Aravind Adiga - Selection Day

‘A boy mustn’t shave until he’s …’

‘Twenty-one.’

‘Why must a boy not shave till he’s …?’

‘Hormones.’

‘Which are not good for …’

‘Cricketers.’

Tap, tap, tap . On a coconut tree beside their hut, Manju saw a woodpecker hammering away. He thought at once of Mr ‘J.A.’ with his beak nose. Working with his beak — tap, tap, tap — the woodpecker raised his enormous profile, which looked like a tribal mask, and disappeared, only to reappear half a foot higher on the coconut stem — tap, tap, tap — before his dark face again vanished, to rematerialize another foot higher: as if he were ascending via masks. In school, Javed had invented a new ‘look’ for himself these days by wearing his blue monogrammed cap backwards, like an actor in an American film. Watching the woodpecker, and thinking of Javed, Manju smiled until he heard Radha pull up his trousers, and promise to take more scientific care of his cricketer’s body.

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 Sunny 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 …’