Aravind Adiga - Selection Day

‘Don’t mock him,’ Manju said. ‘He’s dead.’

But Radha was no longer mocking anyone; there was emotion in his voice. He put his fingers through the metal rings of the fence.

‘ Why don’t you get married?’ he said.

Radha saw that furrow on Manju’s brow, the flame-like mark that inclined left, and which indicated that his younger brother was either angry or ashamed or (once upon a time) thinking.

‘No,’ Manju said. ‘Whatever I am, I’m not a fraud .’

‘What the fuck are you then? Are you sure you don’t like women? You’ll die and go to heaven and even God won’t know if you were a homo or not. When we’re walking, do you know that if you see any two people holding hands you stare? If two donkeys are happy together you stop and watch. I don’t know what you really want, but I know it all seems a big mystery to you: two things of any kind being together. It’s not a mystery, it’s very simple. Get married. There are always women chasing you. Why, I don’t know. Even better: you know what you should do? Catch a train right now and go to Navi Mumbai. That’s what you’d do, if you ever got drunk, and that’s why you don’t have the guts to drink.’

There was a loud sound of wood cracking: one of the boys at the practice nets had broken his bat.

‘You really sound like him now,’ Manju said.

‘He still talks?’ Radha asked. ‘I thought he was a vegetable.’

‘He’s stronger as a vegetable than you and I are as men. He still tries to hit me sometimes, would you believe? Texted me ten times today. “How much did they give you as severance, how much?” Ten times, though he can barely move his hand now.’

A son’s true opinion of his parents is written on the back of his teeth. Radha, who had gnashed his just thinking about Mohan Kumar so often that his upper incisors had moved from the pressure, opening up a gap between them and ruining his once perfect smile (one more thing he blamed his father for), bit his teeth.

‘Why are you here, then?’ he shouted at Manju, when he could again talk. ‘Why do you meet me once a year? Stay with the vegetable on your birthday.’

Radha could see there was no hope for his brother, who seemed to desire men at one moment and women at another, and lived in between his two desires, like a hunted animal — an animal which had finally run to their father for protection.

‘Why are you here?’ Radha asked again. ‘Why?’

‘I’m not here,’ Manju said, gripping the fence. ‘You’re not here.’

But he thought of what his brother had said a few minutes ago: take the train and go to Navi Mumbai and meet Javed. Was it still that simple?

Repression may be a red-hot distortion of the truth, but what follows it, acceptance, when a man finally examines his heart and says, ‘This is what I must have been, partly or in whole,’ is hardly liberation. Nothing much changes because you have stopped lying to yourself. A moment of relief, yes, the sense of shedding some terrible weight — but it passes. Manju had long ago accepted — it had occurred to him one evening in the changing room of the Wankhede stadium, after a particularly fine innings — that what he had known for Javed must have been what the film songs called love, and that his fear of this fact had driven him away from Navi Mumbai and back to cricket. After he wet his hair in front of the mirror and combed it with his fingers, Manju stretched his neck first to the right and then to the left, and accepted that he had been, and was still, attracted to men as much as to women: but knowing and accepting all of this had meant, in the end, not much. The fire of denial had set into the ice of acknowledgement. For himself, for his lies and cowardice, Manju had scorn — (although what else could he have done back then?) — but he had much more scorn for a world that had never shown him a clear path to love or to security.

This was enough, he sometimes felt, this anger was enough. A man could feed on it for the rest of his life.

Except that sometimes he saw the moon, and sometimes he heard this laughter in his head: U-ha. U-ha. Even now, he remembered that first morning when he really noticed Javed — was it a morning, or an afternoon? — sitting in that circle of stupid cricketers, the only one unenslaved and unmastered, with his beak nose and his black-panther limbs and the sickle-shaped dimples emerging when he grinned, like the most gorgeous thing created.

O thou Tiger-King!

Manju controlled his breathing. He steadied his pulse. He did all the things he had learnt to do as a professional sportsman, and yet his heart beat fast. Still, with every step he took he was more in control of himself — he remembered that Javed was in the newspaper again — and now it seemed eleven more years might easily flow before they met. If they ever met again.

Standing by his side, Radha tried to read his brother’s mind. Why did this fellow leave Javed to return to cricket — did he imagine he would save everyone by coming back? Radha remembered what his father used to say: a snake would have to rescue his family from Javed Ansari. But the snake that bit Manjunath had come from within his own heart. He was meant to be the hero of the story, and look what he has become.

Coward!

A whistle blew from the court: cricket practice was over for the day. The boys in white were already leaving with their gear, and workers went about the field, picking up rubbish. One carried a plastic bucket with him, and he splashed the asphalt floor with water.

‘I told you to throw your wicket on Selection Day.’ Radha raised his voice. ‘I told you. If you had done that, I wouldn’t have got mad, I wouldn’t have hit Deennawaz, and they would have given me a second chance to play cricket. And you could have become an engineer, a scientist, you could have gone to America by now. You could have sent me money from there, instead of—’

He threw Manju’s envelope to the ground.

‘You’re drunk, Radha. Eleven years ago, I had no choice. How many times have I told you?’

‘Then have children. And make sure they have a choice. You know I can’t.’

Children? While Radha bent down unsteadily to pick up the envelope, Manju saw in his mind’s eye, as he had so many times over the years, an old image from science television: a strand of red-and-blue human DNA, turning nonstop, like a strip of unwinding plastic, the twisted strip of DNA that we inherit from our fathers. And on this red-and-blue helix was inscribed the message from Mohan Kumar to his sons and their sons: that life, if it is to be lived, is to be lived but badly; is to be, if it is to be anything , but an agreement with hell; and can have for fire and light, if it is to have either, but rage and remorse. Joining a thumb and index finger through a steel ring of the fence, Manju caught the strand of DNA in his fingers and stopped it from turning: no more cricketers.

‘No.’

‘Tommy Sir.’ Radha laughed. ‘Have some self-respect, little brother. Do anything else. Beg. But don’t go back into cricket. Don’t become Tommy Sir.’

Manju took a deep breath.

‘I told you, don’t mock him. He’s gone. Tommy Sir had his stroke right after they picked me for Mumbai. He was hiking in the mountains, they say, and when they carried him to hospital he kept saying, I have to live till I see that boy bat for Mumbai. That would have been my one satisfaction: for him to watch me fail with his own eyes.

Stepping back from the metal fence, Manju cupped his palms, as if he were holding an invisible bowl. He looked straight down into it.

Radha still held on to the fence.