Lokey bustled about in the background while we shot, tripping over the cables and wires, taking calls from Corporates who wanted to sign up Zahid immediately. 'Thee price just went up, Joyaji!' he said chuckling fatly, his face ashine with sweat and happiness. 'You people got him cheap!'
By ten o' clock I was back in my room. I'd messaged Sanks the moment we clicked the last shot and now I was in the mood to party. Ritu had phoned a while ago. 'Meet you in the lobby in twenty, Zo,' she'd crooned. 'Or d'you want me to come fix your make-up?'
I assured her that I was fine and then got all nervous about the evening. Because the truth of the matter was that I didn't have too much experience in going to clubs with international-level cricketers.
I showered quickly, then sunk onto the bed and slathered on huge amounts of moisturizer. Then I combed out my hair (always a long painful process) and got it semi-dry with the hairdryer in the loo. I'd sent my jeans to be washed and ironed and so I dialled Housekeeping and asked them to hurry it up. I was just worrying about getting late and getting left behind by the beautiful people when the doorbell rang and I ran to get it, tripping over the stupid extra large Sonargaon bathroom robe. 'About time!' I said. I put one hand out for the laundry and then froze.
Yeh to bada toinnngg hai....
Nikhil Khoda was standing in the doorway, looking sombre.
'Can I come in?' he asked.
'Sure,' I somehow managed to say, like cricket captains called on me on a regular basis.
He came into the room and then just stood around silently for a bit while I eyed him, totally flummoxed. What was he doing here? Had he come to thank me or something?
Finally, he spoke. 'I hope you're leaving tomorrow,' he said abruptly.
Slightly taken aback at this unfriendly tone (he'd been so nice to me in the elevator), all I could come up with was a puzzled, 'Sorry?'
He raised his voice a little and said, like he was talking to an idiot, 'You're leaving tomorrow?'
I was. Of course I was. But he was being so mean, I didn't feel like saying so. What I felt like saying, and so what I said was, 'Why?'
He shrugged. 'Because it's better that way.'
Feeling a little monosyllabic, I repeated, 'Why?'
'Because the boys' attention is very flattering and you must be feeling very important' - I looked at him, a little irritated - 'and you've probably decided to stay on and win the series for us' - sarci as hell - 'but, here's the thing' - boost-brown eyes glittering - 'I won't let you.'
I opened my mouth to answer, but he didn't give me the chance. 'The only reason we're winning is because we've all trained with single-minded determination for the last six months. This team is slowly learning to have faith in itself. I can't have them putting that new-found faith in you instead.'
He was doing it again.
Talking like a Nike ad.
But, hello, did the guy have amnesia, or something?
I said, as reasonably as I could, 'But you only asked me to stay, Nikhil-sir. I would have been happy to leave that day itself. You said it was a good idea to stay and support the team against Australia.'
He made a little impatient gesture with his hand and I had a sudden flash of insight into his twisted mind. 'You thought we'd lose today, didn't you?' I demanded. 'Are you allowed to think like that?'
He shrugged. 'I'm a realist.' Then he looked me right in the eye and said, 'But we won. A fact I'm proud of. And it wasn't because of you.'
God, what an insecure guy he was. Running up here and going Mine! Mine! Mine! The victory is only mine. And to think I'd liked him! 'So it was because of you?' I asked as neutrally as I could.
He nodded doggedly, 'Yes. And because of Zahid, and because we won the toss and everybody kept their heads.'
Well, that was fair enough, really. They'd played a fantastic match. Every man had done his bit. Only a fatalistic, uneducated, superstitious person would think their fabulous performance had anything to do with me.
Then Khoda said, clearly proving he thought I was all of the above, 'So I don't want you to start believing you had anything to do with it, okay?'
I nodded, keeping calm, just about. 'Okay.'
'Because there's no way you're going to get any mileage out of it!'
That's when I saw red. I'd been holding myself in, thinking about my job and how much I loved it, about how he was such a famous guy, and a captain and everything, but now I couldn't help myself. 'Mileage?' I said, in what I'd intended to be a mature, dry voice, but what may have just come out sounding like an outraged squeak. 'Mileage? That is so uncool! You know, not to be rude or anything, but I don't even like cricket! The last thing in the world I would want to do is become some kind of glorified cricket-groupie!'
That surprised him. I guess his trio of Bollyood starlets didn't talk back to him like that. But then he came back at me with a really nasty one. 'Really? You seemed to be enjoying yourself so much this morning. A gracious kiss on the cheek, that got us a world record? What have you got planned to win us the World Cup, Zoya? How far are you willing to go for your country?'
I felt my cheeks go red hot with embarrassment at what he was implying. But I played it pretty cool. 'Oh, I might just have to go all the way...' I said musingly. 'It's probably the only thing that could win us the World Cup with a clown like you in charge.'
His eyes blazed. 'You're pretty cocky for a Lucky Charm who's only three matches old!'
'And you're pretty cocky for a skipper who's lost every final he's ever played,' I said and shut the door in his face, already appalled at the mess I was in.
***
6
Of course I missed the Shah Rukh shoot. But I did manage to have a long, lazy weekend at home, licking my wounds and being coddled by Eppa and Dad, with no calls from office at all. They were all excited because my horrible brother Zoravar was back for a break after some kind of commando training course, looking completely hideous. He'd been catching and eating snakes cooked in hollowed-out bamboo stems, was tanned deep purple and had these really wiry muscles everywhere. Of course Eppa thought he looked really great. 'Just like soldier shud luk,' she said fondly, as she ladled a third serving of her Balls curry (as she insists on calling her famous, cooked-only-on-special-occasions mutton kofta curry) onto his plate at dinner time.
He wolfed it all down, gnawed on a particularly chewy bit of mutton and grinned at me manically. 'So how are you, Gaalu?' he asked. 'Sunk the company's fortunes yet?'
Basically, Zoravar's thing in life is to make fun of me.
His face is shaped like a cashew nut, all long with a protruding chin, and he has the gall to think my cheeks are a hideous deformity. When I was little he was always letting out this loud scream and going, 'Ma! Ma! Zoya got stung by a bee!' And when my mother came running, he'd go, 'Oh no, sorry, her face is like that only.'
The other really painful thing about growing up with Zoravar is that ever since he was like five months old or something, he knew he wanted to join the army. He never wavered. Any time an auntie at a party asked him, 'Beta, vot you wantu be ven you grow up, hain?' He'd chirp, 'I'm-going-to-be-a-soldier-and-fight-for-India!' And then everybody would go all moist-eyed and sigh, 'So cute.' While I spent my childhood andadolescence dithering over lawyer/banker/ fashion designer/nurse, he remained committed to playing with his tanks and singing Chal chal re naujavan.
No wonder he thinks my job is a joke. Even after three-and-a-half years, he finds it hugely funny that people are paying me money to work for them. So then my dad told him: 'No, Zoravar, Zoya is doing well, she was even sent abroad on company work.'
'Dhaka isn't really abroad,' Zoravar said snidely but did ask me, in quite a civilized way, how the experience had been.
I gave him a carefully edited version of events, sans any mention of my brawl with Khoda. Even thinking about it now, three whole days later, the aftershock was huge. Because, of course, the moment I'd said it, I had been appalled. What had I been thinking? How could I have been so
rude to somebody so important? I kept imagining he'd get me sacked or blackballed from advertising or just command the universe to stop liking me or something....
Both Zoravar and Dad were disgusted to learn that I had gone all the way to Dhaka and watched the matches in my hotel room. 'Oh well,' Dad sighed. 'When has she ever been interested in sports? Zoya, I hope they will pay you more from this April. You are working so hard - these people take you for granted - at least they should give you overtime.'
'Dad, I'm not a driver,' I said, rolling my eyes at him. 'They don't give overtime in management jobs...and anyway they pay me enough to get you guys presents from Dhaka!'
I'd got shirts for him and Zoravar and a pale pink-and-white Dhakai sari for Eppa, which had softened her face and given a halo-like glow to her iron-grey curls. 'Too much money you spent, Zoya Moya,' she'd grumbled happily. 'You shud hav got presents for your Chachis, not me.' (Yeah right, like she would have let me live if I'd come back from Abroad without a present for her.)
And then my dad said, 'Run along upstairs, the two of you. Rinku Chachi wants a couple of guinea pigs. She's bought a new grill and is testing it out making pizzas.'
Awesome! Rinku Chachi's pizzas were legendary. They were loaded with tandoori chicken, achaari paneer, Amul cheese and hara dhaniya and no Italian would ever recognize them, but they rocked. So both of us got into our pajamas and trooped up the rather steep and narrow staircase, Meeku at our heels, tail held jauntily high.
Rinku Chachi had opened the door even before we banged on it. There was a yummy wafting smell of masalas and her hearty, happy voice going: 'Arrey, Zoya! Zoravar! G. Singh, the children are here!'
Gajju Chacha was inside, pottering about his study. We chorused a formal, 'Namaste, Chacha' and happily ignored him after that. He is one strange little man and safest left alone. He's some kind of fancy educationist and looks like a peaceable old turtle with his bald, egg-shaped head and skinny neck. But once, when he was fourteen, he'd grabbed a heavy copper ladle out of the daal ka donga and hurled it across the table at his brother Yogu with such ferocity that it had embedded itself into his scalp, standing upright for forty-five seconds before teetering and falling off. Yogu Chacha got seventeen stitches, and was permanently brain-damaged as a result, according to my dad.
Rinku Chachi is a little lonely now because Gajju has dispatched both his kids (our cousins Monya and Montu) to boarding school in Ajmer. Which is why she loves having Zoravar and me around.
Zoravar started on the pizza with ecstatic moans, all the while grossing Rinku Chachi out by flashing the pus-encrusted blisters he'd got at the commando course, his appetite amazingly unaffected by the three kilos of Balls curry he'd polished off downstairs.
Then Gajju sidled up to me: 'So how was your cricket experience, Zoya?'
'Uh, good, Chacha, 'I said, realizing with a sinking heart that he must want to talk cricket. The last thing I wanted to do was chat with him.
'Did you have the opportunity,' Gajju asked in hushed, awed tones, 'of meeting Mr Jogpal Lohia?'
'Um...who's he, Chacha?' I asked. 'I don't think I've ever heard of him.'
Gajju smiled enigmatically. 'He's the president of the IBCC, child,' he told me. 'A most powerful man, a good man. Discerning. Intuitive.'
'Uh, no,' I said. 'I just met the Indian team, really.'
'The new captain's not bad,' Gajju conceded grudgingly. 'Not bad at all. Not in the same league as earlier skippers, of course.'
'Oh?' I said. 'But I thought, statistically speaking, that Nikhil Khoda is the most successful Twenty20 captain of his age, and has already led India to more One-day tournament finals than any other skipper and also has thirteen ODI centuries in international cricket to his credit?'
Gajju just nodded tolerantly in a little-knowledge-is-a-dangerous-thing way, but Zoravar's jaw dropped. 'Arrey, not bad, Gaalu! Never thought I'd hear you spouting cricket stats!'
I went pink. Okay, so I'd been, as Monita would say 'ogling and Googling' Nikhil Khoda a bit. I'd checked out all his stats on the Net, proving myself to be a masochistic loser who obsessed about people who were super rude to them.
'Tell me,' Gajju asked in his pedantic voice, 'do you think they could win this tournament?'
I said I didn't know enough about cricket to comment, but Zoravar looked up and said, with his mouth full of pizza, 'What win-shin, Chacha? Don't you know what happened today?'
Gajju's face went all self-righteously pious. 'How can I know? Yogu cut my cable wire, it had only been repaired half an hour ago...' he said in a martyred voice.
There was a full story in there but I didn't want to know it. Hurriedly I turned to face my brother. 'Zoravar, what happened today?'
'We lost,' he replied resignedly. 'Dad and I watched the whole match while you were sleeping off your' - he made sarcastic little inverted commas in the air - '"transcontinental" jetlag.'
'Not to - ?'
'Bermuda!' Zoravar nodded.
'That's impossible,' I said weakly, reaching for the remote.
'Nothing is impossible for India,' said Gajju quietly and shuffled away to his study, a broken man.
I couldn't believe it! A match whose outcome had seemed so totally obvious had turned the Champions Trophy around! The Aussie-tamer India was out and the minnow Bermuda was in.
I reached for a slice of pizza in a stunned kind of way.
'It was a complete rout, Gaalu,' Zoravar said, nicking it away from under my nose sombrely. 'Painful to watch. The entire team, scurrying around like headless chickens, calling wildly, getting each other out. Total disaster. And the umpire was a jerk. Okayed some very dicey appeals.'
'But they're still in the reckoning, right?' I asked. 'Isn't there a point system or something?'
'It's a knock-out tournament,' Zoravar shook his head, digging little meat bits out of his teeth morosely. 'Not league. You lose one match, you have to go home.'
Still not wanting to believe him, telling myself it was some twisted joke he was playing on me, I sat back and switched on the TV. Sure enough, the news was showing the Indians coming back, blazers on, pushing their trolleys through Calcutta Customs. It was a strange feeling, watching them all on Rinku Chachi's twenty-one inch telly in Tera Numbar. It gave me some perspective on what big stars those boys really were.
Of course, my mind was in a whirl. A smug little part of me was going 'Hah! Serve the Khoda-thing right. He was so full of himself that night.' But my heart beat for India enough for me to feel bad about yetanother crappy end to our cricketing dream.
I sat there, staring at the TV, watching Nikhil Khoda have microphones thrust into his face, and thought about what he'd told me. That I could do a lot of damage to all the hard work he'd done, if the guys started to believe I was lucky. 'I can't have them putting their faith in you instead of themselves,' he'd said. At that point I'd thought he was just being insecure. I'd thought he'd meant: 'I can't have them putting their faith in you instead of in me.'
I wasn't that sure any more.
Then I thought about what Lokey had told me. About how most of the players were pretty immature. 'They cling to straws,' he'd said. 'Harry and Zahid really believe you're lucky, Joyaji.'
Harry hadn't exactly covered himself in glory at the Bermuda match. He'd got out for a duck, to be exact.
Zahid hadn't taken a single wicket.
'It's the glorious uncertainties of the game, Gaalu,' said Zoravar, licking his fingers clean. 'And anyway, there's still the World Cup. Don't look so stricken.'
But I couldn't help feeling guilty. I wanted to punish myself. So I pushed the last cheese-and-pineapple-laden slice of pizza at a surprised Zoravar and said, 'Here, you can have this.'
I hit office just a little after 9:40 a.m. on Monday. Zoravar dropped me, and was even intuitive enough to ask, halfway through the drive, if I was quite all right. Of course I said I was absolutely fine.
'Hey! Zoya!' beamed Monita, flashing her usual ear-to-ear smile, both arms held out in we
lcome. 'Give, girl, give! How were the Men in Blue?'
I smiled. Our shoot at Ballard Estate seemed so very long ago. 'Unbelievable!' I assured her. 'Tell you all about it soon!'
'Right after you report to Sanks!' she said. 'I'll order us both a cold coffee in my cabin. And there are Greasy Crispy Breadrolls for breakfast, you want?'
I walked to Sanks' cabin and looked in. He was busy stuffing himself full of GCBs (Greasy Crispy Breadrolls) while talking on the phone, so I bobbed my head in and mimed hi, I'm back.
He looked up, grunted and gestured for me to sit.
I sat, looking around, fiddling with stuff on his desk till he wound up the call and banged down the receiver. 'You look like shit,' he barked.
The Zoya Factor Page 8
