Aravind Adiga - Selection Day

But ‘Jo-Jo’ Mistry was still demonstrating his ambidextrous wicket-keeping skills along the table’s surface. Anand Mehta knew exactly why Jo-Jo was acting like an idiot, the same reason he had so cunningly brought an American along: because any moment he could say, Oh, Cricket , we thought you meant High-Yield Corporate Debt, and leave.

Mehta excused himself for a minute.

Out in the lobby of the Trident, dipping his finger in a brass bowl filled with rose petals, he answered his phone.

‘Tommy Sir, I’m in a business meeting. You keep texting and calling.’

‘Mr Anand. Can you come to St George Hospital at once?’

‘Absolutely not. What a question. I’m in a meeting.’

When Tommy Sir explained the situation, Anand Mehta put his palm on his forehead and wished the game of cricket a speedy extinction.

•

Although he was that rare cricket lover who was not also an Anglophile — kept safe from that lunacy by his knowledge of what the British had done to India in the twentieth century (Partition, the Bengal famine, the Gandhi — Nehru family) and the greater horror they had deposited here in the nineteenth century, the Indian Penal Code, which was still in force (like the mad grandfather everyone knows should be locked up in the attic, but who sits in the living room with a cane in his hands) — Tommy Sir had, nevertheless, developed a grudging respect for the rascals, freebooters and thugs who had carved out the Raj in the eighteenth century. James Grant Duff writing the history of the Marathas with one hand while discharging his flintlocks at the Marathas with the other. That takes balls. French call it sangfroid. And of that eighteenth-century legacy of balls, more respectably termed sangfroid, the sole surviving shard we possess in India is the game of Test cricket.

Which was exactly why Tommy Sir smiled at young Radha Krishna Kumar, that living manifestation of sangfroid, as he stood at the head of an outpatient bed in the St George Hospital, Mumbai, even as Anand Mehta entered the hospital ward, asking, ‘Where is this Holocaust situation, please?’

Raising himself up in his bed, Mohan Kumar folded his hands as his benefactor arrived.

‘My own son has done this to me, sir, my own Radha …’ His two boys stood on either side of the wounded Mohan, like a better and a worse angel. He pointed a finger at one, and then at the other. ‘My right leg is broken. My own two sons did this. Radha struck the blow. Radha did it. Please tell the police: please tell them who has hurt who, who is guilty and who is innocent here.’

As they left the hospital, Tommy Sir told Anand Mehta a different version of events. This monster without a name from the mountains of South India, this chutney-seller, was in competition with the two penises he had created.

‘He follows Radha on his red bike all the way to Ballard Estate, and then goes running up and bangs on the door where Radha is with his girlfriend, saying he will murder everyone inside. I told you he has a police record. They say he tried to finish off his wife. To protect his girlfriend, Radha, brave boy, pushes his father, who falls down the stairs and breaks his leg. We need a licence in this country to buy a gas cylinder or open a tea shop, but there is no licence required to have children.’

‘My God,’ Anand Mehta said, slapping his forehead. He had just parted with a five-hundred-rupee note, transferred via Tommy Sir to the wounded paterfamilias.

‘The more money I give them, the more money they suck up. It’s a disaster.’

‘No,’ Tommy Sir said. ‘No, no, no.’

He made a small space between his fingers, and smiled.

‘It’s wonderful. The more money you give them …’

He brought his fingers together.

‘… the less freedom they have.’

As his chauffeur drove him away from the hospital, Anand Mehta looked at the one-inch gap he was holding captive between his thumb and index finger, and the street lights on Marine Drive cast a golden furrow over his car.

•

After being helped by his sons into a black taxi, Mohan Kumar used his crutches to chastise them in alternation, all the way back to Chembur. Both boys silently ate their father’s blows, but each time Radha’s eyes met Manju’s, they relayed the same message: Next time he tries to do this to me, I’ll break his neck instead. When the taxi reached their building, Mohan paid the driver with Mehta’s five-hundred-rupee note. But after Radha and Manju got out, he continued to sit in the taxi and said, feebly, ‘Wait. We need a better story to tell.’

The boys stared at him through the window.

‘The neighbours will ask,’ Mohan Kumar explained, ‘how I broke my right leg.’?

•

‘In the old days they used to say, let Bombay field two sides in the Ranji Trophy and the final will be Bombay versus Bombay. Today look at us. Have we produced one major batsman in this city since Sachin? Small towns all across India are producing hungry batsmen. Things are not going to be easy for you Bombay boys. So don’t make them any harder by dropping catches. Now get the bloody hell into a circle around me. Time for catching practice. Time for pain. The ball is going to fly at your faces. Ready, boys?’

‘Yes, sir, Tommy Sir!’

Manju’s face had been smeared with white war-paint: zinc cream to protect his skin. He stamped on the wild grass at the centre of Azad Maidan; dragonflies fled his brand-new spikes. A Pepsi bottle and a decaying canvas shoe lying in the grass each got a kick. He bent low; he watched the stone-roller.

Six boys were watching that roller. Tommy Sir had the red ball in his hands. He threw it at the curved stone; deflecting off the edge, the shiny new cricket ball flew straight at one boy’s eyes.

Radha caught the ball, fumbled with it, slipped, and dropped it.

Manju winced; he rubbed the back of his thighs. That was where Radha was going to get it. Under-arming the ball to Tommy Sir, Radha turned and waited.

First, the speech:

‘You know how many batsmen fit into a cricket team? Just six. So why, duffers, do you make things harder for yourself by dropping catches?’

Now for the punishment.

Manju closed his eyes. He heard it. Tommy Sir had thrown the ball straight into his brother’s back. When he opened his eyes, Radha, his elbow bent, was rubbing the spot where the ball had hit.

The six boys crouched once more in front of the roller.

Radha loved everything to do with the game: the three rounds of jogging around the maidan to warm up, the jumping jacks, the stretches, even the chastisement that followed a dropped catch. With hard work he had made himself a good fielder. Manju did not practise half as hard. But Manju caught with his left hand as well as with his right, and could hit with just one stump to aim at. On the run.

Now that he had been punished, Radha knew that Tommy Sir, serial humiliator, would aim the ball at Manju next. Lowering his eyes, feeling strange in the stomach, Radha realized he couldn’t say if he wanted Manju to catch the ball or drop it.

He crouched, his fingers tense.

But no ball came.

Tommy Sir was walking over to a banyan tree that stood just outside the maidan. From behind it, the boys now saw a pair of crutches poking out. The man who had been hiding behind the tree now came into view and the yelling began.

‘They’re my sons!’

‘We had an agreement! Out. Out.’

Radha turned to Manju, who was looking at him. The boys saw Tommy Sir arguing with the man on the crutches, then forcing him to get into a black taxi, and slamming the roof as it drove away.

Manju looked at his brother again.

Don’t look at me, idiot , Radha shouted, loud enough for all the boys to hear, because he didn’t know that his brother had already read his mind.