Aravind Adiga - Selection Day

Manju held up his bandaged left thumb. Mr Lasrado lowered his nose and studied the bandage around the sporting finger.

‘Cricket?’

‘Cricket,’ Manju agreed.

Outside in the hall, the peon was pasting a hand-made poster in the hallway: Ten Easy Ways to Fight Tension during the Exam Period.

Manju went down the steps, to an empty bench with a view of the parked school buses; he groaned. Name five man-made elements. Bohrium, plutonium … There was a new edge to these surprise tests, monthly tests, half-annual and annual exams. For eight years, the students knew they could not fail. Now all that had changed. Now they could be thrown out of Ali Weinberg if their grades even threatened to lower the school’s average in the Board Exams. Five man-made elements. Manju knew they were going to ask this question in the surprise test: he should have been able to name at least five.

He had lied to Mr Lasrado; the broken thumb had nothing to do with his not preparing properly for the exam, and the CSI Las Vegas back-to-back special on AXN had a lot to do with it. But he had read Mr Lasrado’s mind, and knew that he wanted to hear about the famous cricket thumb, and not about CSI Las Vegas .

What was the point anyway of studying? He, like Radha, would have to drop out after the SSC exams to concentrate on cricket. Their father had already decided. Tommy Sir, for once, agreed with their father. He had seen so many young cricketers in Tamil Nadu say, I have to go to America, have to concentrate on my studies, sorry, Tommy Sir: no more cricket. There was no chance of either Manju or Radha failing at cricket. And if they did fail, Tommy Sir said, so what? Could always go back and finish college one or two years later.

Einsteinium. Is that man-made? Manju played with a lock of his hair.

Then someone whistled — the air filled with perfume — and a boy in a blue cap passed right by him. Farewell at once to both man-made and natural elements. Tucking his textbook under his arm, Manju followed Javed Ansari.

He walked over maroon-and-grey bricks, and through a makeshift cardboard arch painted with images of Mother Mary, to a place where he saw Javed leaning against a coconut tree to give himself a view, through a variety of mildewed structures, of the ocean. Manju saw a flame being struck.

Javed removed his blue cap and tossed it on the ground. Standing against the tree, looking at the waves, and running a hand through his hair, he smoked. Ten feet behind him, Manju struck the same pose with his hand and his hair. He too exhaled.

Describe your interests in life other than cricket, Manju.

Science. Chemistry. CSI Las Vegas.

How boring. What about driving a motorbike?

No. I can’t.

Manju, can you please use fine English words in your answers?

Suddenly Manju saw that the figure leaning against the coconut tree had disappeared; and he already knew, as if in a horror movie, where Javed now was. Manju turned around slowly and there he stood, grinning: Mr ‘J.A.’, cigarette still in hand.

‘Why did you and your brother write on my chest-guard?’ he asked. ‘Do you even know what it means, that thing you wrote?’

How Manju ran. He ran, under the makeshift arch, over the coloured bricks, through the school gate, and back to his classroom, Class 9, Section A, where he waited for his English class to start. Even in class, there was no safety, because a few minutes after the lunch-break, a peon turned up at his desk to summon him with a crooked finger: ‘Patricia Principal wants to see you. Now.’

Two Powers ran the Ali Weinberg International School. One Power was seen. In her air-conditioned office, Patricia D’Mello sat beneath a framed black-and-white photograph of M.K. Gandhi, father of India, and a colour photograph of the Unseen Power, Karim Ali, father of modern education in the suburb of Bandra. (The students, naturally, assumed there had been ‘hot stuff’ between the Seen and Unseen Powers at some point in ancient history.)

Expecting to find Javed Ansari already in the Principal’s office, Manju discovered that only he had been summoned. Moreover, Principal Patricia looked pleased. She was a plump woman with jowls, whom the students saw in the assembly hall on Independence and Republic Day, when she delivered solemn forty-minute speeches about patriotism and universal love that often turned sentimental and ended with references to herself as the ‘mother of all those gathered here’; but in the privacy of her office she assumed a paternal, punitive avatar.

‘Good afternoon, Principal Patricia.’

He held his broken thumb against his chest for her to see.

The Principal lowered her glasses and smiled at him, several times.

‘Manjunath,’ she said, dragging the final vowel wide. ‘Do you know something about me?’

She smiled at him.

Shit, the boy thought, imagining that this was the start of some particularly baroque punishment.

‘I too once had a future, Manju.’ Removing her glasses, the Principal looked at a corner of the ceiling and smiled.

‘People thought I had a future as a writer, Manju. I wanted to write a great novel about Mumbai,’ the Principal said, playing with her glasses. ‘But then … then I began, and I could not write it. The only thing I could write about, in fact, was that I couldn’t write about the city.

‘ The sun, which I can’t describe like Homer, rises over Mumbai, which I can’t describe like Salman Rushdie, creating new moral dilemmas for all of us, which I won’t be able to describe like Amitav Ghosh.

‘ The sun, which I can’t describe like Akira Kurosawa, rises over Mumbai, which I can’t describe like Raj Kapoor, creating new moral dilemmas for all of us, which I won’t be able to describe like Satyajit Ray.

‘I filled five hundred pages like this, Manju. Five hundred. I called it Phraud . In the end I gave up writing and thought, let me do some good to society, let me teach young boys.’

Realizing that his broken thumb would not be needed as an excuse, Manju lowered it from sight. He understood that some extraordinary and unknown event had ushered him and Principal Patricia into an unprecedented intimacy.

She placed her glasses back on her nose and smiled.

‘You and your brother Radha Krishna — you two are not phrauds . What Radha did today in the Oval Maidan, that was remarkable. Founder Ali himself called to tell me, Manju. The Founder called! He was so proud of you two Kumars — and of me. A new city-wide cricket record!’

She put her glasses back on and smiled, so Manju felt he had to say something.

‘Yes, Principal Patricia.’

‘Global cricket record. Isn’t it?’

Manju tried to read the Seen Power’s mind, as she kept smiling.

‘You do know what your elder brother did today, don’t you, Manju?’

•

On his way home to Chheda Nagar, Manju had the sweetest experience a younger brother can: a woman stopped him to ask for directions to the Tattvamasi Building. ‘Where that boy lives — you know, the one who broke the batting record, you know, the chutney-seller’s son.’

‘My father,’ Manju announced, ‘is a businessman in gold and real estate. Radha Kumar, the global-record breaker, is my brother. You may walk behind me.’

When they reached the building, they found the living room already full of people; some of them saw Manju and cheered, Hero! Hero! — ‘Not this one, not this one,’ Mohan Kumar corrected them, ‘this is tomorrow’s hero’; and on the television, a news reader was announcing,

‘ Not only is this the highest score ever recorded by a batsman under the age of sixteen in Mumbai, this is also the first time in the history of our inter-school Elite Division cricket that 300 runs have been scored by a batsman in one day’s play. The young magician of the cricket bat, Radha Kumar, of Ali Weinberg High School, spoke to our correspondent … ’