Fine, he told his mother, I’ve given up mid-town Manhattan for you – but don’t expect me, please, to settle for just another stockbroker’s life. And so, for over a decade now, while his ageing father continued to sell securities from his Nariman Point office, Anand Mehta, from a large annexe in that office filled with computers, far-sighted business journals, and sacred piles of The Economist magazine, had been scheming, speculating, and squandering his family’s money. He bought big in Thane and Navi Mumbai and sold small; he had been cheated by an Englishman in Dubai and two Lithuanians in Abu Dhabi; and he had dabbled in and been dabbled out of Bollywood.
He licked his wounds; he recovered.
With a childless man’s passion for the crucial battles of World War Two, Mehta opened a Reader’s Digest Illustrated History and read again about Operation Barbarossa. He drank Scotch, and drove down to a two-star hotel near Gamdevi that was melodious with moonlighting college girls. In the mornings he washed his face and made new plans.
Movies gone, real estate gone: so what the fuck is left in Mumbai?
Two years ago, over a long breakfast at the Willingdon Club, Anand Mehta had heard from a ‘top’ friend, a member of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, a close analysis of a celebrated India versus Sri Lanka one-dayer from the 1990s. It was a fixed match, the BCCI man said. ‘You remember that ludicrous last over, don’t you? Now you understand why the two of them batted the way they did. I don’t know if you noticed back then, but there were endless stoppages in the final overs. Why? Simple. To let one of the physiotherapists take messages to the batsmen, warning them what would happen if they didn’t throw the game, as they had agreed to do – because the physio, you see, is the person no one ever suspects.’
‘So the match really was fixed?’
‘Phixed. Which is to say, it was done in our dismal, derivative, scatterbrained South Asian way, which leaves everything to the last minute and makes life so much more exciting.’
‘Wow. This is brilliant. Fucking brilliant. This is cricket!’
Flushed with this ‘inside’ look into the game everyone else in India only thought they knew, Mehta suggested that the Board of Control for Cricket in India (seriously North Korean name, that) start retailing a DVD box-set: Golden Moments of Match-Fixing, only 1,999 rupees, for Diwali, so that Indians could finally learn the truth about their most cherished national memories.
One day Anand Mehta wanted to do it himself – ‘phix’ a match – an international match.
In the bar, Mehta drank beer after beer, savouring the ocean breeze, the camaraderie of the students with their college badges around their necks, and the hint, which grew stronger with every sip, that a good life could still be lived in Mumbai.
After a couple of hours, he drove to his home on the eleventh floor of Maker Tower ‘J’ Block at nine thirty that evening. His parents were asleep.
The windows in the living room were open, and the sea breeze was divine – every one of the six rooms in the flat that his father had bought, even the bathrooms, enjoyed an unimpeded ocean view – but Asha, his wife, had to ruin the effect by insisting that they review ‘this business of cricket sponsorship’ on its one-year anniversary.
Madness. That was what she thought. Giving all this money to boys from the slums. Had he forgotten the cricket academy racket he was running in Azad Maidan, wasn’t that earning them a steady income every summer?
‘These two are sensational, you should see them,’ Mehta protested. ‘Only fat rich boys came to the academy.’
Over dessert Asha’s mood always became worse.
What if the two sensations ran away from Mumbai with the money and went back to their village? Did Anand take any guarantee? This was exactly the kind of trusting and neurotic nature that had ruined every one of her husband’s business deals.
And Asha hardly had to remind him of the time – before their marriage – when he actually gave money to a school for slum children, did she? Neurotic Man.
When Madame Mehta finally allowed him a chance to speak, Anand – with a Gotcha smile – pointed his dirty ice-cream spoon at her.
‘You know what it means in India when a woman calls her husband neurotic?’
Although she knew better, his wife asked, ‘What?’
‘ “My husband’s neurotic” means, he doesn’t like my mother. “He’s psychotic” means, he doesn’t like me. Am I right or am I usual right? Listen: this is why I’ve made a good deal this time. In fact it’s a great deal. Because they’re honest.’
As he did when excited, he smoothed out his moustache with his left hand.
‘Mumbai is a dying city, true. But there is one thing that it will always have. One beautiful thing. Integrity. The integrity of the Bombay common man, known and celebrated throughout India, deeper than granite, the true bedrock of the city. True?’
Perhaps, Asha nodded, with her mouth full of ice-cream. Perhaps.
‘One thing I knew, the moment I saw the chutney salesman. He’ll sell his sons if he has to, but he’ll pay me back.’ Using his spoon, Anand drew a rectangle in the air. ‘Guaranteed.’
‘Why do you think people in Mumbai are honest?’ Asha, still non-committal, scraped the bottom of the bowl with her spoon.
She answered her own question.
‘It must be the Parsi influence. We had lots of Parsis once upon a time, and they’re a straightforward people.’
‘No, no, no.’ Anand scraped his own bowl faster, knowing that he was drawing close to the moment of Memsaab’s consent for his continued sponsorship of the two slum boys.
‘It’s the Gujarati influence. We’re an even more straightforward people.’
And now the whole family, even the domestic help busy with the dishes in the kitchen, laughed.
•
From their bedroom, Asha Mehta looked down on the rows of fishing boats buzzing with blue and red electric lights, docked right outside the Maker Towers compound for the 4 a.m. launch into the ocean to gather fish and prawns; as she lay in bed, she heard boisterous male laughter, battery-operated radios playing film songs, bodies splashing in the water, and the tk-tk of wooden prows knocking into one another. Beyond the water, Nariman Point, and beyond it, all of south Mumbai coruscated. Then Anand walked in, a smile on his lips and the future under his armpit: a rolled-up A4 sheet, covered with calculations, which he brought into bed and unfurled against the light. There. He showed Asha the figures for one year’s investment in cricket sponsorship. He had made payments worth 60,000 rupees to the two boys, plus a loan of 50,000 rupees to the father, plus 24,000 rupees to the old scout. In this same period of twelve months, he knew for a fact that the typical marketing contract of a player on the Indian national team had gone up, according to his ‘inside’ connection in the Cricket Board, to between 45,00,000 and 60,00,000 rupees. Radha Kumar had gained two inches in height, four kilos of weight (pure dark muscle); the younger fellow, Manju, had gained only an inch and a half, and three kilos of weight, of which half appeared to have accumulated as pimples. All that was on the positive side of the ledger.
On the negative side – Mehta sighed, and turned the lights off – whereas, a year ago, the father of these two geniuses was crazy in a basically good way, now he was becoming crazy in basically the other way.
‘What’s wrong?’ Asha asked, squinting. Turning the lights on in the bedroom, her husband had gone to stand by the window and watch the happy boats below them. The truth was, Anand Mehta also had his doubts about the visionary cricket sponsorship programme—doubts which were rekindled on the first of each month, when Mohan Kumar turned up at his office and looked at the white envelope in Mehta’s hand which held that month’s cheque. Because Kumar’s eyes had in them what Anand Mehta called a ‘pre-liberalization stare’, an intensity of gaze common in people of the lower class before 1991, when the old socialist economy was in place, and which you found these days only in Communists, terrorists, and Naxalites: the wrathful gaze of those who could not po
ssess things, but only waste them. What he saw in that mad father’s eyes was not milk and honey for his sons: it was fire.
•
My Appa is once again a magician! – and I want the whole world to know this. If he promises something, anything, that thing will come true! Can your father do that? Or your father?
The anticipation began well before the last day of the month, when Manju would start tugging on his father’s shirt and ask, ‘Is it time? Is it time?’ And then, on the first day of the new month, the Younger Asset went with Mohan Kumar to Mr Anand Mehta’s office in Nariman Point, waiting in the lobby while a clerk brought the money in a white envelope and counted it out; then the Younger Asset returned with his father by train to Dahisar and walked with him to the bank and eavesdropped as he expounded to the branch manager on developments in the gold and real-estate markets.
The truth was, Mohan Kumar’s magic seemed to be growing more powerful by the day. Calling the two boys in for their medical check-up one morning – Radha, as usual, quiescent; Manju, as usual, squirming and complaining as his father examined his genitals – Mohan said: ‘Neither of my sons loves me anymore. Even when I give them a new home to live in.’
New Home? Manju gaped. He ran to his father and embraced him.
Mohan Kumar had finally been able to sell that piece of family land in Alur, and Anand Mehta’s loan of 50,000 rupees was in a fixed deposit in Canara Bank, and they had been saving two thousand rupees, month after month, for over a year. All of which meant, ‘my two sons who have always doubted your own father, that . . .’
•
Manju ran screaming at the black Dahisar river. He went bullocking down the bridge. There was always a group of unemployed young men lounging about here, listening to a cell-phone radio. They smoked and watched the crazy boy.
‘Boy!’
‘Mad boy, come here. Why are you shouting up and down the bridge?’
With a sweet smile, hands behind his back, Manju walked up to them. ‘I’m not mad, I’m Radha Kumar’s brother. My father has made lots of money and now we’re going to leave third-class people like you and move to a first-class place like Chembur.’
They chased; he ran.
And two mornings later, it all came true.
Mohan Kumar, breeder of champions, had walked over the river, and through the WELCOME TO OUR HOME arch holding three chrome-plated keys upright, displaying them first to the politicians of the arch, to let them know he was escaping their clutches for good, and then to his neighbours, one by one, while he said: ‘Did you laugh at me when I said I’d be famous, Ramnath? I think you did. You definitely did – didn’t you, Girish?’
Done with such taunts, Mohan Kumar offered a few words of valedictory wisdom to the inhabitants of the Shastrinagar slum.
‘Age sixteen to eighteen is the danger zone. Kambli and Sachin, both were talented. But only one became a legend. Why? Everything is falling to pieces in this country. Everything. Boys are taking drugs. Boys are driving cars. Boys are shaving.’
Some of the neighbours had brought along their sons and their cricket bats for Mohan Kumar to bless: perhaps God’s grace was contagious.
Only old Ramnath’s mood was sour. Standing in the window of his hut, apart from the rest of the crowd, pressing clothes with his coal-fired iron, he grumbled:
‘Gulli-Danda is the real game of skill. Cricket? Cricket was brought here by the Britishers to entrap us.’
Mohan Kumar smiled.
Ramnath continued. ‘Indians should play Indian sports. Kho-Kho, Kabbadi, buffalo-racing in the monsoons.’
Mohan Kumar began to laugh: it was the loudest laugh he had had since getting on the train to Mumbai.
‘Pack up,’ he told his boys.
Old Sharadha was not told to pack up. They would have a domestic servant in the new place. They were that kind of people now, the kind of people who hired other people.
Chheda Nagar was not just any suburb: in its heart stood a Subramanya temple, a satellite of the shrine of the thousand-year-old God of Cricket in the Western Ghats, and for a decade the three Kumars had gone there by local train to pray and to consecrate new bats, gloves and pads. Once they moved to Chheda Nagar, they could visit the God of Cricket, or at least a reflection of Him, every morning.
Nor was the Tattvamasi Housing Society, Chheda Nagar, just any housing society.
Only when their father held open the wooden door bearing the nameplate ‘B.B. Balasubramaniam’ (the landlord who had sucked 40,000 rupees out of them as a security deposit), and told them to go in, Radha first, did the boys start to believe it. Manju entered, touching the wall with both hands. Can this really be our new home? Overnight, they had become the kind of people who had a working air-conditioner, a big grey fridge, and a largely automatic washing machine. A wooden cupboard just for cricketing gear, equipment, food supplements and antibiotics. Attached to it, a full-length mirror, so they could rehearse their strokes at any time of day or night.
‘This is the reason I picked the Tattvamasi Building.’
Mohan Kumar opened a window, and pointed to something down below. Standing on either side of their father, the boys saw a little courtyard in between the concrete back wall of their housing society and the brick front wall of the neighbouring building. ‘Find your bats, pray, and go. First practice in our new home.’
So, ten minutes after they had taken possession of their new flat, the two boys were ordered out of it. From the window, Mohan Kumar waited for his sons to start using that beautiful brick wall.
But life, of course, can never be perfect. For four nights after they had moved in to the new home, when Mohan turned on their television, he and his sons found themselves witnessing the birth of a new Young Lion.
A star rises on the horizon: not in the city, the traditional nursery of cricketing wizardry, but across the creek, in the suburb of Navi Mumbai. Here, in Vashi, they gather every evening inside the Adil Housing Society to see a handsome young man practise while his father bowls at him. Is this youngster, as some believe, the best batsman Mumbai has produced in the last fifty years?
A stylish left-hander in the David Gower mould, Javed Ansari, a fifteen-year-old student of the Ali Weinberg School in Bandra, has got Mumbai’s sporting cognoscenti excited by his graceful strokeplay. He has already scored four centuries, six half centuries and two double centuries this year. Cricket is in his blood: Javed is a nephew of Ranji Trophy middle-order star Imtiaz Ansari, who now represents Yorkshire county in England. In addition, his father, a textbook importer in Vashi, once donned the flannels for Aligarh University and has been a cricket commentator for the BBC Hindi service.
Young Lions spoke to Mr Ansari and found he does not approve of his offspring’s single-minded devotion to the gentleman’s game. ‘Ninth Standard is the hardest year in school. Now is when you have to start studying for the Board Exams.’
‘So you would like to see him do something other than cricket?’
‘Do you think youngsters today will listen to anyone, even their fathers? Javed is hell-bent on playing for Mumbai, and then for India, and no one on earth will stop him.’
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Turning off the television, Mohan Kumar spat on the floor of his new home.
‘Go down there,’ he told his sons, ‘and start practising right now.’
•
No more long train rides for Manju and Radha; they were now living on the school bus route. Sitting at the back, they startled pedestrians with rude gestures, and fought with their classmates, as the bus wound its way from Chembur towards Carter Road, and into the lane known as ‘Ali’s Education Corner’, slowing as it went past the Karim Ali College of Law, the Karim Ali College of Arts and Sciences, the Karim Ali College of Dental Science, and Karim Ali College of Medical and Alternative Medical Sciences, before it stopped at the Ali Weinberg International School.
But th
e moment the Kumars got down from the bus, they found a Honda City parked outside the school, as if it had been waiting just for them. A pair of legs emerged from the open door, while the rest of the body, visible in silhouette behind the dark window, reclined on the seat and composed a message on a cell phone.