Amit Chaudhuri: Real Time: Stories and a Reminiscence

Watching him ascend the crowded podium on a small Sony television, and talk with some assurance, Khatau, who’d just returned from a hard day in the tenements in South Bombay, commented to his colleague Mohammed Yusuf that Ummar Aziz didn’t seem to have come to watch the game.

“He certainly wasn’t in the crowd; otherwise they would have shown him.” Khatau and Mohammed Yusuf were policemen who regretted the way Aziz had, one day, slipped like sand through their fingers. All those explosions; they hadn’t been able to do anything about it. Here they were four years later, on their sofas, watching Ganguly under the floodlights.

“Arrey, he won’t go to these small-fry games,” Yusuf said, shaking his head slowly and with great conviction, while looking at an English player waiting tentatively in the background. Ganguly was shaking hands with Ravi Shastri. Yusuf wasn’t looking at them but staring at the screen and thinking. “He’ll come to the big one,” he concluded; or words to that effect.

The “big one” was still a few days away, however, days and nights away that is, because they were all “day and night” games, inducing a degree of sleeplessness in the spectator. Before then there was Pakistan versus India, or India versus Pakistan (whichever way you decided to think of it), and Pakistan versus England. After that England would take the first flight out to Heathrow, leaving the battleground open to the warring cousins.

The next day Mita Reddy, former Miss India and runner-up Miss Universe, who had only last year surprised everyone by saying to a panel of judges that her favourite person was Mrs. Gandhi—“Indira Gandhi?” “No, Kasturbabai Gandhi,” embarrassing all by invoking the Mahatma’s small, self-effacing, long dead wife — was seen in the stands, sitting next to Marshneill Gavaskar, grinning because she could see herself on television. She smiled; and waved — at whom, no one, among the millions watching, knew.

During the thirty-fifth over, by which time seven wickets had fallen for 126 runs, and an Indian medium-pacer and an all-rounder were putting up an obdurate partnership, there was a spell of inactivity that sometimes occurs in the middle of an over, when members of both teams suddenly forget the thousands in the stadium and the TV cameras, and behave like a family inside a house, unaware they’re being watched. Tony Greig and a minor English ex-bowler were sitting in the commentator’s box and discussing plans and strategies, while the little microphone in one of the stumps, placed there to detect the sound of a nick, eavesdropped on two players conversing:

“Lagta hai woh Aziz kal ayegaa.”

Greig was too busy composing a litany about Aussie spin-bowling, even if he’d known any Hindi, to register anything; but Khatau, on his sofa, heard the comment, though at first he wasn’t quite sure he had. Yusuf confirmed with a nod that he’d heard it, too. They hadn’t realised that they had an informant in the middle-stump microphone on the pitch; but then the game started again. Someone had said Aziz would come tomorrow; they couldn’t be sure if it was one of the Indians, or a Pakistani, or one of the Indians passing on the information to a Pakistani, or vice versa. Any of these alternatives might be the right one.

“Fantastic shot,” said Yusuf, as Srinath belted an unexpected cover drive.

Then the camera moved to a tall and swarthy Ravi Shastri, his cricketing days long over, but finding himself in the midst of a commentary renaissance, a tie knotted round his neck, laughing and talking to Anju Mahindra, who had once almost married Rajesh Khanna and gone out with Sir Garfield Sobers. She was past her heyday; even the long-distance lens couldn’t conceal the tiredness beneath her eyes; she looked abstracted as she listened to Ravi Shastri.

“Is that what they get paid for, yaar?” asked Khatau, reaching for his beer.

“God it must be hot over there,” said Yusuf.

But, contrary to what the microphone in the stump had told them, there was no Aziz the next day, and neither had the more raucous Pakistani supporters, with their shining green flags, come; were they not interested in watching England lose? The Bombay “glitterati” were there again, dutifully, the executive vice president of Pepsi sitting next to the chairman of the Board of Cricket Control in his dark glasses, their wives, in their flaming saris which might have received interrogatory looks from passersby in the streets outside, smiling vacantly at the camera as they stared back at their friends in Bombay, to all appearances unmoved by the hot desert breath. Their children, in striped T-shirts and shorts or jeans, either leaned and lolled against their fathers or revolved like satellites around their parents and parents’ friends, tripping lightly down the steps.

Rashid Latif hit the winning runs, and a cry rang out in the stadium. A beautiful woman in a salwaar kameez clapped emphatically.

For the “big one” the stadium was full again. Pakistanis jostled one another; and Indians jostled Pakistanis; and here and there, sheikhs, cell phones in their hands, deshabille, in small, male harems, looked around them, listening to the roar. Boycott knelt in his pressed trousers and short-sleeved shirt and felt the pitch with an arcane hesitation again and again. It was like a dry piece of land, a bit of Arabia, that had never been rained on. He patted it one last time and said to the camera: “Yes, Rahvi, the pitch is flat and true, and there will be runs in it”—as if “runs” were some sort of seed that would sprout shortly, and unexpectedly, from the barren soil.

Mrs. Shweta Kapoor, wife of the relatively recently appointed CEO of Britannia India, was sitting not far from Urmila Deshpande, whom she didn’t know, but whose last film, Jaadu —“Magic”—she’d seen twice already. The Pakistanis won the toss, elected to bat, and every time Saeed Anwar executed the pull shot, the camera panned to the celebrating Pakistanis and the studiedly sceptical faces of the Indians, and also to Shweta Kapoor, who’d once been a newsreader, a personality in her own right, and to her husband, whose youthful face was overhung by prematurely greying hair, and then to Urmila Deshpande, who was inscrutable and indecipherable behind her dark glasses. There was a rumour, uncorroborated, that she was seeing Jadeja, who was standing hunched, not far away, at mid-off.

The previous day, both Mrs. Kapoor and Urmila Deshpande had had their hair done at the Hilton; Urmila had acquired the permanent curls she’d need for a film once she got back. Mrs. Kapoor had bought a portable CD player, with a three-CD changer, for her son. The camera now discovered a group of men in the cheaper stalls who were holding up a placard: HI URMILA YOU HAVE DONE JAADU TO OUR HEARTS. The moment they realised they were on television, the sign began to vibrate as if it were alive in their hands. The next minute Ijaz Ahmed was out to a catch at gully held by Azharuddin. The camera showed Mrs. Kapoor smiling and saying something to a beautiful woman next to her, as if exchanging a particularly unworthy piece of gossip; and then it showed a young man clapping, fair, with blond hair, colourless eyes, who could have passed for a European but for the fullness of his lips.

“They’re all there,” said Inspector Khatau, sucking in his stomach.

“Who’s he — never heard of him?” Yusuf asked with justifiable irritation.

Raghav Chopra had displayed his latest collection only two weeks ago at the Taj: cholis, twenty-first-century ghagras; “Clothes are a language that changes before other languages do,” he’d said in an interview. Mita Reddy had been one of the models. In her column, Mita Reddy had been christened “a dark Kate Moss” by Shobha De, a “will-o’-the-wisp.”