Aravind Adiga - Selection Day

Mohan Kumar, breeder of champions, had walked over the river, and through the WELCOME TO OUR HOME arch, holding three chrome-plated keys upright, displaying them first to the politicians of the arch, to let them know he was escaping their clutches for good, and then to his neighbours, one by one, while he said: ‘Did you laugh at me when I said I’d be famous, Ramnath? I think you did. You definitely did — didn’t you, Girish?’

Done with such taunts, Mohan Kumar offered a few words of valedictory wisdom to the inhabitants of the Shastrinagar slum.

‘Age sixteen to eighteen is the danger zone. Kambli and Sachin, both were talented. But only one became a legend. Why? Everything is falling to pieces in this country. Everything. Boys are taking drugs. Boys are driving cars. Boys are shaving .’

Some of the neighbours had brought along their sons and their cricket bats for Mohan Kumar to bless: perhaps God’s grace was contagious.

Only old Ramnath’s mood was sour. Standing in the window of his hut, apart from the rest of the crowd, pressing clothes with his coal-fired iron, he grumbled:

‘Gulli-Danda is the real game of skill. Cricket? Cricket was brought here by the Britishers to entrap us.’

Mohan Kumar smiled.

Ramnath continued. ‘Indians should play Indian sports. Kho-Kho, Kabbadi, buffalo-racing in the monsoons.’

Mohan Kumar began to laugh: it was the loudest laugh he had had since getting on the train to Mumbai.

‘Pack up,’ he told his boys.

Old Sharadha was not told to pack up. They would have a domestic servant in the new place. They were that kind of people now, the kind of people who hired other people.

Chheda Nagar was not just any suburb: in its heart stood a Subramanya temple, a satellite of the shrine of the thousand-year-old God of Cricket in the Western Ghats, and for a decade the three Kumars had gone there by local train to pray and to consecrate new bats, gloves and pads. Once they moved to Chheda Nagar, they could visit the God of Cricket, or at least a reflection of Him, every morning.

Nor was the Tattvamasi Housing Society, Chheda Nagar, just any housing society.

Only when their father held open the wooden door bearing the nameplate ‘B.B. Balasubramaniam’ (the landlord who had sucked 40,000 rupees out of them as a security deposit), and told them to go in, Radha first, did the boys start to believe it. Manju entered, touching the wall with both hands. Can this really be our new home? Overnight, they had become the kind of people who had a working air-conditioner, a big grey fridge, and a largely automatic washing machine. A wooden cupboard just for cricketing gear, equipment, food supplements and antibiotics. Attached to it, a full-length mirror, so they could rehearse their strokes at any time of day or night.

‘This is the reason I picked the Tattvamasi Building.’ Mohan Kumar opened a window, and pointed to something down below. Standing on either side of their father, the boys saw a little courtyard in between the concrete back wall of their housing society and the brick front wall of the neighbouring building. ‘Find your bats, pray, and go. First practice in our new home.’

So, ten minutes after they had taken possession of their new flat, the two boys were ordered out of it. From the window, Mohan Kumar waited for his sons to start using that beautiful brick wall.

But life, of course, can never be perfect. For four nights after they had moved in to the new home, when Mohan turned on their television, he and his sons found themselves witnessing the birth of a new Young Lion.

A star rises on the horizon: not in the city, the traditional nursery of cricketing wizardry, but across the creek, in the suburb of Navi Mumbai. Here, in Vashi, they gather every evening inside the Adil Housing Society to see a handsome young man practise while his father bowls at him. Is this youngster, as some believe, the best batsman Mumbai has produced in the last fifty years?

A stylish left-hander in the David Gower mould, Javed Ansari, a fifteen-year-old student of the Ali Weinberg School in Bandra, has got Mumbai’s sporting cognoscenti excited by his graceful strokeplay. He has already scored four centuries, six half centuries and two double centuries this year. Cricket is in his blood: Javed is a nephew of Ranji Trophy middle-order star Imtiaz Ansari, who now represents Yorkshire county in England. In addition, his father, a textbook importer in Vashi, once donned the flannels for Aligarh University and has been a cricket commentator for the BBC Hindi service.

Young Lions spoke to Mr Ansari and found he does not approve of his offspring’s single-minded devotion to the gentleman’s game. ‘Ninth Standard is the hardest year in school. Now is when you have to start studying for the Board Exams.’

‘So you would like to see him do something other than cricket?’

‘Do you think youngsters today will listen to anyone, even their fathers? Javed is hell-bent on playing for Mumbai, and then for India, and no one on earth will stop him.’

YOUNG LIONS

MONDAY 6.30 P.M. REPEATED ON WEDNESDAY

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Turning off the television, Mohan Kumar spat on the floor of his new home.

‘Go down there,’ he told his sons, ‘and start practising right now.’

No more long train rides for Manju and Radha; they were now living on the school bus route. Sitting at the back, they startled pedestrians with rude gestures, and fought with their classmates, as the bus wound its way from Chembur towards Carter Road, and into the lane known as ‘Ali’s Education Corner’, slowing as it went past the Karim Ali College of Law, the Karim Ali College of Arts and Sciences, the Karim Ali College of Dental Science, and the Karim Ali College of Medical and Alternative Medical Sciences, before it stopped at the Ali Weinberg International School.

But the moment the Kumars got down from the bus, they found a Honda City parked outside the school, as if it had been waiting just for them. A pair of legs emerged from the open door, while the rest of the body, visible in silhouette behind the dark window, reclined on the seat and composed a message on a cell phone.

Mr ‘J.A.’, the new ‘Young Lion’.

The previous evening, as Radha and Manju lay in their new beds, Mohan Kumar, while reintroducing his sons to the three principal dangers on their path to glory — premature shaving, pornography and car-driving — had added one more. This Mohammedan (a left-hander!) had every advantage that Mohan’s two sons lacked: his father had FDs and online stock-trading accounts; his father had probably built a home-gym for his son; and he had that thing you needed more than a rich father in Mumbai — he had a god father. Wasn’t his uncle Imtiaz Ansari a Ranji Trophy man, and wouldn’t the combination of money and influence (which is how things work in this world, my sons) make this left-handed boy irresistible on Selection Day, which was coming, which was coming?

When Radha saw that silhouette inside the car, his heart contracted: he felt again that suspicion which now gnawed at him that despite everything his father said, his contract with God was not fool-proof, and he might not prove to be the best batsman in the world — and so he sweated; but what went through Manju at the sight of that dim body inside the car was a buzz — the same charge of electricity an ornithologist feels when he catches sight of a rare migratory species of bird.

Open-mouthed, the brothers stared at the silhouette inside the Honda City, until Radha said ‘Manju’, and Manju said ‘Radha Krishna’, and the spell was broken, and the two were free to walk again.

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It was on the morning that Javed Ansari tried to steal Sofia from them that the brothers Kumar finally did something about him.