The Zoya Factor

by Anuja Chauhan

'Oh?' he said softly, like a man in a happy dream. Then something struck him. 'But why have the boys rated me so highly?' he asked worriedly. 'They don't think I'm a chhakka, you know, a homo or something?'

  'No-no!' I assured him, 'they rated you nine on the... uh...I-wish-I-was-him-o-meter.'

  'Wowji!' said Hairy happily. Then he turned to me and said, 'Why don't you speak to Lokendar, Zoya? He'll work out something for your bacha-kucha, leftover shots.'

  It was a 'beautiful-day-at-the-Shere-e-Bangla-Stadium-in-Dhaka' as the sportscasters say, but there was nothing sportsmanlike about what I was trying to do. Basically, I snuck around the nets trying to get Lokendar Chugh to catch my eye so I could spirit the openers away for a quick photo-shoot. Of course, it was totally unethical and unpatriotic and nobody in Delhi knew what I was trying to pull. But it's not like I had a choice here. I'd dreamt they were lobbing massive sums from my cost-to-company, all of last night.

  Lokey was nowhere in sight. His portly form and many flashing rings would've been easy to spot in this drab landscape; so I guessed he was inside somewhere. I looked on the ground for a telltale pistashell trail but I didn't spot anything. The boys waved to me once or twice, and I waved back sunnily, but the man I needed to see was Chugh. After many tries - mobile signals sucked out there - I got through on Lokey's cellphone number. His phone played Ek baar aajaa aajaa aajaa aajaa aa-aaja for a long time and then Lokendar's voice suddenly cut off the tinny, nasal Himesh Reshammiya track, sounding surprisingly deep by sheer contrast. 'Hello?'

  'Hi,' I said fluffing my hair out nervously as I spoke. 'This is Zoya from AWB. What's the scene on sneaking Shivee and Harry out for a half-an-hour photo-shoot tonight?'

  A little pause. God, the man was slow. 'Where are you?'

  'Right by the OB vans...' I waved up at the players' balcony, where I imagined him to be. 'Can you come down here and talk to me?'

  'On my way,' he said in a low strangled sort of voice.

  I lurked around the OB van and waited for him, my face feeling warmer and pinker with every passing moment in the hot Dhaka sun. The sporty-looking journalist boys smiled at me perfunctorily, and then looked beyond me, got all excited, and started adjusting their cameras frantically.

  I turned.

  Nikhil Khoda, dishevelled but dishy in white tracks and tee, was heading straight towards me with long loping strides. He looked like a sleep-deprived superhero who'd been up all night saving the planet. His jaw was set and his brown eyes had that steely killer light that's been patented by the Boost ads. You know, the ones where the bowler tosses the ball up in the air in slow-mo and then catches it again, all the while glaring menacingly at the poor non-Boost-drinking batsman at the other end of the pitch, before stumping the hell out of him and winning the match for India. As I watched him stride up, a female chorus singing yeh toh bada toinnngg hai wiped Himesh's sonorous singing clean from my brain. I gave myself a little shake. And moved out and away so he could take the OB van guys apart for showing up and destroying his team's concentration.

  Instead, he swung in right beside me. 'Zoya?' he said, politely enough.

  Wow, I didn't think he'd remember my name and everything. I smiled a bright smile and said, 'Yes! From AWB.' I held out my hand, oozing professional charm.

  He didn't take it. Instead, he slowly held up his own hand, which held a cellphone. I looked at him blankly. 'Lokey happened to leave his phone with me...'

  Nice one, Zoya. You are so up excreta creek.

  I couldn't think of one single thing to say, so I continued to stare at him, the smile frozen stupidly on my face.

  Khoda took a deep breath, swept a look at the journalists looking on curiously from the OB vans and then reached out and grabbed my hand. He walked me away from there to a spot behind a big Bong tree and then glowered down at me. This close to him, I observed that not only were his eyes agleam with that Boost-ad gleam, they were also the exact chunky brown colour of Boost powder with Advanced Energy Boosters.

  'Do you have any idea how sacred the evening before a match is, Zoya from AWB? It's not the time for holding a product so that the logo faces the camera, or for striking smiling poses. A good player prepares for a big match in the way a warrior prepares for war.'

  Okay, so this man took himself seriously. I mean, I knew I was in the wrong here but there was no need for him to start talking like a Nike poster. Besides, I'd seen how his openers had behaved in the restaurant the previous night. They'd been singing Hindi film songs and dabaoing tandoori chicken, and though I'm no expert, I'm pretty sure that's not what warriors do before a war. So I chinned up and looked him in the eye. 'I'm really sorry, Nikhil-sir, it was just an outside possibility I wanted to put to Lokendar. Because we had been promised three clean hours with the boys yesterday, but all we got was two-and-a-half.'

  He shook his head and smiled a little at that, his brown eyes grim. 'You think you're so smooth, don't you, Little Miss Fix-It? Creating fake Nikes logos, saving the day. The - what d'you guys call it? - the servicing girl. Well, do me a service and stay away from my team.'

  It was nasty. He made me feel incredibly small. Especially by reminding me about how he'd covered for me with Rawal yesterday. And the worst part was that I knew he was in the right. 'Look, I'm sorry,' I said contritely. 'I wouldn't dream of upsetting your players' focus.' And then - I swear I didn't mean for it to come out sounding the way it did - I added, 'I know how badly they need it!'

  He'd relaxed a little but that unfortunate remark got him pissed-off again. I saw something smoulder in his eyes. And it wasn't, you know, a sexy smoulder (like how hunky heroes smoulder in wet white shirts in Mahesh Bhatt movies). It was more of a nasty smoulder (like how housewives smoulder before zapping cockroaches to death in pesticide spray commercials). God, I couldn't believe this was how badly my first conversation with a guy who could get me fired with one phone call to my boss's boss's boss was going. He was the captain of the Indian team, after all. I had paranoid visions of him calling the Zing! CEO and getting me sacked. Or saying he wouldn't endorse the product any more, because we were commercializing the sport. Or, even worse, calling Coke and endorsing them instead. How hideous was that?

  But then the pissed-off look left his eyes, the shutters went down, and he just looked bored. Like I wasn't worth his time or something. He let go my hand, pushed back his hair and said dismissively, 'Just lay off my boys, okay? Or I'll treat you to a fireworks display you'll never forget.'

  I scurried back to the hotel, called Vishaal and unloaded the bad news. He started moaning celebrity-photographer moans about how he had to be in Bombay tomorrow. I called my idiot client Ranjeet and told himwhat had happened and he had a major cardiac because I'd been 'rude' to Nikhil and had 'over-exceeded my brief'. Then Neelo called me and started hyperventilating about how we would all three be sacked. 'Because they always hang you in threes, Zoya, you know? No one ever gets executed alone. Bhagat Singh hanged with Sukhdev and Rajguru, Ravana burns with Meghnad and that glutton Kumbhkaran...even Jesus took two guys with him, hanging right and left. You, Zoya, are going to take me and Vishaal...'

  I hung up on him too and decided to take a long shower to calm myself down. When I emerged, the afternoon paper had been slid under the door. I grabbed a Diet Zing! from the mini-bar and sat down to read it.

  Only to come face to face with an article on Nikhil Khoda in Sonali's Gupshup column.

  There was a hot-looking picture of him in his India blazer, pushing an airport trolley with an abstracted look on his face. Nothing abstracted about the headline though. It screamed KHODA THE COLDHEART! in 40 point:

  Apparently, Nikhil Khoda doesn't believe in love, darlings! He's got this distressing scientific theory that love is... just hormones. A little society bird tells us that he sat next to Yash Chopra at a gala dinner last week. And guess what the two of them ended up talking about, sweeties? Love. Well, Nikhil did the talking mostly. When prodded by the Love Guru about his love life, he opined that he found Ishq,
Pyaar and Mohabbat to be highly overrated. He said that he thought love was just a messy glob of hormones running amuck. A mixture of 'glandular imbalances, adrenalin surges and spring fever'. Aren't your hearts just shattered, sweethearts? Mine was. And that's when Mr Chopra told him that he should be called not Nikhil Khoda but Nikhil Coldheart! Wasn't that too, too witty of him, girls? So even if your hearts skip a beat when you see the skipper, I suggest you give him a skip, darlings.

  He may drink Zing! but his Dil is Thanda!

  Hah! Can you imagine?

  This Nikhil Khoda was either a completely cold fish or had a very, very wicked sense of humour. Oh, and Sonali added that he also told Mr Chopra that the only things he revered were honesty, discipline and courage. Which are values I can totally respect, except for the fact that she went on to reveal that he (Nikhil Khoda, not Yash Chopra) had been a 'messy glob of hormoning it out' with two NRI supermodels on the fringes of Bollywood, one sports journalist and, of course, the girl in the yeh toh bada toinnngg hai ad, all in the last one year, and would be 'pursuing his penchant for beautiful damsels by judging the Miss India pageant later this month'.

  All of which led me to think that he sounded way too busy to make phone calls to CEOs to have me sacked. Hopefully, I'd be able to fly below his radar for the rest of this trip, scurry back to Bombay for my glamorous shoot and never have to meet him again.

  But my happy mood didn't last too long. I realized pretty soon that even if Nikhil Khoda didn't get me sacked, the fact that I still didn't have the openers shots might do the job for him. I tossed and turned all night and woke up obscenely early. Too stressed to just lie in bed, I took a long shower, pulled on some clothes and shaking out my hair, zipped down to the Coffee Shoppee at half past seven in the morning.

  The Coffee Shoppee guys were clearly taken by surprise because all the tables had chairs upended on them as three skinny dudes in Hawaiian shirts scurried around swabbing the floor. The chubby restaurant manager smiled at me extra-chirpily. 'Miss Solanki! A table for one?' Like he had piping hot breakfast all ready to serve or something.

  But maybe he had. Because as he flipped over a chair for me to sit on, I spied all our Men in Blue, and their coach, tucking into a lavish breakfast at a table at the far end of the room.

  Uh oh...

  I looked away quickly but it was too late. Hairy was waving happily: 'Hey, Zoya!'

  I waved back weakly. Then made a big deal of reading the menu card. The last thing I wanted was for Captain Coldheart to read me the Riot Act about how my crass commercial presence was going to corrupt his pure little performers. Hairy looked a little disappointed. Out of the corner of my eye I could see him half rising in his seat but then Shivnath said something to him that made him sit down again. Meanwhile, Khoda just sat there, stolidly eating his way through an entire watermelon.

  As I fiddled with the cutlery and waited for my order, bits of their conversation drifted over to me. They were discussing what to do if they won the toss. Fat chance. Nikhil Khoda hadn't won a toss for seventeen one-dayers running. Even a cricketing ignoramus like me knew that.

  'Ma'am, your breakfast.... 'One of the sweet skinny boys was back with my order, which he placed carefully before me. I picked up my fork and dug into the bhurji with gusto. Just then, a tardy arrival to the team table, smelling strongly of after-shave, swung past me in a hurry and his entire kitbag, loaded with bats or dumbbells - or maybe, just bulk-building, protein-shake powders - slammed into my table and collapsed it totally. In one moment I went from a poised, put-together working girl breakfasting alone, to this total kid, sitting there, mouth agape, a tiny triangle of toast and bhurji speared on my fork and the rest of it scattered all around me.

  The dude and the kitbag swung back at once and started apologizing profusely. It was Zahid, the I-don't-know-I'm-good-looking-yet one. 'So sorry,' he was going. 'So sorry, Zoyaji!'

  The entire team - showing the kind of synchronicity it seldom showed on the field - leapt to its feet as one. They hadn't seen what had happened, just heard the crash, and I think at first they thought the place had been bombed, a likely possibility given the amount of hate mail they'd been getting lately. Hairy rushed over at once, going: 'Zenia? Tussi theek ho?'

  Of course I jumped up and said I was fine. And I was, really.

  But Zahid, very contrite, totally ignored my frantic protests and scooped up the remains of my breakfast and carried it to the team table.

  I trotted along behind him, feeling completely idiotic. I mean, they must think I'm a super klutz or something. Or, even worse, some kind of desperate groupie who throws her bhurji-eating self into the flight path of hot-looking bowlers at seven a.m. to swing breakfast with them and their team-mates.

  Shivee set my plate down on the team table with a flourish. Hairy pulled up a chair. Everybody had a go at poor Zahid for knocking me down. And even Nikhil Khoda, who'd glanced up swiftly when the table crashed to check that I wasn't dead or something, was content to just ignore me. Which was really quite excellent behaviour, given his attitude yesterday. In fact, halfway through the meal, I think he even passed me the butter....

  Anyway, I ended up eating breakfast with what the commentators are always calling the 'youngsters' on the team. After they were satisfied there was nothing wrong with me they started kidding around like crazy. The match didn't start till twelve-thirty and they were pretty chilled. Nikhil Khoda was in his own private huddle with Wes, their bald Aussie coach, the boyish-looking physio, Dieter Rund, Laakhi, and that shoe-flicker Rawal at the other end of the table, but down here the mood was definitely lighter.

  'Zoyaji,' asked Hairy, doing this really bad Charu Sharma imitation as Shivee waved a banana in my face, 'what do you think India should do in order to win today?'

  Like I had the foggiest idea. 'Uh,' I said, into the banana mike, 'they should eat a good breakfast, focus hard and just play their natural game.' Not bad, I told myself, relaxing a little. Pretty cool of you to use that phrase 'natural game', Zoya, it sounds like you know what you're talking about....

  'Good advice,' said Hairy, one leg jerking the table up and down.

  The other boys nodded.

  Hairy looked set to hit me with another question but I had no intention of playing interviewee any more. My lack of cricket knowledge would be totally revealed. After all, yesterday, on the bench, I'd told him that I was a huge fan of the game and watched every India match, always. So I quickly grabbed the banana from Hairy's hand and asked a question of my own. 'Tell me, boys, do you guys always eat breakfast together like this before a match?'

  It worked. They all started talking at once.

  They did always eat together before a match. It was Wes's idea, apparently a bonding exercise of sorts. Some of the guys didn't like doing it, it made them feel like kids, but everybody fell in line because Nikhil backed Wes on it.

  So, of course, I started stressing that Khoda must be really hassled that I'd gatecrashed their exclusive team-only breakfast but then I realized it wasn't the first time I'd done so. I said, 'Hey, I've had breakfast with all you guys once before too! Don't you remember?'

  They all looked blankly at me. And I suddenly felt very stupid. Because I'm not exactly a supermodel, or an actress, or a two-headed freak, or anything. There was no reason for them to remember a nobody in a baseball cap and jeans who had sat at their table for fifteen minutes or so, a year and a half ago. I looked down at my bhurji and tried to look like I hadn't said anything.

  But Hairy was all excited. 'Really? When, Zoya?'

  I said sheepishly, 'In Bombay, ages ago. At the Wank... Wankhede Stadium...I think it's called. It's no big deal. I bet lots of people share breakfast with you now and then. Agents and family and stuff....' I trailed off self-consciously.

  But Hairy was shaking his head impatiently.

  'In Feb?' he demanded. 'Or September?'

  'Feb,' I muttered, wishing I hadn't brought it up. 'At some unearthly hour in the morning. Actually, we needed an
NOC from somebody - you, as a matter-of-fact,' I nodded at Balaji, who nodded right back, going 'Ya ya, of course, of course,' doing a terrible job of pretending that he remembered me. 'I had to get your signature on a lot of papers so you guys let me sit at your table and I grabbed a toast or two.'

  There was a little silence around the table. Everybody chewed their high-fibre cereal moodily. Then Hairy said, 'That was our first big win, wasn't it, guys?'

  'First and last,' Khoda said dryly, spearing a pineapple chunk.

  'Hey, maybe I bring you guys good luck!' I said brightly, for no better reason than that I wanted to show him I was unaffected by his presence.

  'I don't think it was luck that won us the match that day,' Khoda said witheringly.

  'No, no,' I replied in a rush, worried I'd made him mad at me again. 'Of course not. It was just a bad joke. There's no such thing as luck!'

  He didn't say anything, just made a kind of grunting noise.

  But Shivee spoke up, a little defiantly: 'By the way, skipper, do you know when Zoya's birthday is?'