Aravind Adiga - Selection Day

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One morning, over 100 million years ago, India left Eden and went looking for Tibet. Tearing itself off from Gondwana, a primeval continent covered in rainforests and teeming with dinosaurs, a ‘V’-shaped chunk of land called India (accompanied at first by Madagascar) decided it wanted to join, for some godforsaken reason, South Asia.

For that ‘V’-shaped piece of land, the next 120–140 million years, needless to say, have been mostly a catastrophe.

Tommy Sir — after the death of his wife, he had allocated Saturday evenings to the enhancement of his draughtsmanship and colouring skills — now stood by an easel, painting the geological history of the Indian subcontinent. That history was, in his eyes, a tragic one. Eight panels had been completed, and were drying in a corner of the room; now he was filling in details of the giant volcanic eruptions that started sixty-five million years ago in the Deccan Plateau — releasing so much gas and smoke that the sky was darkened, the earth shuddered, and an Ice Age began, killing all the dinosaurs. Mexicans say it was their Yucatan meteor that did it — bullshit: our Deccan Plateau murdered the Tyrannosaurus. Fire and brimstone. You can still see the evidence of all that volcanic rage when you hike around Mahabaleshwar, as Tommy Sir did each year, by himself. The mountains, ridged and layered, consist of millions of tons of congealed lava; here and there you may see a jagged peak, carved like a stegosaurus’s spine, like a trophy kept by the Deccan Plateau of its most famous victim. Inside a giant amphitheatre formed by concave red cliffs, Tommy Sir had stood, observing the cataract of plastic bottles and cellophane rubbish left behind in the mountains by tourists — educated, English-speaking, middle-class tourists — and had wondered aloud: What happened to you, Mother India? Where are your fountains of fire now? How did we become this pathetic people?

We should never have joined Asia, never. Should have remained an island off Africa, super-Madagascar, inviolate: Atlantis!

Blowing on the easel to cool the paint on his volcanoes, he went to the window and looked down on Kalanagar.

‘It’s a moonlit night, Lata,’ he called to his daughter, who was in the kitchen. ‘You know what the Christians do on a night like this?’

He did not wait for her to answer.

‘Out there in the Bandstand, they are going mad. Boys and girls run out into the water and sit on rocks kissing and cuddling and godknowswhat-ing, and then the tide covers the rocks and they can’t come back — have to call the ambulance to rescue them! Are you listening to me, Lata?’

Lata, Tommy Sir’s daughter, worked at a bank in the Bandra-Kurla Financial Centre. A Maharashtra state-level volleyball player, she had dropped out of the sport after just missing the cut for the national team (because even if she had made the team, her father had told her, what future for a woman in sport?), and now managed Tommy Sir’s little Kalanagar flat, a role that she appeared content to play for the rest of her life, though her father still harangued her once a month to find a boy, a salaried boy of any religion or looks — even a Gujarati boy if all else failed — as long as hands, eyes, ears, nose, legs, and everything in between functioned. For what more can a girl want?

Incomprehensible Youth!

In the background, the radio played old film songs.

Lata, in the kitchen, hummed along and did the dishes.

From his desk Tommy Sir removed a packet of cigarettes and a manila folder full of sketches, war maps, and notes made in Marathi, Urdu and English. It bore the title: ‘1761: The soul breaks out of its encirclement. Notes for a proposed true history of the third battle of Panipat’. Looking over the elegant handwriting of his youth — how beautifully we Indians wrote in those days — Tommy Sir smiled, remembering that this project had once been a passion greater than cricket for him. For the Emperor Shivaji, the Peshwa Baji Rao and other successful Marathas, Tommy Sir cared nothing: in history, as in geology, failure excited and aroused him. Because only failure — the right kind of failure — has tragic grandeur. Plus, didn’t his blood boil at the thought that students across India were still learning about Panipat by reading Sir Jadunath Sarkar, that inveterate Maratha-basher? No one knew how close the Marathas had come to winning — after five hundred years of effeminately surrendering to invasions from Central Asia, an Indian army almost triumphed at Panipat. It was that close. No more than the space between Tommy Sir’s fingers. After being foxed and fooled by the Afghan king Abdali for months, after losing ally after ally to him, after running out of money and food, and then sitting passively within a trench for weeks while the enemy encircled and taunted them — in other words, after doing nearly everything humanly possible to ensure their own defeat — the Marathas, just before dawn on 14 January 1761, finally decided to fight. And how they fought. In this, one notes a resemblance to the way Indians once played Test cricket. By noon on the day of battle, Abdali, stunned by the ferocity of the Maratha charge, told his soldiers to get his wives away to safety. Man’s soul, which is bogged down in a monkey’s body, and Mother India, bogged down in some lesser nation’s history, were both about to break free. That close.

Holding a cigarette in between his thumb and index figure, Tommy Sir put away the old manila folder. One of these days, one of these days. But for now — he lit the cigarette, and switched on the lamp over his computer — it was time to start his next column for the newspaper: ‘Some Boys Rise, Some Boys Fall: Legends of Bombay Cricket and My Role in Shaping Them Part 24’.

He stopped writing as soon as he began. The headache was starting again.

Biting on his cigarette, he used both index fingers to massage his forehead. Into this thin tense forehead had been crammed the entire history of Bombay cricket. Vijay Merchant’s technique, Ravi Shastri’s tenacity, Sunny Gavaskar’s craftiness. You can believe in the future, but you must worship the past. Tommy Sir worshipped all hundred and fifty years of Bombay cricket, but his forehead, of late, had begun to hurt.

Mean blood sugar had reached 141 in the last report. You have to control your stress, the young doctor at Lilavati Hospital had said. Control my—? Are you crazy ?

After forty-one point five years of service to cricket, didn’t the men who ran cricket in Mumbai show more respect to one of those homeless girls that sell yellow balloons and blue wigs outside Wankhede stadium before an IPL game than they did to Tommy Sir? And why? Because Tommy Sir knew many things, but he did not know how to lie — and especially did not know how to utter the one big lie required today of everyone involved in the game of cricket, a lie that is dragged out over ten excruciating hours every match day by our chipmunk TV commentators, but which really boils down to a single deceitful statement: ‘Cricket in India still smells good.’

The old scout winced: oh, my forehead. My fore …

It must be the pollution, he thought, smoking his cigarette by the window. Or perhaps it was what he had read in the papers that morning. Out in Chembur, a man named ‘Metro’ Mahesh had been arrested by the police, for running a racket of illegal betting on international cricket matches. Of course he’d be walking free by evening. The politician to whom he sent up his betting money would call from New Delhi — or Dubai. The police would be promised a bigger cut next time. ‘Metro’ Mahesh. What a name. Just one of thousands doing the same work, all the way from Mumbai to the smallest villages in India, collecting bets from every bar, hotel, recreational club and police station. The worst part is the public know this — they know exactly what’s happening with the betting and the fixing — and they don’t care, they keep watching, they keep coming to the IPL matches.