Aravind Adiga - Selection Day

‘And there’s a bill to pay. For this scotch. Good Indian scotch. Nothing is free for you people anymore. It’s my bar. Start paying me.’

Mohan Kumar took out his wallet, and held it out, and Anand Mehta removed the only large note, a hundred-rupee bill, from it.

•

When they finally made it outside the building, Mohan saw his Manju bend over, stick out his tongue like a happy jackass, and vomit on the pavement.

The gates had closed behind them.

‘Let’s go to the police, Appa. Let’s both go to the police right now,’ Manju said, as he wiped his lips clean. ‘He made me drink that. Right in front of you. And you did nothing.’

Mohan Kumar said nothing; his shirt stuck to his body.

Manju came close and examined his immobile father. He saw no eyes, no lips, no features; and he realized that for all these years, his father had not had a face. All these years, there had been no secret contract with God, no scientific method, no antibiotics and no ancient wisdom: just Fear.

Manju turned and observed: not one adult walking around him in the night had a face.

•

‘The first point we have to establish is this. Did Javed tell you, or did he not tell you that exactly this kind of thing would happen to you if you kept playing cricket?’

Leaving his father before the gates of Anand Mehta’s housing society, Manju had crossed the road to a grocery store with a yellow pay-phone. The store-owner had a black tear-like birthmark running from his eye to his nose, giving him the look of one born to sorrow; he flicked through a copy of the Mumbai Sun , entirely indifferent to Manju, who stood beside him sobbing on the phone.

‘… don’t be a bastard. Tell me what I should do, Javed. Just tell me.’

‘Bastard? You’re calling me a bastard? I shouldn’t even talk to you. I told you, you keep playing cricket, I’ll stop talking to you. And I keep my word.’

‘Javed, everything bad that happened today, what Radha did, this is all my fault. You don’t know the story. You don’t know half the story.’

‘Manju: it’s nobody’s fault. Your father is fucking you in the head again. Leave him now .’

‘Leave and go where, Javed?’

‘Come to Navi Mumbai. I have my own flat now. You’ll be safe here.’

Manju heard, on the other end of the line, the sound of Javed’s jaws moving and crushing darkness.

He would be safe there. Javed would protect him.

The store-owner kept turning the pages of his Mumbai Sun .

‘Come stay with me, Manju. How many times do I have to say it?’

There was a pause.

‘But one thing: don’t call me till you’re ready to give up cricket and come here. Javed Ansari won’t break his word again. No more calls from you will be taken. Everyone in my house has received instructions. Because I worry you will come to Navi Mumbai, say “Fuck cricket, I am here for good,” and next morning decide to go back to Daddy.’

The phone went dead. Manju replaced the receiver; the store-owner folded his newspaper, placed it on his desk, and smiled. This act of kindness refreshed Manju, but then he saw the story on the last page of the newspaper:

Woman Kills Husband, But Not Without

A Reason, Police Say

The 32-year-old wife of a building contractor who murdered her husband yesterday in horrifying circumstances, as reported in this paper, did so only after discovering that he had been having an affair — with another man, the police have disclosed. The full story of this lurid act of revenge, the police say, forces us to reconsider …

‘Everything alright?’ the store-owner asked.

‘Everything is perfectly alright, sir,’ Manju replied.

And then added a smile to his statement.

•

Perched upside down on the telephone wires along the road, parakeets screeched at the passengers in the bus.

Radha Krishna Kumar licked his lips to rid them of the coating of metal. He had slept with his face against the bars, and now, when he moved his head, there was pain, as if a wrench had been left behind in his neck.

Radha saw hills in the distance, and day breaking over them. The bus had come to a stop, and the passengers had descended to line up in front of a man pouring tea from a stainless-steel kettle.

He had caught the bus from Crawford Market the night before, as his brother had suspected he would. He was on his way to his village, to his uncle Revanna’s house, where he would be safer than at home: his uncle would never hand him over to the Mumbai police.

When the engine restarted, a baby whimpered; Radha saw a black sobbing face, raw, wet, rising in front of him, like something just lifted out of the primeval pond: and then rising further, towards the ceiling of the bus. Its father was lifting the baby high up, so it could see there was nothing to fear from the noise: the child saw, and squealed. But to Radha’s ears it had roared like a lion in the jungle. He turned to the iron bars of the window in tears. My father never did that for me; never held me up like that so I could roar over the noise of the world. He watched the inverted parakeets. He wanted to bite the rusting bars of the window; yes, bite and break them, one by one: how else was he to tell God what he thought of having been given a man like Mohan Kumar for a father?

When he looked up at the sky, the light of the new day seemed unbearable: for what did the morning have to do with a man like him, a man who was no longer good for cricket?

‘Close your eyes, Radha,’ a voice whispered; he obeyed. Fingers snapped in the dark; and then he saw, beneath a rusty grille, black water, which foamed and parted to reveal a domed creature with quick limbs rising up into the light.

A small soft voice said: ‘Radha Krishna Kumar, elder brother of Manjunath Kumar, the morning will always have something to do with a man like you.’ Then the turtle sank back into the deep. Radha’s soiled and tensed body relaxed; though the light now struck his face directly, he slept.

•

To call, after you have been told not to call; to press the redial button after the dial tone has been silenced; to sleep with the phone next to your pillow in the hope that it will wake you up in the middle of the night; these are new experiences for a sixteen-year-old.

Not a word in twenty days. Three weeks tomorrow.

You can’t even pick up the phone when you know it’s me, Javed?

Sitting in the last seat of a bus, Manju wore his ear-phones as he scrolled down the songs on his cell phone to find Eminem. Around him were Mumbai’s most promising under-19 players, selected by the Cricket Association; they were on their way to the P.J. Hindu Gymkhana for a ‘Friendly’.

Manju had made a round wall of music surround him: yet in its centre, he sat, exposed, naked to any pair of eyes that knew of the pain that one boy could inflict on another.

Someone turned to look at him, and at once the wall was breached: so Manju hid his deepest troubles behind others. There was only bad news of Radha from the village: their relatives complained that he sat in a corner and said nothing but ‘Punish me’. And every day, as soon as Manju opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was Anand Mehta Sir ordering him to suck his whisky. There? Happy? He glared at the boy who was looking at him.

Happy that I have troubles that someone like you can understand as troubles?

Now he closed his eyes and thought of how Javed was treating him, just because he hadn’t left everything and gone to Navi Mumbai.

I am not slave , he had texted him six times. You are not nice to me . Four times. I am coming but I can’t come right now . Twice.

No reply.

Now he wanted Javed’s hair to fall. Let it be eaten up, in widening bays of bald skin. Let that Muslim boy become ugly. Let him wish he had never met Manjunath Kumar.