Aravind Adiga - Selection Day

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 an 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.

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.