Aravind Adiga: Selection Day

A dozen boys from Ali Weinberg’s cricket team had been summoned to the MIG club, and were sitting in a circle on the lawn; and they watched Tommy Sir and the man in the red T-shirt describe languid circles around them. That was all the two men had done for three-quarters of an hour.

Leaning back to eavesdrop on the two men as they passed, Manju instead heard his brother’s voice say, ‘Scientist, you know what I’m thinking of right now? She’s got a spotty neck.’

Manju elbowed him away, but his brother kept whispering, ‘Spotty Neck, Spotty Neck.’

All at once, in both boredom and desire, Radha stood up and began dancing as he sang, Spotty Neck, Spotty Neck . Radha was the leader of this group of boys; one day he would be captain of their cricket team. The other cricketers joined him: ‘Spotty Neck, Spotty Neck, she’s got a spotty neck.’ Tommy Sir and the rich man in the red T-shirt took no notice. The boys became louder and louder, as Radha swished his hands like a bandmaster before the swaying, singing cricketers.

Only one boy, Manju observed, was not obeying Radha.

While the other cricketers wore regulation school caps, this fellow had his own cap, monogrammed in gold thread with the initials ‘J.A.’ He had small alert eyes, and a beautiful nose, hooked and swooped, which looked as if it had been made to order. Full black sleeves worn under his cricketer’s white T-shirt rendered his arms sleek, pantherlike; and he was rubbing them in alternation, as if getting ready.

The moment he smiled, sickle-shaped dimples would cut into his cheeks. Manju was sure he would see the dimples today, because the last time he and this Mister ‘J.A.’ had been close together, the rich Muslim boy had not smiled. That was after their match with Anjuman-i-Islam. Dusty and sweaty, the cricketers had waited in a queue by the sugar-cane stand, a reward from Coach Sawant for winning the match. Manju had stood right behind Javed. The Muslim boy’s neck, glossy with sweat, was shaved bright below the hairline. When seen from behind, his thick neck conveyed an impression of hidden strength as it expanded into his shoulders. The queue had moved in starts, and the sugar-cane machine had made a tinkling noise as it crushed cane. Before drinking his juice, Javed had lifted his ice-cold glass to the sunlight in an exaggerated flourish that Manju thought might have been meant for his benefit; then, as Manju observed, the powerful throat pulsed and swallowed the juice in one continuous motion.

Now, from opposite points of the circle of white, their eyes met.

‘Enough of this shit.’

Manju started, and then realized he had not said it. Javed Ansari, the Muslim with the majestic nose, had risen up to his feet, making his black-panther limbs even longer.

‘Enough of this shit,’ he repeated.

Radha Kumar stopped singing, took a step back, and sat down.

Now the fellow with the commanding nose was, in a very deep voice, chuckling.

U-ha, U-ha, U-ha.

Manju drew closer to his big brother. Radha was not doing much better. With an open mouth he saw the black-panther limbs come closer and closer to him and his brother.

Choosing a route between the Kumars on his way out, ‘J.A.’ put a hand on Radha’s shoulder and nearly kicked Manju in the face as he raised one huge shoe after the other, and left the circle of passive white.

‘Ansari!’ Tommy Sir shouted. ‘Come back. You sit and wait with the others.’

But the boy had left the circle, and was not returning: he kept walking to a car, its door already opened for him by the driver. Slam. Engine on, car gone. He didn’t need any rich man’s sponsorship.

•

A magician came thirty years ago to a village in the Western Ghats with an elephant. Not an elephant that did normal work like moving logs with its trunk or pulling down trees, no. It had a secret power, the magician said. He left the creature in the village square and walked a hundred feet away from it — too far for it to hear him. People gathered around the magician. Young Mohan Kumar was one of them. ‘Whisper a command for the animal into my ear,’ the sorcerer said, ‘any command.’ Mohan Kumar went up to his ear and whispered: ‘Roll on the ground like a baby.’ And then — without a word — the sorcerer just looked at his elephant: which got down on its knees, and thrashed about the ground, kicking up dust everywhere. ‘Raise your trunk and roar three times.’ Again, without a word, the magician forced his elephant to roar. Three times. Mohan watched with his mouth open. That massive beast, with all its muscles, was helpless: it obeyed the brain-waves of its master, it suffered the enchantments of his black magic. When he went back to work, Mohan, a thinking boy, had looked around at the other farmers toiling in the wheat fields, and realized: We are no more unmanacled than that elephant.

This was a truth about life he had never forgotten, even after he had left the village and come by train to the big city. Only recently, Ramnath, his neighbour in the slum, observing that poor Muslims were becoming revolutionaries in Egypt and Syria and kicking out their governments and presidents, had whispered: ‘Maybe the same thing will happen in India, eh?’ Mohan Kumar had smirked. ‘Here, we can’t even see our chains.’

After being forced by Coach Sawant to leave his sons at the MIG Cricket Club, Mohan had returned to Dahisar, mounted his bicycle, tied two stainless-steel containers of chutneys to its side, and visited a Mysore Sweets, an Anand Bhuvan and a National Hindu Restaurant, before cycling down to Deepa, the Restaurant-Bar near the Dahisar train station. No one bought a thing from him. Heaving his bicycle over his head, he walked over the Dahisar river on the all-but-submerged bridge of bricks, then slammed the bike down, and cycled through the cardboard WELCOME TO OUR HOME arch (shielding his eyes from the gaze of the grinning politicians), past the broken homes and little shops, until he got to his own, where the sight of his neighbour Ramnath pressing white shirts with a stupid industriousness was so unbearable that he went to a teashop for relief.

He squatted by his bicycle and blew on the hot tea. He seethed. Tommy Sir thinks he can cut me out of my own sons’ future. I know what he is telling that visionary investor about me. He is calling me a chutney salesman. A thug. A peasant. An idiot.

When he got angry, Mohan Kumar’s right eyebrow rose up rakishly, which highlighted the comic element in his small and moustached face.

Looking at his glass of tea, he delivered the speech he wanted to give Tommy Sir (but had had to desist for the sake of his sons):

‘Other parents pay tens of thousands of rupees for cricket coaches, but I, a penniless migrant to Mumbai, am the pro-gen-i-tor of pro-di-gies. Mr Tommy Sir, I say these words slowly, why? So that even a man of your mental capacities may understand them. Here are two more words pronounced slowly for you. Amoxycillin. Azithromycin. Do you know what they are? Do you know how to prescribe them? I do. I have taught myself medicine and pharmacology. Mr Tommy allegedly Sir: where were you when my sons fell ill? Where were you when they needed someone to sit by their side and record their temperature every half hour? Mr Tommy: when my Radha becomes famous and glorious, I’ll call the reporters to the MIG Cricket Club. To the very place where you humiliated me. And I’ll have my press conference right there.’

Even in tea, there is no peace today. The moment Mohan Kumar began sipping, the legless man had to make noise on his flute in a corner of the shop. This legless fellow performed every morning in the train station, and came here afterwards. Holding up his glass of tea, Mohan Kumar looked at the flautist.