Amit Chaudhuri - Real Time - Stories and a Reminiscence

“Where is Sharjah?” asked Khatau finally.

“I don’t know,” said Yusuf, looking blank. “Near Du-Dubai.” He added, “That guy doesn’t look Indian, yaar!”

As far as everyone knew, though, Raghav Chopra was a real blond. How he’d come to be one was a mystery no one enquired into. The colour of the hair had changed probably as the universe had changed temperature; just as orange frogs were found recently in English gardens.

“Three hundred and five,” said Khatau, rising suddenly. “Phew!”

All out, 305 runs. Boycott proclaimed that defeat was at hand.

“It’s a known fact,” he said, “that Eendiuns are no good at chasing!” He shook his head and seemed to smile in bewilderment at his words. Floodlights had been switched on about an hour ago, night had come and brought with it a school of dragonflies cruising through the field. The saris were lit up, and the women moved uncomfortably. The desert sky was like a great, empty theatre.

Twenty minutes later, Tendulkar came out with his heavy bat in one hand, followed by the taller, shuffling Ganguly. The camera noted two people in deep conversation, but it was impossible to hear what they were saying.

“Sachin’s our secret weapon,” observed one of them, a gentlewoman who lived on Malabar Hill in a flat overlooking Kamala Nehru Park.

“And not Trishul or any of the other warheads?” said her husband’s colleague. She smiled politely and refused to indicate that she’d understood, then fanned herself gently with a magazine.

As Aquib Javed bowled the first ball, the crowd’s voice swelled in a hum and then subsided again. On the television screen, Tendulkar’s bat, its face as remorseless as its staunch owner’s, descended straight on the ball and hit it onto the ground. A deep thud, magnified by the microphone in the stump, accompanied this event.

“Hey! Hey!” said Khatau. “Look, bhai.”

The camera had come to rest, in innocence, on the face of a man scratching his cheek.

“It’s our man, bhai! It’s our bridegroom, who left at the wedding!”

The camera now withdrew prudently to a safer place, a minor and timid crook in a nasty area. Then, panning from a group of agitated men holding up a sign saying TON-dulkar, it framed the man who’d been scratching his cheek thoughtfully moments earlier, sitting next to the chairman of the Board of Cricket Control and his wife and, a few seats to the right, Urmila Deshpande, who seemed absorbed in the course of the match.

“Saala!” said Yusuf; and his mouth remained open.

“Don’t abuse your brother-in-law,” said Khatau, but he didn’t feel like laughing.

The man who’d almost blown up Bombay, who’d had bombs placed in Nariman Point and Dadar and eleven other places, had taken care to wear a pale, pressed green shirt, and had probably had a haircut; he now took out a cell phone. With excessive politeness, he spoke a few words into the receiver. His face, when in close-up, revealed a ravaged and uneven skin.

* * *

THERE WEREsixty runs on the board, forty-six of them made by Tendulkar off fifty balls, when the sky darkened. The weather reports had made no predictions; the batsmen looked up at what little they could see of the sky. The floodlights dimmed.

“Oh dear, oh dear, it seems like a dooststorm,” said Boycott.

The women in the expensive seats looked uneasy; their husbands laughed in their suits and belligerently talked business with one another. A man leaned forward and said something in Ummar Aziz’s ear. Tony Greig and Gavaskar initiated a detailed discussion of the match so far, and replays of a brighter time, when batsmen had played their shots in the light of day, began to be shown.

“Chai lau?” said a ten-year-old boy in shorts.

“No, idiot,” said Khatau. “What, tea at this time of the night?” Reprimanded, the boy sat down quietly, and gratefully, on the floor before the television.

Every time the camera returned to the ground, it showed the dust swirling in minute particles across it. Tendulkar was still wearing his protective headgear, boiling in the dressing room, staring back hard at the night; yet, in the prolific commercial breaks, there he was again, leaning against a van and drinking Pepsi-Cola, or wearing a striped T-shirt and flashing a Visa card. Meanwhile, the Bombay housewives pressed saris against their faces and looked for a moment like local Muslim women; but Urmila Deshpande’s face remained composed, as if nothing had happened. Again and again, the commentators scrutinised a slow-motion almost-run-out from the afternoon, Saeed Anwar raising his bat and setting out infinitesimally on his long odyssey, while Ijaz Ahmed, too, in agonising protractedness, lunged towards the white line.

When play resumed an hour later, Tendulkar came back looking intent; at the other end, Ganguly began to prod the ball gently and sent it to somewhere near the boundary. Raghav Chopra ran his hand through his hair; it looked absolutely white in the floodlights. The women from Bombay self-consciously dusted their saris.

“If there’s anyone who can win India the match,” said Ravi Shastri in his oratorial voice, “it’s that man out there.” For no one referred to Tendulkar by name anymore.

“He’s gone,” said Khatau, despondent.

Ummar Aziz had disappeared; Khatau had been absorbing this fact for the last five minutes. Urmila had gone as well, probably to a different destination, but he couldn’t help noticing it. The one nondescript and aging, the other resplendent. “Beauty and the Beast,” thought Khatau in bold letters.

Almost immediately, Tendulkar, on sixty-one, was bowled by an in-swinger. One large section of the crowd — the Indians — stared into the distance, as if a film they’d been watching had been stopped midway. The others danced festively, as if a country separated them from the Indians.

“How did that happen,” enquired Boycott, “to the little master?”

The executive vice president of Pepsi moved impatiently in his seat; he’d been talking to his companion about a rival bid from Coke at that moment. Tendulkar, his head bowed beneath his visor, strode heavily towards the pavilion; but, almost immediately, he was drinking Pepsi, leaning against a van, and flashing a Visa card (“Now You Go Get It”), indifferent to his debacle.

“But how did you know, yaar?” said Yusuf, curving the palm of his hand in a question.

“What?” asked Khatau, straightening his shirt.

“You said just now, ‘He’s gone.’ How did you know he’s going to be out?” Yusuf smiled. “You’re a clairvoyant or what?”

The dismissal was shown twice from the point of view of the stump camera: the ball rising from near the batsman’s feet, so quickly as almost to hit Khatau’s and Yusuf’s faces, and then the lens falling backward and staring lidlessly at the sky, a dead eye gazing at space.

In spite of the floodlights, the Indians in the stadium could see only darkness about them. It was left to Ganguly and Jadeja, throwing huge and fluent shadows, to build up a partnership of two hundred runs and steer the side to an unlikely victory. Anju Mahindra, who half an hour ago had been exhausted, now looked rejuvenated and fifteen years younger, and waved at someone who was presumably still awake in Bombay. Jadeja leaned forward and hit the winning four; on another channel Urmila Deshpande, her hair long and with no curls in it, sang sweet, tuneless words to Salmaan Khan upon a beach.

At one o’clock in the morning, a loud celebratory firecracker went off in Bandra. Khatau shuddered at the noise of the explosion, and thought of Ummar Aziz, small, nondescript, scratching his cheek thoughtfully.