Aravind Adiga - Selection Day

In the distance, Alibagh just about made itself visible. Radha persisted with his TV smile.

‘Your brother has big eyes, so cute. The girls are going to go crazy for him.’

Still smiling, Radha narrowed his eyes and lowered his voice: ‘For your information: one, he didn’t score 600, and two, he’s not going crazy for the girls.’

But no one had heard him: because the policeman’s son, rummaging about in his backpack, had produced a pack of condoms.

‘Hey, cricketer,’ the other boy shouted. ‘You know what this is? KKK. Kondom, Kondom, Kondom.’ The girls laughed.

‘I have many more inside my bag. The real KKK.’

‘He’s so funny,’ Sofia said.

He stole my joke, Radha thought. To hell with these rich kids. Big thief walks free. He knew that Sofia was the only one here who was different — for the others, I’m just the boy from the slum, he thought, and looked down at his dirty shoes.

Then he closed his eyes and tightened his grip on his cricket bat: when the moment comes, when Radha Krishna Kumar scores his double century for India in the World Cup, when his name will be applauded in far-off and wonderful places like Cape Town and Christchurch and Trinidad, we’ll see who is laughing.

When he opened his eyes, Radha saw small white birds skimming the waves. The euphoria faded; his smile disappeared; he remembered his younger brother.

The boat docked; people shrieked; the girls held on to the seats for support and almost knocked Radha into the water.

When they reached Alibagh, the blonde and the boys walked down a grey beach. Radha kept his eyes on the water’s edge, where indistinct birds left deep black prints on the sand.

Sofia said, ‘You were saying something about Manju? I didn’t hear.’

Radha had seen something dark moving within the white surf — a turtle, or something like a turtle. He gnawed at his fingernails, and spat.

‘I said nothing about Manju.’

With his cricket bat in hand, he walked into the water, and the ocean swelled, mockingly, around his feet.

Two nights ago the TV had been on, and Radha, seeing Manju sitting on the ground and watching with narrowed eyes, had thought, CSI Las Vegas . But no: not CSI . It was a programme about the gays in America: they could now marry each other. He had stood behind his younger brother, watching him watch the programme. Manju heard his breathing, and jumped, and turned the television off: it was that leap, more than anything else, that had made Radha’s heart pound.

Now he smashed his bat into the Arabian Sea.

Is the world’s second-best batsman a homo? And is the world’s best batsman, the one with a secret contract, not going to be selected for Mumbai? Radha waded deeper into the ocean. He bashed at the waves with his SG Sunny Tonny. ‘Weight-transfer issue.’ The phrase was as heavy as a death-sentence. His jeans were now wet above the ankles, and he felt their soaking mass pulling him down. Weight-transfer. What I wouldn’t give you, ocean, to make this problem go away. The water had risen to his knees. See, sometimes I have to drink a beer to go to sleep. And when I wake up, the eyelids do not want to open, and a voice in my head says, ‘What does the morning have to do with a man like you, who can’t even hold a bat?’ And then the voice says, ‘Your little brother is a homo, and you can’t hold a bat anymore.’

Why? Why? Why?

Someone up there was rewriting the promised contract, and Radha Kumar, who could do nothing to undo the changes to the script, who had learnt — as his father had — what it meant to be only a man before he had learnt what it meant to be fully a man, bludgeoned the waves around him with his bat.

‘Radha!’ Someone was shouting at him. ‘Come back, are you crazy?’

The water rose above his knees now. Wading deeper into the sea, Radha Kumar raised his bat and looked around for that turtle.

•

While Manju slept in Mumbai, someone was thinking about him on the mainland.

A white moon moved over Navi Mumbai, and Javed Ansari had slipped from his bedroom, passed the couch on which his father snored, the cricket magazines his father had left on the dinner table in a pathetic attempt to revive his fading interest in cricket, opened a door, and walked, a free man, into the night. Vashi was deserted. Javed walked past a government school: click, click , he heard a rolled-up flag knocking against the metal pole in the school compound. A bike had toppled over outside the school; a policeman slept at a traffic light. Javed walked down the centre of the road, knowing that all the gates of the night were open to him. He could just kick at a door, go into someone’s flat and rob it, he thought, and half considered the idea before laughing into the darkness: U-ha, U-ha. Money was for idiots. Money and cricket were for idiots. He grabbed at the night air as if it were black, physical material, coal that his strong fist could crush into diamond.

Poetry.

Wiping the sweat off his forehead, Javed looked up: the moon waited white and immense over the earth, like a mandate to dream and create.

‘Sean Connery,’ he said out loud. Yeah, he had looked him up on the Internet. Very handsome man, Manju: but seriously old, too.

With a grin, Javed directed a giant brain-wave right at the Tattvamasi Building in Chheda Nagar, Chembur.

Pass me the hammer, Miss Moneypenny. I’m a young Javed Ansari!

•

Over the next few weeks, Manju became aware that two parties were in open conflict for possession of something precious and hidden inside him: his future.

First, his father took Manju to the local Subramanya temple and made him put ten rupees into the collection box before reminding him to keep his end of the contract with God and drop out of education, as he had long ago promised his father he would (and as the great Sachin himself did, remember), to concentrate full-time on cricket. ‘Yes, Appa, I’ll do it,’ Manju said.

He went straight to a pay-phone near the train station, wiped the receiver clean with his shirt, and called Javed, who listened and said: ‘Unless you want to be a slave, you must never drop out of college.’

Manju, in principle, agreed.

He gave Javed his word, no matter what manipulation his father and Tommy Sir tried, he would study all day and all night for the exams, and would get into Ruia College.

But the next morning, he went to JJ Hospital morgue. The boys were practising cricket at Azad Maidan, and he, still in his cricket whites, just slipped down the road, and took the bus. He found the morgue and told the guard, ‘Let me in, please.’ The old man in khaki squinted at him: ‘Only doctors, interns or medical students are let in.’

‘But I play cricket ,’ Manju said.

‘Fine,’ the guard said. ‘Go on in.’

So at last Agent Grissom of the CSI Team (Las Vegas) walked into the JJ Hospital morgue (Mumbai) and suddenly shivered in the cold, and couldn’t go on.

‘Why not?’ Javed asked, when Manju, almost in tears, called him from a one-rupee pay-phone.

‘It smelled.’

‘Dead bodies smell. Didn’t you know?’

‘But Javed, it smelled .’

Finished. Manju could never again imagine himself Agent Grissom. He couldn’t even eat his food; his gorge felt full of all that was awful and real, and it came out of his eyes as tears.

How Javed laughed at the other end of the line.

‘Maybe I can go back to Manchester.’

‘Why? You think dead bodies don’t stink in Manchester? Idiot.’

Manju was so angry he announced he wouldn’t go to Ruia College. Or any college.

Two minutes later he dropped another rupee into the pay-phone, wiped the receiver clean again, and called Javed back to say, ‘Don’t tell anyone what I told you, okay? About the morgue?’