Tania James - Aerogrammes - and Other Stories

Imam touches the mat, then his heart.

The bell clangs, and Lemm hurls himself at Imam; his back heel topples Imam onto his back. Imam slips free, darts around Lemm, quick as the crack of a whip. He does not see Lemm in terms of ankle and knee and leg. Instead he tracks Lemm’s movements, listening for one false note — the falter, the doubt, the dread.

At one point Lemm stalls, a fatal mistake. Imam lunges, lifts him up, and hurls him to the mat. He flips the bucking Swede and pins him. Three minutes and one second.

Not long into the second bout, Lemm is sprawled out on the mat, Imam on his back. Imam can feel Lemm struggling beneath him, trembling down to his deepest tissues until, with a savage groan, he deflates. One minute and eight seconds.

Imam gets to his feet, heaving. Something bounces lightly off his back. He whirls around to find a beheaded flower at his feet. Someone else tosses him a silver pocket watch. Imam turns from one side to the other; the men are roaring. It takes him a dizzying moment to realize they are roaring for him.

Of the fight with Lemm, a reporter from Health & Strength goes into rapture: “That really was a wonderful combat — a combat in which both men wrestled like masters of the art.… Let us have a few more big matches like unto that, and I tell you straight that the grappling game will soon become the greatest game of all.”

In the two weeks that follow, Gama and Imam defeat every wrestler who will accept the challenge. Though Gama the Great commands the most public attention, a dedicated sect of Imam devotees takes shape. They mint him with a new name: the Panther of the Punjab. They contend that the Panther is really the superior of the two, citing the blur of his bare brown feet, so nimble they make an elephant of every opponent. Gama may be stronger, but Imam has the broader arsenal of holds and locks and throws, as seen in his victories over Deriaz and Cherpillod, the latter Frenchman so frustrated that he stomped off to his dressing room midway through the match and refused to come out. Within a year or two, they claim, Imam will surpass Gama.

Gama listens in silence when Imam relays such passages. He betrays no emotion, though his fingers tend to tap against his glass of yogurt milk.

Baron Helmuth von Baumgarten is the only critic to speak in political terms, a realm unfamiliar to both Gama and Imam. “If the Indian wrestlers continue to win,” the baron writes, with typical inflammatory flair, “their victories will spur on those dusky subjects who continue to menace the integrity of the British Empire.”

And where most articles include a photo of Gama or Imam, this one displays a photo of a young Indian man in an English suit, with sculpted curls around a center part as straight as a blade. This is Madan Lal Dhingra, the baron explains, a student who, several months earlier, walked into an open street, revolver in hand, and shot a British government official seven times in the face. Before Dhingra could turn the revolver on himself, he was subdued, arrested, tried, and hanged.

Imam looks over Gama’s shoulder at the article. They stare in silence at the soft-skinned boy with the starched white collar choking his throat. He looks much like the interpreters who sometimes tag along with the English journalists, a few stitches of hair across their upper lips, still boys to the mothers they must have left behind.

Gama folds the paper roughly, muttering, “Half of it is nonsense, what they write.” He tosses the newspaper on the coffee table and goes upstairs. This clipping they will not take back home.

Imam remains in the sitting room, waiting until he can hear the floorboards creaking overhead. From his kurta pocket, he removes the pocket watch he has been keeping on his person ever since it landed at his feet. The silver disk, better than any medal, warms his palm. He draws a fingertip over the engraved lines, each as fine as a feline whisker.

As word spreads of the Lion and the Panther of the Punjab, all the European wrestlers fall silent but one — Stanislaus Zbyszko, the winner of the Greco-Roman world championship tournament at the Casino de Paris four years ago, ranked number one in the world before his more recent scandal with Yousuf the Terrible. This time, Zbyszko is looking to rebuild his name and promises a match with no foul play. He and Gama will face off at the John Bull Tournament in early July.

“This is it,” Mr. Benjamin says to Gama. “You pin him, you’ll be world champion. You —” Here he jabs a finger at Gama’s chest. “Rustom! E! Zamana!” Mr. Benjamin’s pronunciation brings a smile to Gama’s face.

Imam is less amused. He detects a growing whiff of greed about Mr. Benjamin in the way he goads Gama toward desire and impatience, the very emotions they have been taught to hold at bay. Just as troubling is his refusal to offer a clear figure of ticket sales, though he promises to give them their earnings in one bulk sum at the end.

Out of habit and innocence, Gama puts his faith in Mr. Benjamin. Through him, Gama dispatches a single message in Sporting Life: he will throw the Pole three times in the space of an hour.

Imam has seen pictures of Zbyszko: the fused boulders of muscle, the bald head like the mean end of a battering ram. Even hanging by his sides, his arms are a threat. Gama has seen the pictures too, but they never speak of Zbyszko, or his size, or his titles. They refer only to the match.

News of the bout spreads to India. Mr. Mishra, their Bengali patron, writes Gama a rousing letter, imploring him to prove to the world that “India is not only a land of soft-bodied coolies and clerks.” Mishra rhapsodizes over Bharat Mata and her hard-bodied sons, comparing Gama to the Hindu warrior Bhim. Regarding Europeans, Mr. Mishra has only one opinion: “All they know is croquet and crumpets.”

Imam isn’t sure if Mr. Mishra knows that Zbyszko is a Pole. He considers writing back, then recalls the article with Dhingra’s picture, the words “traitor” and “treason” captioning it. Once, a journalist asked Gama and Imam about their political leanings, whether they considered themselves “moderate” or “radical.” Imam turned to Gama, each searching the other for the correct answer, before Gama, bewildered, said, “We are pehlwan .”

Those words return to Imam later, as he sets a lit match to the letter. They do not want trouble. He holds the burning letter over the sink and then rinses the ash down the drain.

A week remains until the John Bull Tournament. Life narrows its borders, contains only wrestling and meditation, bethak and dand, yakhi and ghee and almonds. Food is fuel, nothing more. They wake at three in the morning and retire at eight in the evening, their backs to the sunset slicing through the crack between the curtains.

For all their time together, Imam has never felt further from his brother. He can detect some deep tidal turn within Gama, a gravity at his core, pulling him inward and inward again into a wordless coil of concentration. He declines all interviews. His gaze is a wall.

Lying in bed, Imam imagines entering the ring with Zbyszko. He pictures himself executing an artful series of moves never witnessed on these shores, the Flying Cobra perhaps, an overhead lift, a twirl and a toss. The papers would remember him all over again. Twitching with energy, he can hardly sleep.

One day, he upends Gama with the Flying Cobra. Imam knows he should withdraw, but something snaps in him, and it happens in a blink: Imam dives and pins his brother.

Imam lies there, wide-eyed, panting. Beneath him is Gama the Great, Rustom-e-Hind , Boy Hero of Bethaks with his cheek against the mat. No one has ever pinned him, until now. “Get up,” Gama says.