Aravind Adiga - Selection Day

Suddenly remembering the caterpillar, Tommy Sir looked all around him.

Didn’t matter that he couldn’t find it now: it had been a sign.

See, right now, at the Kalanagar Signal, there was a big bank advertisement that said: ‘When Sachin Tendulkar dreamed of becoming the world’s greatest batsman, so did Ajit Tendulkar.’ But if Tommy Sir looked hard enough, it changed before his eyes and became: ‘When Radha (and/or Manju Kumar) dreamed of becoming the world’s greatest batsman (and/or batsmen), so did Narayanrao Sadashivaro Kulkarni, known to all as Tommy Sir.’

Fear intruded on his fantasy. The UP Muslims, turning around, were heading back towards him. With his instinctive courtesy, he stepped aside to let them pass, then sat down on the wall of the promenade, and looked at the wilderness of rock, rubbish and dead trees that kept the ocean a few yards away from Carter Road.

He laughed.

Near the water’s edge, a pipe sputtered slow black water, and in the sewage that trickled to the ocean he spotted a crab hunting for its food — emerald-backed, slime-coated, iridescent, with many moving red arms, many moving plans. ‘Anand Mehta,’ said Tommy Sir, and looked around for someone to share the joke with, but saw only UP Muslims everywhere.

•

Manjunath Kumar was changing. The fat was leaving his face, but the pimples were larger. His eyes were more heavily lidded than they had been in childhood. His voice had not yet broken, but his gaze, like an adolescent’s, seemed always to be recoiling from something that had just noticed it. He had developed a sly grin, and an annoying new way of chuckling. While he still spoke Kannada to his father and Hindi to his brother, now he uttered entire sentences in English. He wore a baseball cap all the time, possibly to make himself look taller than his five foot two inches. He was more brazen, and at the same time, more secretive. The moment he realized that he was being observed, by his father, by his brother, by the neighbour, Mrs Shastri, or sometimes, when no one else was around, even by ‘B.B. Balasubramaniam’, the landlord’s nameplate hammered into the door, he withdrew his new mannerisms and hid them behind a dark face and scowl: as if this thing, his new personality, were one of those secret science experiments of his boyhood.

In the morning, standing half-naked before the mirror, he puffed out his cheeks, and flexed his arms, gritting his teeth. Nothing. Manju turned his head from left to right to check. Absolutely nothing. Though his forearms were thick, he had none of those sexy veins that should bulge from a man’s biceps when he made a muscle. He moved closer to the mirror, until his breath fogged it. His tongue extended and touched itself. This is what he had always assumed he tasted like: cold glass.

Then his tongue disappeared.

Scraping her way on her knees as she mopped the floor with a wet rag, the maidservant had entered the boys’ bedroom; in the mirror, her narrow eyes found his.

Buttoning himself up, Manju went to the living room, where his father was talking to Mrs Shastri, the most star-struck of their neighbours, who was visiting, as usual, with her eight-year-old son Rahul, a prospective batsman.

‘No: it is not enough to start thinking when they are six or seven. You start before that. You start from the moment the sperm enters the egg, and creates the zygote.’

Manju went to the window with a view of the brick-wall courtyard where they had once practised cricket, and which Radha had nowadays turned into a darbar-hall where he held court, bat in hand, to a gang of local admirers.

‘You know what I like best about being with a girl? When she’s just washed her hair, and you’re holding her, and the wind blows right over her head, bringing all the shampoo into your nose, and you go … Ummmm.’

High above his brother, closing his eyes and inhaling deeply from a phantom head of shampooed hair, Manju whispered, ‘Ummmmmmm.’

‘What is this thing you did to your eyes, Aryan?’

He opened his eyes to see Radha now touching one of his friend’s eyebrows.

The boy, Aryan, explained he had gone to a barber to ‘weave’ his eyebrows: sleeking them into a stylish line arching over his eyes. ‘My father would kill me,’ Radha said, as he traced a finger over the arch. ‘Once I go to England, then .’

Glancing up, Radha saw Manju, but pretended not to.

People had begun to say that Radha Kumar had his father’s face, but that inverted triangle formed by his grey eyes and his strong nose belonged entirely to their mother.

Watching his brother show off, Manju picked up the tennis ball they used for practice, and squeezed it in his right hand until it was warm and angry:

‘ Behenchod! It’s late!’

Throwing the hot ball down at Radha, he made his admirers scatter.

Dressed, and with their cricket bags slung over their shoulders, the boys came to the living room to see Mrs Shastri, her hands folded on her son’s head, staring at their father.

On the sofa, Mohan Kumar sat without a word, looking at the blue wall above the television set.

‘He was telling me how I should give the boy regular check-ups and then he just —’ Mrs Shastri said. ‘He just …’

Mohan Kumar had let thick grey stubble overrun his face: but it was not a beard, it was a ‘statement’ — it was a ‘protest’, he said, against Tommy Sir’s step-by-step encroachment upon his paternal rights. He couldn’t even speak his mind these days; but when he stroked his beard, when he bit his lip, the boys knew what he wanted to say.

Manju had noticed that his father would sometimes stop speaking in mid-sentence, apparently to scratch his beard, and then he would look at the clock; sometimes he might even forget an ancient proverb. For two or three hours at a stretch they found him slumped on the sofa, or with his pen in his hand, alternately looking at the clock and attempting to make a mark on a blank sheet of paper.

Manju seized his inert father by the shoulder, and shook. ‘Appa. You’re doing it again. Doing it again. Stop.’

Emerging from his daydream, Mohan Kumar smiled at his son as one might at a headmaster, then looked at Mrs Shastri and her eight-year-old Rahul, and resumed his lecture on why only Cipromycin, bloodhound among antibiotics, can be trusted to sniff out, locate and exterminate even the most cunning of bacteria hiding inside an infected prostate gland.

•

On their way to class, students of the Ali Weinberg International School would occasionally hear residents of nearby buildings shout that their founder was a ‘thug’ before slamming down their windows. Depending on whom you spoke to, Karim Ali had either created this corner of Bandra or destroyed it, or done that peculiar thing to it, involving in equal parts creation and destruction, that happens sooner or later to every suburb in Mumbai. They said there was no room in this end of Bandra to build skyscrapers: Karim Ali found room. Had he threatened Catholic widowers to do so? Had he violated city zoning laws? Catholics are rich, they will survive, and this city’s laws were written to be broken. Karim Ali was now Founder Ali, patron of the new enlightenment, proprietor of Ali’s Educational Empire, comprising medical, dental, journalism, and many other colleges, to whose number more were being added year by year, but the Jewel in whose Crown would always be the Ali Weinberg International School (run in partnership with the Joseph P. Weinberg Memorial Institute of Lafayette, Mississippi), known for its headline-capturing cricket team, into which boys were recruited, with financial aid, if necessary, and from deep within the slums, if necessary.

Today, the Unseen Power and Guiding Genius of the Ali Weinberg School was paying his cricketers an extraordinary visit.