cricket.
•
‘Did you see how much money he had with him?’
‘Are you awake? You were snoring.’
‘I was pretending to be asleep. Just like you. Did you see the money?’
‘No. I didn’t see.’
‘Manju, you know what I did find on his cot the other day?’
‘What?’
‘Dirty magazines, Manju. You never saw these magazines?’
‘Don’t lie. Appa has no dirty magazines.’
‘You’re an innocent, Manju.’
Radha sat up in bed; his younger brother was turned away from him.
‘Whatever you’re thinking about, scientist, don’t keep it to yourself. Only girls do that . . .’
When Manju faced him, his eyes were narrowed, and a furrow cut into his brow, dark and slanting noticeably to the left. Radha remembered that the same flame-like furrow had appeared on their mother’s forehead when she was thinking: it was like a bookmark left there by the woman.
Manju looked at Radha. ‘When you become a famous cricketer and I’m your manager, do I have to give him all your money?’
‘I’ll kill you if you give him my money. It’s just for you and me.’
Radha kicked the body beside him, which kicked back; and each knew what the other meant to say. Let their father become old: they would make him beg for every rupee they gave him.
Every. Single. Rupee!
Both of Mohan Kumar’s sons, too, were becoming entrepreneurs of revenge.
Two years before Selection Day
NINTH STANDARD BEGINS
A fork-tailed black kite wheeled over the wet trees; a rainbow arched over the city. Beneath the circling kite stretched miles and miles of wet trees – banyans, neems, mangoes, gulmohars and palms – whose leaves glistened like ripples in a dark ocean. Rejecting raintrees, palmyrahs and coconut palms, the kite settled on an incongruous wonder, a Christmas pine planted at the highest point in south Mumbai: perched on its crown, the hunter surveyed the city, from Marine Drive to the new towers beyond Pedder Road.
Through ceiling-to-floor windows, Anand Mehta gazed down at the Hanging Gardens of Malabar Hill. Beside him stood a childhood friend, the owner of the windows and the view. Even the bad blood occasioned by their morning meeting, and his friend’s point-blank refusal to join in Anand Mehta’s latest business venture – cricket, two spectacularly talented slumboys, what could go wrong? – was dissolved by the spectacle before the two men. They remembered being young.
Assuring his friend, ‘No worries, mate,’ and inviting him over for dinner – Asha’s home-made strawberry ice-cream! – Mehta left to make the same pitch to another investor in Nariman Point.
He drove down to Chowpatty.
One hand on the steering wheel, he removed his cell phone from his trouser pocket to find that all six new text messages were from Mohan Kumar.
Pls call must talk sons
He scrolled down to the next, which read:
Must talk sons
Before he could read the third, the phone began ringing.
‘I keep sending you updates on my sons, but you never respond, Mr Mehta. There is something I must say . . .’
‘Mohan Kumar, I am driving. The police are cracking down on cell phones. Please.’
‘No, you must listen to me, Mr Mehta. It is now one year since we started.’
‘As honoured as I am by your involvement in my scheme,’ Anand Mehta looked at the roof of his car, and raised his voice, ‘I cannot pay more. We haven?
??t seen results yet. Goodbye.’
The first time he met the father of the boys, Anand Mehta was sure he could place the man: an Indian version of that Manhattan bartender you meet sometimes – Mexican, shaved headed, bushy eyebrows, just a touch of Spanish in his accent, who asks if your MacBook Air is thirteen-inch or eleven-inch, and how much memory it has, two gig or four, and who has an expert opinion on every cocktail but will confide with a quiet grin, ‘I never drink, sir,’ and who secretly aspires, one day, to run the Gringo establishment he is now a servant of. Yes, that was this chap, this Mohan Kumar: a Mumbai incarnation of that Mephistophelean Mexican bartender. But guess who owned the bar? Ha Ha. And that is why the deal happened.
But now, as the father’s text messages kept coming, and coming, irritating Anand Mehta so much he had to stop at Chowpatty on the way back, at Café Ideal, to order a beer, he had to fight the feeling that this cricket venture might just possibly be a very stupid idea.
Mehta was not one of those Parsi gentlemen whose Uncle Freddy or Firdaus would any day now be found cold by the nurse inside Cusrow Baug, leaving his nephew a million in the will. If he lost money he bled.
Anand Mehta thought of a friend, the managing director of the Indian branch of a German bank, who knew someone at the construction firm that built the Bandra–Worli Sea Link. This contact had given him a free pass for the Sea Link – lifetime validity. The banker had millions of dollars in his accounts, three homes in Mumbai, a slim mistress in Pali Naka, yet he hoarded one more privilege. Fortune favours those already fortunate.
Mehta’s father had been a stockbroker. There had been a family tradition, handed down from generation to generation, of gently ripping off loyal customers. But Anand had quit that racket: the one known as A Normal Life. Thousands of his generation and social class were still living that normal life: for eight hours a day they sat in their air-conditioned offices in Nariman Point and spoke English to their clients, after which they sat in their air-conditioned cars and spoke Hindi to their drivers, after which they sat at their air-conditioned dinner tables and spoke Gujarati to their mothers. Anand Mehta had been a communist for a semester and a half; but then, changing his politics, he had read Kahlil Gibran and Friedrich Nietzsche; had gone to New York to study business and have a love affair with a black New Yorker; had enjoyed life in that meritocratic metropolis, a coliseum of competing nationalities and races (but of all these pulsing ethnicities, one stood out: driven, Anglophone, numerate, and freed by post-colonial entitlement from almost all forms of liberal guilt or introspection – and of this privileged group, Anand Mehta intended to be the most privileged, because he was the one Indian financial analyst who had read Nietzsche); until, finally, one long night, he had consumed marijuana in three different forms and stood on a rock by a lake in Central Park and decided to resign his mid-town desk job and confront human potentiality face-to-face in its locus of maximum remaining concentration, which is to say, East, South East, and South Asia. Anand Mehta was going home. The disappointments that await a young Indian in America, alas, are minor compared to the disappointments that await him on his return to India. It hurt Mehta that not a soul in Mumbai – not even his mother, and certainly not his wife – knew what a sacrifice there had been, Manhattan and Central Park given up for Chowpatty and Shitty Park. He summed up his predicament in a recurring mid-morning fantasy: ‘Nuclear war has broken out, Anand. You can save only one city on earth. Choose.’ Anand Mehta saved Mumbai, home of his family and culture, of course – but then flew to New York and unbuttoned his shirt to die with everyone there.