Aravind Adiga - Selection Day

•

After breakfast, when Manju insisted, ‘The police know we’re cricket stars. They will listen to us,’ all Radha did, once again, was to shake his head from side to side. The two brothers left home and walked to the train station, but only one of them had brought a cricket kitbag with him.

‘That man can’t treat us like that. He can’t wake us up in the middle of the night.’

‘Just because you’ve gone to England and speak with an accent, doesn’t mean you’re special, Manju. He’s paying us.’

Manju saw that the red handle of his brother’s bat, sticking out over his shoulder, was rubbing against the back of his neck as they walked.

‘What do you want to do anyway, Manju?’

‘Go to the police. Tell them.’

Radha had stopped.

‘Police? Englishman wants to go to the police. Give me your hand. Give me your foreign hand.’

Manju held his hand out to his brother, who squeezed it in his.

‘Come, Manju, let’s go to the police together.’

Hand in hand they walked like that. As they passed a streetside barber’s stall, Manju leaned back, reflexively, to check himself in the mirror in between two men being lathered for a shave. And this was too much for Radha: My brother , he thought, is such a little bugger.

‘Manju,’ he said. ‘I like police stories. Do you like police stories? Good. Manju, Sofia’s friend’s father, the ACP, was telling me a story. Listen. This ACP was telling Sofia and me the Mumbai police now go on the Internet, and they go onto these chat sites, right. They go on to gay chat sites, Manju. Gay chat sites.’

Radha squeezed his younger brother’s hand.

‘First they make friends with the gays, Manju, and they say, you want to exchange videos? Blue videos? Let’s meet outside Dadar station. Fine, the gay brings his blue video, he comes to Dadar, he meets the ACP, who has come with another blue video, they exchange the videos, and then the gay is walking home when the ACP does this (Radha seized Manju), and says,’ (holding his brother’s shoulder, Radha curled his own tongue to touch his upper lip like a bull) ‘and says, that isn’t a blue video in your hands, is it? That isn’t a gay blue video, is it? Let’s go to the station, fag boy, let’s go. Then the ACP and his police friends take the homo to jail and say they will lock him up for ten years and tell his mummy and wife he’s not a real man, just a fag boy, till he sweats and begs and pays the policemen lots of money. Isn’t that funny, Manju? I asked, Englishman, isn’t that funny? Hey, Manju, where are you running? The police station is this way. This way.’

‘Fuck off,’ Manju told his brother. He walked a few steps, then turned around and shouted: ‘I took it from you, Radha. Remember that every night before you go to sleep. And if there’s a new scholarship, I’ll take it from you again.’

•

It was virtually an instinct now, to call Javed whenever he was in trouble. After leaving his brother, Manju found a pay-phone near the Chembur train station. He told Javed everything. ‘I knew that investor was no good the first time I saw him,’ Javed replied. ‘Which man with self-respect would wear a red Manchester United T-shirt? Listen to me, little Manju. Take the train to Navi Mumbai. I’ve been waiting for you. You can tell me about England, too.’ ‘Alright,’ Manju said, and put the phone down, and paid the shopkeeper a rupee for its use.

Then the strange thing happened. As he was crossing the road, a traffic policeman, in his white shirt and khaki trousers and topi, raised his left hand; with his right hand he pointed a wooden lathi straight at Manju. He took a step towards the boy. Manju’s throat had contracted. He stood in the middle of the road, his heart beating, until the cold glass of a passing autorickshaw’s rear-view mirror touched his back, and he started. The traffic policeman walked right past him and began talking to the rider of a motorcycle; now the rider was remonstrating and pleading with the policeman. Ah, Manju thought — the fellow has forgotten to wear his helmet. The policeman has caught him for that. Hunter and prey would now start negotiating the size of the bribe that the motorcyclist had to fork out for his offence.

That lathi was never pointed at me , Manju understood. Yet his heart still thumped against his ribs.

Drops of water fell on his nose. He looked up at the dark sky. Deciding not to meet Javed, he instead ran home for his cricket gear: he would go join a match in the Kanga League. He was going to be the best in Mumbai today.

For Manju was now batting to protect himself.

TENTH STANDARD CONTINUES: THE KANGA LEAGUE STARTS

Even in mid-May, even in early June, they keep playing cricket: right through the heat, and through the terrible days when all-India strikes are called and buses are burned. Right through till the sixth or seventh of June, when the rains say: ‘Stop.’ Then the nets are taken away, and the stone-rollers are smothered in yellow tarpaulin. At the Oval, bare-chested workers scoop out mounds of dark earth from what used to be the cricket pitch, as if excavating a mass grave.

It rains and it pours, and the semi-naked bodies dig deeper and deeper into Mumbai.

But barely a month later, the cricketers have come back from the dead: the Kanga League has begun.

Standing in a multitude of circles they hear the same pep-talk from a multitude of coaches. Crows are rising and swooping in front of the Bombay Gymkhana. Dozens of matches are in progress on one maidan. The rain grows heavier each minute. The grass is mad and the human beings are mad. Young men are skidding, falling, and resurrecting themselves out of the mud. It is as though the life-force of Mumbai city were flowing from the street into the middle class: well-fed school kids, dressed in Victorian white, are hustling like homeless children. Strong is the thunder, and strong is the lightning-bolt: but we are stronger.

•

Beyond Mankhurd, the Harbour Line went past slum after slum, slums that were gloomy and hopeless in a way that Manju couldn’t remember the old place in Dahisar ever being, past the clustered buildings of a Slum Redevelopment Authority project, and into green wilderness.

Then came a bridge, and glowing water, and in the distance, a new city: Navi Mumbai — New Mumbai.

•

In the men’s toilet at Vashi station, Manju looked at himself in a mirror and washed his face with soap, twice, and checked his hair.

Right outside the station, he found a shopping mall made of glass. A foot away from the entrance, where security guards waited with metal detectors, a boy stood admiring himself in the glass wall. His powerful neck was shaved clean below the hairline, and his shoulders were exposed by his low-cut T-shirt.

From the reflection in the glass Manju could see that the boy was wearing Aviator sunglasses, and had a gold ring in his right ear.

He began to run towards him.

But Javed had seen his reflection in the glass: waiting till Manju was almost upon his back, he turned around and caught him and for a long moment they held on to each other.

•

Knowing that Javed’s first question would be: What is England like? Manju thought, I will tell him about the forest bird. There was a garden behind the school, and there were deer in the garden. Deer? Yes. In England you have deer everywhere. On the way to cricket, Manju would stop to watch the deer in the garden, and one day, he heard a sound from the bushes. Parting open the leaves of a big dark bush, he found a forest bird, motionless and curled-up in a wet nest, like an ebony foetus. Indian boy and British bird stared at each other, for a full minute, each asking the other, What are you doing here? Then, with a beating of wings, the bird made Manju’s heart stop as it rose right over his head, as if it meant to seize him, like the roc that lifted Sindbad over the seven seas.