Aravind Adiga - Selection Day

Some part of him was starting to believe it.

It was his third morning in Javed’s flat, and he was growing used to waking up like this, a comic book under the cot, and a bird hopping about the blades of the fan. With each new morning, a life without cricket seemed to become more real.

Except this morning when the doorbell rang, and Manju opened the door; expecting to find Javed and breakfast, he found a strange man staring him up and down.

‘Javed is not here — he went to the mall to buy some film tickets. So I thought, it is time for me to come and see you.’ Bald and moustached, luminous in cotton clothes, Mr Ansari had the family’s trademark beak nose; but his slit-like hooded eyes reminded Manju of an Uzbek warrior he had once seen in a programme on the History Channel.

As the maid came in, and prepared the table for breakfast, Manju felt that pair of Uzbek eyes inspect him very thoroughly.

‘Mr Manjunath. My son is always talking of this Mr Manjunath. Now at last I see this Manju, and his famous forearms.’

They were served curry and pieces of warm bread, which the Ansaris, family of eccentrics, ate every morning in preference to parathas.

‘You know I am a cricketer myself?’ Mr Ansari spun a few imaginary balls towards Manju. ‘I got into Aligarh on the cricket quota, in 1976. Left-arm spinner, right-hand batsman. Cricket is every Indian boy’s dream; but not my Javed’s. Cricket and corruption: an old song, and not one that you two boys invented. Javed’s uncle Imtiaz said the same thing when they didn’t select him for India. It can happen. A selector can push his son into the team, yes: but when he stands at the crease, all three stumps fly. Not the best game, not the beautiful game: just the honest game, in the end. Have you ever heard me on the BBC Hindi service, by the way? I have some old tapes here. But eat now. Eat well. We’ll talk later.’

When they were done, Mr Ansari summoned him into his car, and they drove to an office, where they descended into a basement hall past a sign saying ‘Bulk Science Textbooks’.

‘ You know left-handers are all brilliant people, like Leonardo da Vinci?’ Mr Ansari spoke suddenly.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘My Javed is a genius, if he fails at cricket — by the way, I hope you know he failed only because he wanted to — he will start a big company like Mister Steven Jobs. So I don’t blame you for anything, Mr Manjunath. That I don’t.’

Opening a door, Mr Ansari, importer of scientific textbooks, ushered Manju into his empire, an underground hall filled with textbooks, some still lying inside half-opened cartons, others arranged in bright piles which rose two or three feet tall. Men were lowering more cartons into the basement.

Manju counted the cartons and decided he would never again have to worry about the cost of college textbooks.

‘You know what I call my son Javed?’

‘The Nurse,’ Manju said.

Mr Ansari looked up sharply.

‘He tells you everything. Yes, you go to the hospital and you’ll see all the nurses are from Kerala. My Javed has a nurse inside him — he has a big fat Malayalee nurse inside him. That’s the only way he can take care of himself: if he’s taking care of someone else. It’s not charity. It’s the only way he can preserve himself. By falling in love. First he loved me. Now he loves you. But I don’t blame you for anything.’

You do blame me, Manju thought. You blame me for everything. But you’ve been too scared, ever since your other son killed himself, to tell Javed what to do or whom to see.

Now Manju understood why Javed had aborted his cricketing career — to prove a point to this sweetly manipulative father: and in Javed’s mind this raised him higher than everyone else he knew. But soon he would have to do this again, destroy himself again and stand even higher on that wreck (maybe the next discarded self would be labelled ‘College Student who talked like Harsha Bhogle’, and the one after that ‘Guitar Player who sounded like Freddie Mercury the Rock Star’, and the one after that …), until he was entirely isolated from other people by an enormous pile of his own dead selves. And when he got there, to that high and arrogant place, he would be lost to everyone else. Except me, Manju thought. I will always be able to get to him.

Mr Ansari turned to shout at the men delivering more cardboard cartons of books, and then turned back to Manju.

‘You think I don’t know Javed wants to run away with you and go to Kanyakumari and whatnot? Look at me as I talk, Mr Manjunath. That boy is mad sometimes. But another part of me says, he is seventeen, he is young, now is the time for him to run away with a friend. This is the most important time of your lives … seventeen and eighteen is when the world can still be saved, do you follow? Once the door closes … are you actually listening to me, Mr Manjunath?’

The workers had left: the two of them were alone in the room. Manju folded his arms; his eyes on the textbooks, Mr Ansari picked his way in silence through cartons and boxes to the far end of the room. Manju wondered if he could leave.

The textbook businessman scratched his jaw.

‘Look at me when I talk, Manju. Good. Now I told Javed, please be careful what you do, I don’t want the neighbours or the relations talking. Be quiet. Be careful. That’s all I ask for.’

Getting down on one knee, he ripped a carton of books open, and kept talking, even as he gasped from the exertion.

‘He has no discipline. No discipline or self-control. The only discipline he has is that he loves people very honestly and sincerely …’

Rising to his feet, wiping his palms against his trousers, Mr Ansari penetrated deeper into the labyrinth of textbooks, looking among the cartons as though for some lost codex.

Manju was no longer sure he could mind-read Mr Ansari, no longer certain that this bald man with the sly eyes was just a subtler version of a familiar figure.

Out there, Manju thought, with regret — a regret he would feel so keenly for the rest of his life — there must be fellows who are actually proud of their fathers.

•

Coca-Cola in his right hand, Javed Ansari sat at a table in the highest level of a mall in Vashi, and turned the pages of a legal textbook. Mastering the Indian Penal Code for Competitive Examinations . A cheap paperback edition, probably pirated, that an old man had been selling on the footpath outside the mall. Javed had bought the book while waiting for Manju, and now, pen in hand, he flipped through it while glancing at his cell phone.

He turned to a blank page at the end of the textbook, and, with only his finger for a pen, wrote:

What is it we search for, in drink and in the depths?

The sentence had occurred to him two nights ago, as he watched inebriated men staggering through Vashi. Why did they do this, night after night?

Producing a ball-point pen from his leather jacket, he completed the poem:

What is it we search for, in drink and in the depths? asks Javed.

A star fell to the earth, and we hunt for it in the world’s rubbish.

The name of the star is love.

He sucked his teeth. No. The poem didn’t click. He crossed out the three lines, and dropped his pen: nothing he wrote these days clicked. Maybe he should give up poetry and stick to guitar. Try to start a band with Ranjith and the others.

He continued reading randomly through the legal code.

‘Section 120-B: Possessing assets disproportionate to known sources of income.’ He amended it with his pen.

‘Section 120-B applied to Poets: Possessing goals and ambitions in life disproportionate to known sources of talent.’