Aravind Adiga - Selection Day

‘So they do have character in the slums, Tommy Sir. They still do. And my money? What about the sponsorship?’

‘Manju has promised, you will get your 75,000 rupees, Mr Anand. From the first cheque the boy makes, he will pay you back. But you must let his brother return to Mumbai and play here. Don’t go to the police or make trouble.’

‘Has the boy left college? You always said that was important.’

‘Yes, he has. I told him, there is no other way. And he went to the principal and dropped out yesterday.’

With his left hand, Anand Mehta slapped both his cheeks and pulled at his moustache.

‘Fantastic. By the way, Tommy Sir, you’re fired. I’ll take things over from here. I’ll deal directly with Goldenboy.’

Before the old man could reply, Anand Mehta hung up. The newspaper had flown back to the floor of the bridge. Bending down, Mehta outlined the boy’s grinning photograph with his thumbnail … No: not a boy anymore.

Manjunath Kumar

Said to be ‘one of our brightest young prospects’

Anand Mehta stood up tall.

He thought he was ready to cry. Had ‘Jo-Jo’ Mistry ever done something like this? O, this was big. Bigger than Barbarossa. Remember where that cricketer and his brother and their father had been living when all of this began? Dahisar. Slum, absolute slum, rats this big running on his roof. And now: the cars, lifestyle, flat, stars and starlets chasing after him, everything he wants. (We should tell Pepsi and Adidas at once.) In return, little fellow with the big forearms is asked to do what for next twenty years? Something he loves, something everyone loves, cric … cri …

He staggered down to Chowpatty beach.

He had to call his wife and tell her. Asha. Asha! It worked. My plan worked!

Anand Mehta walked towards the water, watching it recede, watching the city become bigger with every step he took.

I have set a man free, he shouted at the waves.

In Bombay I have set a man free.

His eyes were growing smaller each year. He was certain of this when he examined his face on his birthday. Full of all those changes that are supposed to happen to women with age: the nose becomes big, and the eyes …

He was twenty-seven years old today.

Sitting astride a bench in the toilet of the Cricket Club of India, he was reading the newspaper. In his pocket was a white envelope with his severance cheque in it.

A man called Karan from SwadeshSymphony, the public relations firm that ran the Celebrity Cricket League in partnership with the Cricket Board, had given him the envelope, and the good news.

Two months. And they had a new job for him, starting right away.

Humming a film song, Manjunath turned the pages of the newspaper until something made him smile:

12 May

The Prime Minister’s Office has stated that a person by name of V.V. Cherrinathan frequenting Mumbai under the pretext of being ‘the prime minister’s special adviser on marine biology’ is not employed by the PMO in this capacity, or in any other. He is not an accredited expert on marine biology, meteorology, plate tectonics, political theory or personal finance. If approached by this person for money, the public is urged to report the matter to the police. (Press Trust of India)

Tearing the article out of the newspaper, he added it to the white envelope in his pocket. This was the kind of thing he liked to bring Radha from the outside world — it would be good for a laugh, and would defer the moment when he had to give his brother the bad news.

He looked around, and realized he was alone in the men’s toilet.

So he bent over and licked his forearms like a cat, again and again. What if someone came in? Let them come in and scream. Call security, and throw me out. This would be the last time he was in the Cricket Club. No more wearing the armour — the pads, chest-guard, arm guard, the ‘box’ tucked in, thigh pads, forearm guards — no more of that second body of foam and plastic covering his own. He was free.

what happen?

His phone beeped six times in a row with the same message.

what happen?

Of course it was his father.

What happened is they dropped me , he texted back.

On the way out, two schoolboys in cricket whites stood pressed together, watching something on their cell phone. One of the boys glanced up: and said, at once, ‘Can I have your autograph?’ He held a little notepad towards Manju. ‘And a selfie?’

‘Do you know who I am?’ Manju asked.

The boy smiled.

‘Cricketer.’

Must have been a lean day for the two autograph hunters.

Manju, still only five foot four inches, observed that the two schoolboys were nearly as tall as he was. But he knew that for a cricketer, shortness of stature only adds to his mystique.

With an ironic smile, exactly like he’d seen Ravi Shastri affect for female admirers, he asked: ‘What’s my name?’

The boys looked at each other.

Manju said, ‘I played for India Under-19, and for Mumbai, three seasons in the Ranji. Maybe you saw me in the Celebrity Superstar Cricket League? I was one of the non-celebrities, the real batsmen. I batted with Sanjay Khanna once: the actor? I have the record for the longest six hit by a non-celebrity in the history of the Celebrity Cricket League. Do you know how many metres the ball went?’

He seized the autograph book, before the boy could change his mind, and wrote his name on it.

Manjunath Kumar

Batter

He could read the question forming in the boy’s eyes.

You really hit the biggest six in the Celebrity League?

You?

No one ever believed it.

‘Yes, it was me,’ he said, even before the boy asked.

Outside the club, he pushed past the grimy white clothes of cricket-playing teenagers and the immaculate white uniforms of their adult servants (chauffeurs, delivery men, peons). Manju looked quickly at his own T-shirt: he was wearing, appropriately enough, beige.

The two teenagers had followed him, perhaps for another autograph, but the moment they saw him sit down on Marine Drive, they turned back. No boy wants to see a cricketer enjoying solitude: it is not how he imagines his heroes.

A clear summer’s evening. Looking to the south, Manju could see the skyscrapers of Nariman Point give way to a line of nearly identical low-rise buildings, Navy Nagar, and beyond them, and before the Arabian Sea, a final twinkling, a dot … the lighthouse at the end of Mumbai.

To his right, a pair of little slippers, each studded with glass gemstones, lay next to two warm black shoes; from somewhere down below, among the concrete rocks that buffered the city from the ocean, he heard a woman’s laughter. When he looked at the slippers again, the sunlight shining in the cheap glass stones was suddenly too much to bear.

Twilight had set in by the time he got off the train at Santa Cruz station and walked through a congested market to a place called the Mafia Bar, which he visited each year on his birthday.

No connection whatsoever between name and decor (but then, this is Mumbai). The low wooden ceiling of the bar was ribbed like a Buddhist cave in Ajanta, and the red velvet covering the eight empty tables was so ancient that its decomposition could be smelled on the air-conditioned air, and after a few hours, would coat the tongue and render everything slightly acrid.

A black beam divided the bar; four tables on this side, four on that. Someone was sitting right behind the beam.

That was the spot Radha always chose, because whoever sat behind the black beam had an interrupted view of the small television fixed into a corner of the ceiling. Radha said he did not want cricket to poison even his drink.