Aravind Adiga - Selection Day

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 possess 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.