Aravind Adiga - Selection Day

Slowing as it passed Chowpatty beach, the white bus stopped in front of the P.J. Hindu Gymkhana. When Manju opened his eyes he saw Tommy Sir standing outside.

He clutched his cricket bag, pushed his way out of the bus, stopped and realized that the old scout had been waiting for him.

Tommy Sir started to say something but Manju walked right past him.

Tommy Sir found him in the dressing room of the pavilion, apart from all the other boys, earphones still plugged in to his cell phone.

Tommy Sir removed one of the boy’s earphones, put it into his own ear, and indicated his approval.

‘English music? Good. I too like English music.’ He relinquished the earphones but placed a hand on the boy’s thigh. ‘Manju. We have to talk. Look at me, I say, look at me. How is Radha doing? Is he okay?’

The boy looked at him as if he failed to understand. Then Manju’s features changed.

‘I don’t know .’

‘Manju. Look at me. Answer my question.’

‘ I don’t know,’ the boy said.

So Tommy Sir asked the question again, and for the third time, Manju, in the voice of one who was unmistakably enjoying himself, replied:

‘I don’t know.’

Tommy Sir took a while to understand what was happening.

All the other boys left the dressing room.

Tommy Sir reached out to seize Manju’s shoulder to shake some sense into him, but his hand stopped in mid-air.

Staring back at Tommy Sir, Manjunath Kumar looked like a Doberman barely restrained by a metal fence. Remembering what his elder brother had done to Deennawaz Shah, the violence in the blood of this family, Tommy Sir checked himself. But he hadn’t been scared of anything his whole life — and he certainly wasn’t going to be scared in a boys’ changing room.

‘Manju,’ he said, ‘because the selection match the other day was disrupted by your brother, everyone’s a bit nervous about the two Kumars, and the selectors just want to make sure you’re okay, so you have to come to Shivaji Park tomorrow and show—’

Tommy Sir stopped breathing, for Manju’s face had turned darker and even more vicious.

‘You crazy, bloody …’ Tommy Sir first considered giving the boy a good slap on the head, but changed his mind, and then considered retreating from the room gracefully, but finally just turned and fled.

•

Posed like a hero in the old Hollywood movies, his right foot on the sea wall of Marine Drive, his head erect and scanning the ocean, white hair trembling in the breeze, Tommy Sir thought, ‘If I don’t have a cigarette, my brain will burst open.’ Having left the gymkhana, he had crossed the road for safety (glancing over his shoulder to make sure Manju wasn’t following), then continued to the other side of Marine Drive, and gone a distance for further safety, before stopping at the sight of an ocean liner that had entered into Back Bay. Though it was a lifelong rule never to do this thing in the open, where some young impressionable boy might spot him, Tommy Sir now took out his packet of cigarettes and tapped on it.

First Radha blames him, now Manju blames him. After all he had done for them. He lit a cigarette.

Exhaling, relaxing a little, Tommy Sir observed the pleasure ship on the horizon, the foreign ship. Chock-full of lovebirds. Around the world they go, these little lovebirds: Italy, Scotland, Russia, maybe even to those Pacific Islands where there are still smoking volcanoes. At such moments, Tommy Sir remembered his late lamented wife, in whose company he had never been able to enjoy such pleasures.

Can you believe it? He wanted to shout to the young lovebirds on the cruise liner: You find the new Tendulkar and he doesn’t want to play cricket!

Half an hour later, as he retraced his route, recrossing Marine Drive and returning to the gymkhana, he saw two urchins playing cricket near the parked cars. One ran up and bowled an imaginary ball. The other swung at it with an imaginary bat.

‘Do it like Manju, yaar!’ the bowler shouted. Tommy Sir stopped.

‘Do what like …?’

He sprinted the rest of the way to the P.J. Hindu Gymkhana.

Men had gathered by the boundary wall. Men who had been working all through the night, and who still had an hour-long trip to Govandi or Thane ahead of them, and had come to watch a few overs first; two Indian couples; and a European couple in floppy caps, sitting, backs against the sight-screen, to consult their guide book. Now four pale legs move with a single shriek; for a hard red ball is heading straight at the sight-screen.

‘This fellow, they say his name is Kumar, he can bat, can’t he?’

‘He’s going to play for Mumbai.’

‘India! The World Cup!’

Two trains were passing each other in Marine Lines station; their metal roofs overlapping.

For the first time in four decades, Tommy Sir allowed the Mumbai cricketing public to see him smoking. Cigarette in hand, he watched Manju. Because this was the best the boy had ever been. Earlier, if he had cut and flicked the ball out of a love of batting, now he did so out of hate. His strokes had become crisp, his footwork precise. The story of the past few days was there, in every ball he played. Every flick of his wrist said, do you know how much I hate you, Anand Mehta? Do you know how much I hate you, Mohan Kumar? And do you, Narayanrao Sadashivrao Kulkarni, really want to know what I think about you ?

This is what I have not understood in all of forty-two years, Tommy Sir told himself. The shroud has parted: this is the one thing the boy needed to make him a great batsman. He needed to hate the game.

When the Mumbai Sun sends a reporter to interview Manju on my seventy-fifth birthday, let him say Tommy Sir was a Monster. He destroyed my life, he sucked my blood. And if they ask me, I’ll say, a great sportsman is a kind of monster. This was the final discovery of my career as a Talent Scout.

•

‘Why won’t you talk about the match, son? A reporter for the paper called me and told me you were great.’

Mohan perched on the bed, bird-like, beneath the fast old-fashioned fan. His hair was wet. He turned his head from side to side.

Manju sat with his organic chemistry tutorial notes. Pads and bat had been stacked up in a corner of the room.

‘They’ve put him to work in the fields. A son of Mohan Kumar, a big-city boy, and they treat him like this, in the village.’

Turning the fan off, Mohan got down from the bed, bent his head, and rubbed his hair with a thick white cloth.

Now Manju looked up.

‘So why don’t you do something? Write to Revanna Uncle to bring Radha back to Mumbai.’

Mohan had stopped rubbing his hair; he looked about the floor, as if the words he needed were lying down there waiting to be picked up.

It has been a long time, Manju thought, since this small man has tried to hit me. He had to strain to catch his father’s muffled words.

‘The winnowing has begun in the villages. I heard from Revanna just an hour ago. It’s the work I used to do. Breaks the back. Imagine if they found out in Dahisar, in the old neighbourhood. Ramnath, he’ll laugh so hard he’ll forget to press clothes for a day. And then he’ll give us four rupees which we’ll have to take as charity.’

Putting his hands on either side of the cot, Mohan Kumar pressed, as if trying to squash his own bed.

Manju sat facing the kitchen. The maid was making chapatis, stacking them up on a tin plate. He imagined her doing this for years and years, the pile growing higher and higher.

Mohan Kumar was still trying to compress his bed. ‘“On its way into town, the king’s white horse turned into a donkey.” A golden proverb. I had illusions about my sons, and all of us suffered because of them. If you make it onto the Ranji team, that’ll do. One point five lakhs a month will be your salary; first we have to give Anand Mehta his 75,000 rupees for saving your brother from the police. Then we have to give him back his 50,000 rupee house loan. In two or three years, he’ll go away, don’t you think?’