Aravind Adiga - Selection Day

‘I won’t. But did you mean what you said, Manju, are you really not going to college?’

‘I mean it.’

‘You really are a slave. You think Javed Ansari wants to talk to slaves on the phone? I thought you were on my wavelength.’

Then, ten minutes later, Manju wiped the receiver clean a third time, and called Javed to inform him he was on the same wavelength.

•

August was almost over when one morning Manju tiptoed out of the boys’ bedroom, turned the tap in the sink, and ran three wet fingers through his hair.

‘Manju, don’t think I didn’t see you. Are you going to JJ Hospital morgue again? To look at naked dead women? Foreign naked dead women?’

Mohan Kumar followed the boy out of their flat; he leaned over the edge of the stairwell, hearing the boy’s quick footsteps, and boomed into the echoing airshaft: ‘Are you going to meet that Mohammedan cricketer at the morgue?’

From down below in the stairwell, Manju stopped and turned his face up to his father’s.

‘Why do you see that Javed Ansari so often?’ Mohan Kumar asked.

They stared. Then Manju stuck his tongue out at his father, and showed him his middle finger.

‘Mongoose has got to you, my little Manju …’ his father whimpered. ‘Mongoose, Mongoose, Mon—’

‘Don’t call him that again!’ Manju shouted from below. ‘He’s my friend.’

He went out of the building, turned around, came back in, and this time shouted:

‘He’s my real father.’

Free! Manju steadied his bag on his shoulder and walked fast. The door of the Subramanya temple was open. Chanting in Sanskrit the priest exalted the dark deity with a flaming brass vessel. Manju bowed before the fire-garlanded idol and asked the God of Cricket for a big favour:

‘Please don’t let my father stop me from going to college.’

Done praying, he walked to the train station, stopped, remembered, and ran back to the temple to ask for another thing.

‘And please let Javed stop losing his hair.’

Half an hour later, Manju got off at the Matunga station and stood, in a crowd of teenagers, outside the gates of Ruia College.

The third list of admissions had been pasted to a bulletin board on the other side of the college gate.

Manju had known already from the email and the letter, but he wanted to touch the admissions list. Touch it.

The gates were closed, so he walked back towards the station. They were playing tennis at the Matunga Gymkhana; someone threw a ball high up, and the act seemed to say ‘freedom’ in a way nothing in cricket could.

When Manju walked back to Ruia, the gates had just opened. The crowd rushed in.

Jostling against the others, he stood in front of the noticeboard where the admissions list was posted; his heart began to pound.

Even as elbows and fingers poked him, glancing over his shoulder to where he imagined Navi Mumbai would be, he fired, high over land and creek, a giant brain-wave of his own.

Javed. Javed. We did it. I got into Ruia.

FIRST YEAR OF JUNIOR COLLEGE

The Banganga tank, in Walkeshwar, high above south Mumbai, late in the evening. This is one of the oldest parts of the city, and even now, with its temple bells and wandering cows and narrow streets, it retains the look of a village tucked inside the metropolis.

White tubelights shone around the enormous open tank, and ducks floated on the black water, as two young men walked down the old stone steps that led to the water. One of them was in stained cricket whites; the other wore a leather jacket over blue jeans.

‘Do you ever miss it?’

‘It, Sir Manju, being?’

‘Cricket.’

‘Only you would ask a question like that, Sir Manju.’

Just a fortnight into junior college, and Javed had reinvented his image. His long-sleeved white shirts had given way to T-shirts and a leather jacket; the gold earring was gone, and his wavy hair was now streaked with copper highlights. It was receding, so dyeing it was the right decision, Manju felt.

‘ Never? You never miss it?’

‘Why … why … Sir Manju … why … would I miss that pro-puh-gun-duh and manipulation and mind-depopulation? I am no slave, Sir Manju.’

This was a new mannerism Javed had picked up ever since he’d started junior college in Navi Mumbai: a pout of his lips, an exaggerated emphasis on a random word in a sentence, followed by a spitfire burst of syllables, all delivered with a lopsided grin and an unstable head, a confounding mannerism which reminded Manju of the cricket commentator Harsha Bhogle.

‘By the way, you like this place? I now come here sometimes on the weekend,’ Javed said. ‘There is some energy- wenergy here, isn’t there?’

On the final step above the water, the two boys sat down.

‘The monkeys are terrible around here,’ Javed said. ‘Watch out for your phone and wallet.’

Javed gestured at the vast black water and the searing reflections of the white tubelights. ‘Isn’t it beautiful, Manju? Isn’t it gorgeous?’

‘Gorgeous,’ Manju repeated. ‘ This is gorgeous.’ He pinched Javed’s jacket between his fingers, and squeezed the rich dark leather.

Javed chuckled. ‘Don’t rape my jacket, man.’ He snapped his fingers at Manju, who reluctantly let go of the leather.

‘The jacket isn’t gorgeous, anyway. I am. Yes or no?’ Manju smirked.

‘Give me an answer, Manju.’

Javed thrashed his legs about when he did not get an answer.

Gorgeous.

From the figure of Javed, who was now spreadeagled on the steps in his leather jacket and tight blue jeans, Manju’s gaze moved to the tank and its skin of glossy black water. Gorgeous . It turned into a milky-white cloud: he remembered a morning when thick fog covered the Western Ghats as their bus climbed up the road, and the only things piercing through the fog were giant roses — no, not a rose, a mountain flower larger than the largest red rose on earth — and Manju felt he was flying high over the earth. When the sun finally pierced through the fog, the first thing he saw, seated on a low mountain wall, its enormous wings folded and its eyes intent on the bus, was a vulture.

Manju smiled with pleasure, and leaned back in stages until his neck touched a damp stone step. He shivered. Stretching out his hand, he pinched Javed’s leather jacket again.

‘Let go of my jacket, man. You’re crazy.’

I’m crazy? Manju thought. That was what people called Javed. Your rich crazy Muslim friend. Radha had told Manju, with much glee, about a rumour circulating among the cricketers that Javed Ansari (though now an ex-cricketer, still very much the focus of gossip) had been caught by the police a second time. On Independence Day. He and his friends had been driving about Powai without a licence: caught, taken to the station, and then bailed out — once again — by his father. Manju had been waiting for Javed to say something about the whole affair.

‘Don’t call me names. I don’t get arrested by the police.’

‘Who told you?’ Javed looked at him.

‘Everyone in cricket knows. Mad Max Gang. You guys must be idiots. No one else in all of Mumbai gets caught by the police for driving without a licence. Just your gang.’

‘Fuck cricket.’ Javed spat out the words at Manju, staining his face with saliva. ‘Fuck them all. They have no right to talk about me. It’s all pro-puh-gun-duh.’

‘I know, I know. Tatas Batting, McDonald’s Bowling. If you think cricket is for idiots, why are you imitating the biggest idiot in cricket, Harsha Bhogle?’

When Javed became furious these days, his scalp went back several inches, and this hint of premature baldness highlighted the vein in his forehead even more prominently: how Manju loved the sight of that face — volatile, vicious, glowing with dark blood.