Tania James - Aerogrammes - and Other Stories

They meet at the Alhambra, a sprawling pavilion of arches and domes, its name studded in bulbs that blaze halos through the fog. Inside, golden foliage and gilded trees climb the walls. Men sit shoulder to shoulder around the roped-off ring, and behind them, more men in straw boaters and caps, standing on bleachers, making their assessments of Gama the Great, the dusky bulk of his chest, the sculpted sandstone of each thigh. Imam sits ringside next to Mr. Benjamin, in a marigold robe and turban. He is a vivid blotch in a sea of grumpy grays and browns. He feels slightly overdressed.

Gama warms his muscles by doing bethaks . He glances up but keeps squatting when Roller swings his long legs over the ropes, dauntingly tall, and whips off his white satin robe to reveal wrestling pants, his abdominal muscles like bricks stacked above the waistband.

They take turns on the scale. Doc is a full head taller and exceeds Gama by thirty-four pounds. Following the announcement of their weights, the emcee bellows, “No money in the world would ever buy the Great Gama for a fixed match!” To this, a hailstorm of whooping applause.

Imam absently pinches the silk of his brother’s robe, which is draped across his lap. Every time he watches his brother in a match, a familiar disquiet spreads through his stomach, much like the first time he witnessed Gama in competition.

Imam was eight, Gama twelve, when their uncle brought them to Jodhpur for the national strong-man competition. Raja Jaswant Singh had gathered hundreds of men from all across India to see who could last the longest drilling bethaks . The competitors took their places on the square field of earth within the palace courtyard, and twelve turbaned royal guards stood sentinel around the grounds, their tall gold spears glinting in the sun. Spectators formed a border some meters away from the field, and when little Gama emerged from their ranks and joined the strong men, laughter trailed behind him. Gama was short for his age but hale and sturdy even then.

When the raja raised his hand, Gama began, up and down, steady as a piston. His gaze never wavered, fixed on a single point of concentration in the air before him, as if his competitors and critics had all dissolved into the heat. At some point, Imam wanted to sit in the shade, but his uncle refused to move, too busy staring at Gama, as if with every bethak , the boy was transforming into something winged and brilliant. When Imam complained about the sun, his uncle said, “Look at your bhaiya . Does he complain?”

Imam looked at his brother: serene and focused, impervious to pain — everything Imam was not. There was a gravity about Gama in his youth, as if he had been schooled from the womb in the ways of the pehlwan , to avoid extremes of emotion like rage and lust, to reserve his energies for the pit. Their father had begun Gama’s training at age five and died three years later, before Imam could prove himself worthy of the same attention.

The bethak contest lasted four hours, and by the end, only fifteen men remained standing. Raja Singh yanked Gama’s hand into the air, declaring him the youngest by far and, thus, the winner. Greased in sweat, Gama wore a funny, dreamy expression, listing slightly before his knees buckled. Seeing him this way — limp, waxy, the crescent whites of his eyes between his lashes — made something jerk in Imam’s chest. He could not move. At that moment, Imam began to hate his uncle. He hated the raja for coming up with this contest, and he hated every person who herded around his brother and blocked out the sun, claiming him as if he were theirs.

•

The bell clangs, and the match with Roller begins. Gama slaps his thighs, beats his chest, charges. He plunges at Doc’s leg. Doc evades him the first time, but not the second. With a smooth back heel, Gama fells him and finishes him off with a half nelson and a body roll. One minute and forty seconds.

The second fall happens in but a blur — Doc laid out on his belly, sweat-slick and wincing at the spectators in the front row, who lean forward with their elbows on their knees. Roller gives in, and then: bedlam. The emcee yanks Gama’s hand into the air; men mob the mat like sparrows to a piece of bread. Mr. Benjamin wrings Imam’s hand, then shoulders his way through the crowd. Imam hangs back, Gama’s robe in his arms, craning his neck to see over all the hats and heads between him and his brother.

Over the next few days, Gama defeats two more challengers, sends them staggering to the mat like drunken giants. The newspapers have begun to take notice. Sometimes, while warming up, Gama and Imam spot a reporter watching from the road, the brim of his hat shadowing his eyes as he scribbles something in his notebook. Imam doesn’t like being ogled while doing his dands , but Mr. Benjamin has told them not to shoo the scribblers away. Press, he says, breeds more press.

Mr. Benjamin is right. These days, he brings more clippings than ever before, and Gama wants to digest every word, his appetite inexhaustible. Imam would rather play chess, the only game at which he consistently beats his brother. The journalists rarely, if ever, mention him.

“Gama the Great,” writes Percy Woodmore in Health & Strength , “has so handily defeated all his European challengers that one can only wonder whether the Oriental strong man possesses some genetic advantage over his Occidental counterpart.” Imam can recognize barely half the words in this sentence, but he understands the next: “Will the Hindoos ever lose?”

“Do you know,” Gama interjects, “these sahibs have so few counters — only one to the cross-buttock hold.” Gama shakes his head in bemusement, and just when Imam thinks he cannot stand him a minute longer, Gama adds, “Wait till they see you in the ring.”

Imam is beginning to wonder if that day will ever arrive. He feels the distinct weight of malaise, same as he used to suffer in school. When they were children, Gama got to train at the akhara with Madho Singh, while Imam had to recite English poems about English flowers. After Gama’s triumph at Jodhpur, people talked as if the boy could upend mountains, greater than all the pehlwan ancestors who had preceded him.

Sometimes, if Imam was sitting alone, sullenly reciting his multiplication tables, Gama took pity on him. “Come on, chotu ,” he’d say, taking Imam outside to show him a new hold. Gama was the only one who called him chotu , a word that raised his spirits when nothing else would.

By age twelve, Imam was fed up. He began cutting school and hovering around the akhara , where the only language that mattered was the heave and grunt of bodies in constant motion, whether climbing the rope hanging from the neem tree, or hoeing the wrestling pit, or swinging a giant jori in each arm, spiky clubs that surpassed him in height. Moving, always moving. The akhara seemed a splendid hive unto itself, sealed off from mundane concerns like school and exams and the sting of the teacher’s switch. Here was his classroom. Here, among the living, was where he belonged.

•

Finally Mr. Benjamin arranges a match for Imam. He is to take on the Swede Jon Lemm, who has won belts from both the Alhambra and Hengler’s tournaments.

They meet at the Alhambra once again, to a sold-out arena. Imam has the advantage of height but feels gangly next to Lemm, who is a stout tangle of muscle, and pale, with eyes of a clear, celestial blue.

The referee summons them to the center of the mat. Lemm gives a cordial nod and locks Imam in a hard handshake before releasing him to his corner. Imam can feel the spectators watching him, murmuring. One fellow openly points at Gama, who seems not to notice, sitting beside Mr. Benjamin with an air of equanimity. There is a proverb that their forefathers minded for centuries: Make your mind as still as the bottom of a well, your body as hard as its walls .