Aravind Adiga: Selection Day

I, too, have a secret.

Pebbles and pen-tops; the gold tin-foil wrappers of chocolates; battered coins and the leather handles of cricket bats; cracked green buttons and two-inch needles full of rust: I understand them all.

Pen-tops, you are really lemons. Pebbles are sweeter. Rusty needles are vinegary. The floors of rooms are buttery. Good paper is milky and cheap paper becomes bitter. Orange rinds are tastier than oranges. Only one thing in this world is tasteless.

Plastic!

He was four years old. Every evening at five thirty his father would take Radha Krishna out for cricket practice, and then he would be alone in the room all three of them lived in; he was in Kattale .

Kattale is darkness in Kannada, his mother tongue: and so much darker than any English-language darkness.

In Kattale , his nose pressed against the mirror; he breathed on glass. His tongue grew: and he began understanding and reunderstanding.

You, glass, are just salt. The bindis that go on a woman’s forehead taste like Kissan mixed-fruit jam. Wool is burnt starch. Cotton is cooler than wool, and better at keeping scents.

People came next. When he sniffed Radha Krishna’s white cricket T-shirt, even before he began licking, it smelled of one of the seven kinds of sweat. The kind produced when a boy is scared. Then he knew Radha had been at cricket practice with their father.

This was his secret world. His tongue was a white sail and when it grew big he could go from one end of the world to the other. Alone, in Kattale , like Sindbad, he explored. Then when he was seven or eight years old, the lights came on one evening, and his father caught him licking the mirror. A blow fell on the boy’s back; blow followed blow until his stomach vomited out everything it had tasted, and he became like Radha Krishna, and like everyone else.

No more secrets.

There’s usually no one in the school corridor in the evenings so I go there after practice with my cricket bag on my shoulder, to wash my face and hands with the antiseptic soap. But that evening I saw a boy standing alone in the corridor: he had a nose like a beak. In his left hand he held a little round mirror and he was looking at himself in it. Suddenly I remembered something I’d forgotten for years. That evening when I was still a boy, and pushed open the door to the women’s toilet by mistake, and saw my mother inside, examining the kajol around her eyes in the mirror, I began sweating, and my heart beat faster and faster. That is when he looked up from his mirror and noticed me.

Six years later, Manjunath had just opened the door to another hidden world.

EIGHTH STANDARD

‘I’ve got news for you, Tommy Sir.’

‘And I’ve got news for you , Pramod. You see, when I was twenty-one years old, which is to say before you were even born, I began working on a history of the Maratha campaign at the third battle of Panipat. It had a title: “1761: the soul breaks out of its encirclement”. Because I felt that no truthful account of this battle had ever been written. All the histories say we Marathas lost to the Afghans at Panipat on 14 January 1761. Not true. I mean, it may be true , we lost, but it’s not the true story .’

‘Tommy Sir, there is a younger brother, too. He also plays cricket. That’s my news.’

‘Pramod. I am sick of cricket. Talk to me about battles, onions, Narendra Modi, anything else. Don’t you understand?’

‘Tommy Sir. You should have seen the younger brother bat today at the Oval Maidan. You should have. He’s nearly as good as his big brother.’

Darkness, Mumbai. The bargaining goes on and on.

‘And you know just how good the elder brother is, Tommy Sir. You said Radha Krishna Kumar was the best young batsman you’ve seen in fifty years.’

‘Fifty? Pramod: there hasn’t been a best young batsman in fifty years in the past fifty years. I said best in fifteen years. Don’t just stand there, help me clean up. Bend a bit, Pramod. You’re growing fat.’

Behind glass and steel, behind banks and towers, behind the blue monstrosity of the Bharat Diamond Bourse is a patch of living green: the Mumbai Cricket Association (MCA) Club in the heart of the Bandra-Kurla Financial Centre. Floodlights expose the club’s lawns, on which two men scavenge.

‘I ask you, Pramod, since you insist on talking about cricket, what is the chance of elder and younger brother from the same family becoming great cricketers? It is against Nature.’

‘You distrust sporting brothers, Tommy Sir. Why?’

‘ Mistrust , Pramod. Pick up that plastic for me, please.’

‘A master of English cricket and grammar alike, Tommy Sir. You should be writing for the Times of Great Britain .’

‘Of London .’

‘Sorry, Tommy Sir.’

Sucking in his paunch, Pramod Sawant bent down, and lifted a plastic wrapper by its torn edge.

‘The younger brother is called Manjunath Kumar. He’s the biggest secret in Mumbai cricket today, I tell you. The boy is the real thing.’

Chubby, moustached Pramod Sawant, now in his early forties, was a man of some importance in Bombay cricket — head coach at the Ali Weinberg International School, runner-up in last year’s Harris Shield. Head Coach Sawant was, in other words, a fat pipe in the filtration system that sucks in strong wrists, quick reflexes and supple limbs from every part of the city, channels them through school teams, club championships, and friendly matches for years and years, and then one sudden morning pours them out into an open field where two or maybe three new players will be picked for the Mumbai Ranji Trophy team.

But he is nothing if he can’t get Tommy Sir’s attention tonight.

‘No one knows what the real thing looks like, Pramod. I’ve never seen it. How can you tell?’

‘This Manju is a real son of a bitch, I tell you. He’s got this way of deflecting everything off his pads: lots of runs on the leg side. Bit of Sandeep Patil, bit of Sachin, bit of Sobers, but mostly, he’s khadoos . Cricket sponsorship is a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant idea: now you can make it twice as brilliant.’

Grey-haired Tommy Sir, taller and wiser than Coach Sawant, kept his eyes on the lawn.

‘After thirty-nine years of service to Bombay cricket, they make me clean up like a servant, Pramod. After thirty-nine years.’

‘You don’t have to clean up, Tommy Sir. You know it. The peon will do it in the morning. See, I know Manju, the younger brother, is the real thing, because if he’s not, then what is he? A fake. And this boy is not a fake, I promise you.’

Having completed a round of the cricket ground, Tommy Sir had started on a second trash-hunting circle within the previous one.

‘Pramod, the idea that the boy has to be …’ he bent down, examined a stone, and let it drop, ‘either real or a fake is a very Western piece of logic.’

He moved on.

‘Do you know what the Jains say, Pramod? Seven varieties of truth exist. Seven. One, this younger brother might in fact be the real thing. Two, he might be a fake. Three, the boy might simultaneously be the real thing and a fake. Four, he might exist in some state beyond reality and fraudulence that we humans cannot hope to comprehend. Five, he might in fact be the real thing and yet exist in a state beyond our poor human capacity to comprehend. Six—’