Aravind Adiga - Selection Day

Manju took Javed’s palm in his hand and said, ‘Twilight is my mother’s favourite hour.’

‘What?’ Javed asked.

So Manju kept talking.

‘She had this thing in her right hand’ — he traced his finger down the webbing on Javed’s palm, describing a groove. ‘Nitric acid fell on her hand at the goldsmith’s shop when they were working on the old jewellery. Where the acid went, it left a deep mark, and that mark was how I knew that it was my mother and not a fake when she came home after she’d been gone for a long time. Before I let her touch me I would say: “Show me your hand, woman,” and I would check for the nitric acid mark.’

Looking at his hand, held tight in Manju’s, Javed asked: ‘Your mother disappeared and came back?’

Manju dropped Javed’s hand and covered his mouth with his fingers. He was appalled by what he had just done. Even more scary was the thought that maybe he had babbled about the secret groove in her palm, something he had not told even Radha, only because Javed had asked twice about his mother. Manju had a horrible premonition about intimacy: it could be this simple, this could be how something starts — just because he asks you twice to tell him your story.

‘My brother can squeeze his cock into seven colours. He says he can do twenty-four but it’s really just seven,’ Manju said. He looked at Javed. Both laughed, and Manju, helpless to stop, continued:

‘Even if I get the marks, my father won’t let me go to junior college.’

Javed, with a smile, placed a finger on his lips. They had been found.

‘You two!’ Coach Pramod Sawant stood with both his hands on the fence, panting. ‘You two!’

‘They were supposed to play base-o-ball with us, uncle,’ the boy with the big glove shouted. ‘But then they started to play with each other!’

•

The next morning, Mumbai’s interschool cricket schedule brought them together again, at the P.J. Hindu Gymkhana.

Manju woke up that day and found that he could not get out of bed. He yawned; he stretched, he turned from side to side. Raising his head, he saw that his legs were trembling.

At midday the tall boy wearing a blue cap with the initials ‘J.A.’ stood fielding at long leg. When the wind blew, the dust rose around him: and in that dust, Manju saw a boy sprint, attack, gather and throw the ball back without breaking stride. Manju searched Javed Ansari’s long body, half expecting to find an ‘H’ branded on his shirt or trousers.

In the drinks break, Javed stood in the tent, near the twenty-litre bottle of mineral water; he was talking to someone on his red BlackBerry. Manju went up to the big bottle and poured himself a plastic cup.

Javed put down his BlackBerry, turned to Manju and asked:

‘Do you actually like cricket?’

Manju thought he had either heard the question wrong, or that he was being mocked, shamefully.

‘Wasn’t that baseball much better? I’ve been reading about baseball on the Internet. Do you know of Baby Ruth? He’s like their Bradman: but better. Do you want to go back with me and play baseball with those slum boys one day?’

Manju thought : Is that how he sees me, too? As a slum boy?

‘We live in Chembur,’ Manju said. ‘In a housing society. We have air-conditioning.’

‘Chembur?’ Javed looked at him sideways. ‘Chembur smells. Too many factories there.’

Manju felt his ears turning hot.

After that they did not talk again until Ali Weinberg played Fatima at the Oval. In the afternoon, watching his team bat from the dark players’ tent, Manju was conscious of a presence on a plastic chair next to him — someone who had just stripped off his white shirt, and was sucking a bottle of water. Manju got up from his chair, and was about to leave the tent, when a voice from behind him said, ‘I wrote a poem about you, Manju. Do you want to hear it?’

‘Shut up.’

‘If you don’t to want to hear it, see it. Turn around.’

‘No. I won’t,’ Manju said.

‘Turn around and see the poem I wrote for you,’ the voice said again. There was no one else in the tent. Manju could hear someone removing his clothes.

When he finally turned around, Javed had stripped off his trousers, revealing his white underwear.

And Manju watched a poem.

Beyond the tent, sunlight and cricket continued, and the world kept turning; here, in the darkness, ‘J.A.’, stripped to his briefs, down on all fours, lifted himself up on his wrists and the tips of his toes. Slowly he turned his wrists around till they faced Manju. He grunted, awakening a giant vein on the side of his arm, and raised his toes off the earth. He was supported only by his wrists now. ‘Watch me,’ he said. Manju’s lips parted. ‘Watch me.’ Inside the dark tent, his near-naked adversary, cheeks puffed out and forehead swollen up, was parallel to the earth.

Moving back, step by step, until his back was pressed against the taut fabric of the tent, Manju stood still, as if someone had held a knife to his throat.

•

That Saturday (Ali Weinberg v. Rizvi Springfield), as Javed batted in Shivaji Park, someone in the crowd — Mumbai’s most discerning cricketing audience — shouted: ‘ Makad. ’ Monkey. In the argot of Shivaji Park, ‘makad’ was a term of honour: it meant Javed could bat, bowl, field, run, he could do anything.

The nickname brought a smile to Manju’s lips.

The next day he went to a paan shop by Chembur station, gave an old man a rupee, wiped the receiver of the shop’s yellow pay-phone against his shirt, as his father had taught him to, and dialled a number.

When the phone was answered, without introducing himself, Manju asked: ‘I don’t know what my father will do, and what your father will do if they find out, but do you want to practise together with me from now on?’

There was a pause, and the voice of the makad said, ‘Why not, man?’

•

Being both an atheist and a cricketer, Tommy Sir was twice as superstitious as other men, and when he felt something fall on his hair from a tree on the seaside promenade at Carter Road, and move down his forehead and nose like quicksilver, his immediate thought was that it was a sign from heaven.

This was reconfirmed when Tommy Sir discovered that what had fallen on him was a caterpillar, a little green dynamo, by this time going down his chin towards his neck.

The old scout had just come from a meeting where he had given Anand Mehta tremendous news: Radha Krishna Kumar was about to go to England for six weeks … ‘No, he is not!’ shouted the investor, who had not yet heard the key word.

‘On a scholarship?’ Tommy Sir finally got through.

Someone else was paying? Delighted.

‘Founder Ali called me. He complimented me, as no one in the Mumbai Cricket Association has ever done, on my excellent work, and then he said he would personally come to the school today to give “My son, young Master Kumar” his scholarship and plane ticket to England. His own words. He called Radha his son.’

Tommy Sir picked the caterpillar off his neck, and examined it. Look at its legs go, he thought; look at the brio in this fellow. Like a worm drawn by Van Gogh. He raised it up with care to observe it against the elemental backdrop of the Arabian Sea.

His viewing pleasure was interrupted by the passing of a group of bearded young men in loose white cotton clothing. Forgetting about the caterpillar, he watched the men in white intently. Muslims probably from Uttar Pradesh, the nation’s barely governable heartland. Behind them followed half a dozen women, dressed from head-to-toe in black burka. There was visual evidence of it every day: the biggest change in India, happening right in front of everyone’s eyes. The Muslim population was growing. In number and in religious fervour. Not that the increase in their number, due to an exponentially higher birth rate, was in itself a problem for Tommy Sir, who had no issues with either Christians or Muslims — point one, a universalized misanthropy protected him from such petty resentments ( all men smell, after all), and point two, who are the most passionate cricketers in the whole wide world? Muslims! Yet Tommy Sir, watching the young women in all black follow the young men in all white, worried. He worried that the fecundity and the fundamentalism together were going to bake a nice big Christmas cake for India in about twenty years. Burka here, fatwa there. Sharia for all. Personally, of course, Tommy Sir didn’t approve of buggery — normal sex was filthy enough, and the thought of men doing that to each other was nearly enough to make him faint — but this is a free country, let the chaps do what they want in the shadows. The Taliban, however, used to bury men behind brick walls simply because they were gays. What will happen to fellows like Pramod Sawant if the Fundos take over here too? Lots of people worry, about this and other things, but no one dares say it out loud. Because they’ll surround you at once and call you a name: racist! In nothing can we Indians find the right balance, not even in tolerance.