Aravind Adiga - Selection Day

Sofia, the spotty-necked one, the girl with the car and driver, the girl whose father owned a big chemical plant in Thane, had come to Thambi’s that morning with the two brothers.

Thambi’s Fast Food Hut, just a few feet away from the Ali Weinberg School, served exactly the kind of food that teachers at the school warned their students against. Cooking in the open near piles of cowdung and buzzing garbage, the food doled out on plates freshly dipped in bilgewater — all of which meant, in addition to their dosa and idli, young people who ate here were likely to receive a complementary side-order of jaundice or typhoid.

Thambi’s, inevitably, had become the great place for romance at the Ali Weinberg International School.

That morning, Sofia sat on a bench with a textbook pressed against her chest, and a bag slung across her shoulder. Her long black hair was brushed down over her left eye, and she smelled like a large foreign flower. The blood-coloured spots, a birthmark, lay on either side of her fair neck.

‘I gave a presentation in class today, on women in today’s India. Do you want to know what I said?’

The little outdoor shop was an excitement of garlic and onions; two Tamilians transmitted Radha’s orders to a third behind the counter, who sizzled the hot-plate with water, scraped it dry with a truncated broomstick, put a hand on his hip and yelled, ‘Dosa?’

‘Dosa.’

‘Cheese?’ asked the man behind the counter, scraping the tawa.

Naturally. ‘Double Cheese. Double Double Cheese.’ Always impresses the girls.

Pointing his short broom at Manju, the man asked:

‘And if I see your father, am I to yell, like last time?’

‘Louder this time,’ Radha pleaded.

‘Getting back to what I said in class about women,’ Sofia continued, ‘I said, in India today, a woman is either a sucker or a bitch. My dad has taught me that. Do you know what it means? No? You must be good for cricket only. It means, if you’re a woman in a job in marketing or sales, for instance, men will treat you like you don’t know what you are doing, and they will try to cheat you. So you have to put your foot down, and get angry and shout at them, and then they’ll call you a — a …’

She turned from the elder Kumar to the younger one. She covered the spots on her neck and asked Radha:

‘Why is your brother staring at me like that?’

Manju wasn’t staring at her: only at the silver ‘H’ on her sequinned handbag.

The Tamilian arrived with a cheese dosa on a cellophane-covered metal plate. Chutney dripped down the side of the plate.

‘Are you really eating that?’ Sofia asked.

Oh, Radha certainly was. He tore into his food.

Sofia winced. Stroking her handbag with the ‘H’, she said:

‘I’m also a sportsman, by the way, so don’t think you’re special. My Mummy says we get 3.5 per cent added to our final SSC marks if we play sports at the state level, and that will help me get into a good junior college, so she made me join state-level badminton. I go every day after class. My knees hurt, but Mummy says, get into college, and become rich, and you can go to hospital and pay for shiny new knees. Isn’t that crazy?’

Radha smiled: ‘Let’s see the knees.’

Sofia lifted up her school skirt and showed. But when Radha grinned at her naked knees, she grew angry with herself.

‘Cricketers!’ She covered her knees with her skirt. ‘As a matter of fact, I don’t know anyone who respects cricket. Lunch-break! Nothing that stops for lunch can be called a sport. Everybody I know follows Arsenal or Manchester United. Although I hope you’re not into Barcelona because I hate their guts. Are you listening to me?’

Of course he was. Done with his food, Radha wiped his lips with the back of his palm, and then began whispering to Sofia about something that was this big (he showed her with his hands exactly how big), until she screamed: ‘Seven colours! Seven?’

It was true: Manju had seen his brother do it. Radha’s thing was enormous, and when he held it tight, after going to the toilet, and squeezed it so that the blood stopped flowing into it, he could make it any colour he wanted. It was all true.

But Sofia just pushed Radha away, and laughed hysterically.

‘You cricketers,’ the girl said, ‘are too funny. You’re even worse than J.A.’

‘Than who?’

While Radha frowned, Sofia explained that both Young Lions had been trying to impress her, because earlier in the morning, she had been given this by Mr Javed Ansari. A piece of fragrant white paper. Radha read it, while Manju, putting his chin on his brother’s shoulder, spied.

Miss Sofia:

You walk in beauty, like the night of

cloudless climes and starry skies.

J.A.

‘What the fuck is this?’ Radha asked.

Sofia said it was Javed’s love poem, written just for her, and that she found it ‘touching’.

‘He likes me. You cricketers are all too funny.’

When Radha saw Manju reading the love poem with a frown, as if he was trying hard to understand it, he couldn’t take it anymore.

‘Scientist,’ he said. ‘Give that back to her.’

That Saturday, when no one was looking, the two brothers broke into the school changing rooms, found a green cricket bag embroidered in gold with the initials ‘J.A.’, and unzipped it. Radha had brought the pen. He examined Javed’s gear — his thigh pad, his box, his gloves — before settling on the chest-guard. Placing it on his knee, he wrote something on it. ‘Done,’ Radha chuckled, and asked Manju to read what he had written on the chest-guard — but what was his younger brother up to? His mouth open, Manju had slid his whole forearm up to the elbow into Javed’s green kitbag. The arm was trembling. And more of it was still going into the bag!

‘That’s filthy.’ Radha slapped Manju on the head. The younger boy withdrew his forearm at once. Radha held the pen out to him. ‘Now you write something on his chest-guard.’

Afterwards the two brothers howled and screamed all the way up and down Carter Road in celebration of their victory over Mr ‘J.A.’.

•

During the monsoons, the maidans in the heart of south Mumbai — Azad, Oval, Cross — are overrun by weeds. By Independence Day, with rain still falling, dark nylon nets have cordoned off parts of the maidans, and rectangular patches of reddish earth are taking shape inside those protected areas. Similar rectangles turn up at the Police Gymkhana and the Islam Gymkhana along Marine Drive, puzzling the black kites, which fly circles over them, balancing their wings on the sea breeze.

In September, stone-rollers are applied over these patches, levelling out the earth. At the Oval, the rectangles of stubble are now russet, the colour of some of the tiles in the Bombay High Court building, which towers over the maidan. Mounds of cut turf are stacked up; men in khaki shorts sit by the turf; mynahs land and take off, and pigeons roost on the pitches. Two white sight-screens are moved into place against the fence, just beyond which the bronze statue of Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, first Baronet of Bombay, sits with his hands on his lap and his back to the Oval, disdaining the common pleasures of sport. Then one morning, a bare-chested man materializes on the cricket pitch at the Oval and starts meditating. His palms are folded by his chest and his eyes are shut; only his lips move. A stone-roller waits beside him. Raising his palms over his head, the half-naked man claps once — twice — three times, and opens his eyes.

It is October, and the cricket season has begun.

NINTH STANDARD CONTINUES: CRICKET SEASON