Aravind Adiga - Selection Day

‘Okay,’ Manju said.

Half an hour later, he was open-mouthed, gazing at a magic horse that lived among handkerchiefs, perfumes and jewels. He was standing outside the Hermès luxury store in Horniman Circle, gazing through the windows.

Radha and Sofia were inside, ‘shopping’.

His nose pressed against the glass, Manju gaped at the torso of the horse, which was composed of tiny, multicoloured enamel bricks, and was split into three parts, to fit the three display windows. A real kitten examined Manju as he examined the jewelled horse.

The most valuable thing we have in our family, Manju wanted to tell the kitten, is wrapped in cellophane and kept inside the almirah: Sachin Tendulkar’s own glove, given to my brother Radha. But the kitten grew bored and licked its paws.

The door opened, releasing scent, golden light, and Sofia. Radha had his arm around her waist, and said: ‘They don’t have anything good here. We’re going to another place to shop.’ The top button on Sofia’s shirt was undone, exposing more of the dark spots on her cream-coloured neck.

Manju followed them in the direction of Ballard Estate, until his brother turned around and made a rude gesture.

So he went back to his magic horse. Inch by inch, Manju brought his nose closer to the glass.

The kitten meowed: Manju looked at its open mouth, at its little teeth.

His heart began to beat.

Two evenings ago, he had been watching the history channel, as a tall thin European man stood by an exposed stone arch and talked about the Mughals, and about Emperor Akbar the Great, how he liked paintings of wild leopards and wild peacocks and wild ducks and hunting dogs. Watching the European man’s chiselled nose, his soft hair, his powerful Adam’s apple and tense lips, against the backdrop of all that raw Islamic stone, Manju felt the need to hide beneath the sofa (settling instead for turning the TV off and picking up a new bat and standing in front of the full-length mirror to practise his extra-cover drive); and now, as he thought about that European with the chiselled nose — bang, it had happened, even as the kitten was watching: his cock was stiff, and he had to walk with his feet wide apart to hide behind the safety of a pillar.

The kitten followed him, meowing.

As he wiped his sweat with one hand, and then with the other, Manju saw his father, driving a red Bajaj Pulsar right past him: and the nightmare was complete.

Mounted on his bike, the Progenitor of Prodigies had followed his two sons all the way to Horniman Circle. Now instinct was leading him straight to Ballard Estate. He knew exactly where his son had gone with that girl.

He’s going to kill Radha when he finds him with a girl, Manju thought. He sprinted behind the red bike, shouting, ‘Appa! Don’t hurt Radha! He’s your son, remember!’

•

What made you go ‘Wow, that’s crazy!’ about Anand Mehta was not that he had had a Negro girlfriend in America, or that he was loudly contemptuous of his own class, or that he drank too much at the Yacht Club and declared that he could fix all of Mumbai’s problems in five minutes ‘with a guillotine’— no, what really disturbed members of his own class was the horrible but true rumour that Mehta had donated ten or fifteen lakh rupees to a school for slum children in Cuffe Parade. A donation! To a school in the slums! He could have done the decent thing, and given five hundred rupees to the Malabar Hill Lions Club, but no — a donation ! To slum children!

Nevertheless, out of respect for his father, his years in New York, and his entertainment value, most of his classmates generally agreed to listen to his next big idea.

‘Imagine an Economist article. A real Economist article. That only the two of us can read, a whole year before it is printed.’

A TV showed an old cricket match at one end of the bar; at the other, a wide window gave a view of trees swaying on Marine Drive. Anand Mehta sat on a sofa with a bottle of Foster’s, and nibbled on two bowls of fried snacks.

His visitor, who had just wiped his face with a white handkerchief, said: ‘I’m sorry I am late, Anand. Really, I am. See, I thought we were meeting at the Taj President.’

The man who had arrived late was Rahul ‘Jo-Jo’ Mistry, whose father, like Mehta’s, was a stockbroker; unlike Anand, he still worked with Daddy in Cuffe Parade. When Anand had sent around a mass email about Radha’s triple century, inviting potential investors to purchase equity in his unique cricket sponsorship programme, Mistry was the last man he had expected to reply. Old Money types, unless liberated by an instinct for debauchery, which ‘Jo-Jo’ seemed unlikely to possess, rarely took risks.

Refusing Mehta’s offer of the fried snacks, ‘Jo-Jo’ Mistry, heir to a 200-crore brokerage fortune, insisted on further explaining his tardiness.

‘When you said the Trident I thought you wanted me at the President. I always thought this hotel was just called the Oberoi. Isn’t that funny?’

Anand Mehta took ‘Jo-Jo’ Mistry’s small cold hands in his and pumped some life into them.

‘Relaaaaaaax, Jo-Jo. Relaaaaaaax.’

How, Anand Mehta thought, as he reached for more deep-fried starch, could you live all your fucking life in South Bombay and still mix up the Trident and the Taj President? Only if, like old friend ‘Jo-Jo’ here, you were not required to think in order to survive, because Grandpa Mistry had bought big fat plots in Worli and Chembur in 1955 at eighteen rupees an acre and shoved the title deeds up your baby bum, which you have kept tightly clenched ever since. Reaching for a few more fried rings, Mehta looked at ‘Jo-Jo’ Mistry and licked his lips.

(But his eyes looked up at the ceiling when he was lying, and this had tipped off his friends for years.)

‘Now, I would like to make you the exclusive gift of an Economist article, one year in advance.’

Here they were interrupted again, because ‘Jo-Jo’ had brought another potential cricket investor with him, an old white man in a beige suit. Mehta shook hands with him, and discovered he was American.

‘Are you in sports management?’

The old American smiled and said, ‘I am the one man who is despised on every country on earth.’

Mehta thought about it. ‘Are you a plastic surgeon?’

Which made everyone laugh.

‘Let’s try this,’ the American said, enjoying the game, ‘I like my prose paratactic, my women flexible, and my governments libertarian. Who am I?’

‘Chinese communist.’

‘Close enough. I’m an investment banker,’ the American confessed, and Anand told him of the three years he had spent in New York — and of his intimate knowledge of Central Park, especially the pond area called Hernshead, towards the south — and of his knowledge also of Peter Luger, Scalini, Wolfgang’s Strip House, Bouley, Daniel (Lithuanian waitresses!), Union Square Grill (the things you can do in that Men’s Room of theirs!), Gramercy Tavern, Grimaldi’s, Lombar—

‘You know, Anand,’ ‘Jo-Jo’ Mistry interrupted him, ‘I actually played cricket.’

‘I remember, mate.’ Anand Mehta smiled. ‘I remember. You were a keeper, weren’t you?’

‘Substitute wicket-keeper. Being ambidextrous, I was good at collections with my left hand too, which most Indians are not.’ Mistry demonstrated how he gathered the ball this way and that, this way and that. ‘Coach never gave me a chance. Even now it hurts.’

‘Like the first time you wanted a girl. Can’t be forgotten. Ah, cricket. We had to get rid of the English, I always say, in order to enjoy the benefits of English civilization. You will keep hearing,’ Mehta turned to the American, ‘that other sports are becoming popular in India, like tennis or volleyball, but the thing to understand about cricket, sir, is that our government has no option but to enforce the mandatory playing of this game in India. You see, we are sitting on a time-bomb: we’re missing about ten million women from our population, due to female infanticide. This extraordinary fact is known to you, I assume? Do not make any business decision in India until you familiarize yourself with our male-to-female sex ratio, the result of decades of selective abortion. I predict that young Indian males, lacking women to marry or even to mate with, are likely to become progressively more deranged. This is already visible. Now, only one thing on earth can save us from all this rogue Hindu testosterone. Cricket. Have you ever tried to kill someone with a cricket bat? All but impossible. The deep and intrinsic silliness of cricket, I think, all that fair play and honourable draw stuff, makes it ideally suited for male social control in India. Can you imagine what will happen to crime and rape in Delhi and Mumbai if boys here start playing, say, American football? I believe that in the years to come, to pacify hundreds of millions of desperately horny young Indians of the lower social classes, our government has only three real policy options: to legalize prostitution, which it won’t do; to make liquor significantly cheaper than it currently is, which it can’t afford to do; or else, to supply us with a never-ending stream of narcotizing cricket-based entertainments. Bread and Tendulkar. Televised cricket in India is essentially state-sponsored lobotomy (you must hear our cricket commentators) — and we’ll be getting a lot more of it soon. What do you think, Jo-Jo? Am I right or am I as usual right?’