The Zoya Factor

by Anuja Chauhan

  Yours sincerely,

  Weston Hardin

  ***

  Mon read it aloud as we zoomed back to our hotel on the Met. It was potent stuff. We discussed it heatedly, all of us talking at once. Who'd have thought the strong and silent Wes Hardin had such depths to him? Had Rawal really thrown the match? Him and Ritu-dumper-Nivi and that quiet guy, Ali?

  Judging by tolerant Indian standards - not Hardin's self-righteous Aussie ones - was it really such a horrible thing to do (throwing that match and getting rich, I mean)? Because we were in the Super 8 anyway! I'd been hoping for more or less the same thing myself!

  Would Jogpal Lohia back down and send Rawal home?

  No way, we all said immediately. So would Wes quit? Or deny the e-mail was actually written by him? And what was Khoda's take on the whole thing?

  We pored over all the other related articles in the newspaper and speculated madly about how it had leaked, who had leaked it and so on.

  Investigative journalists scrutinized the Rawal-Lohia friendship from the day it began, saying they'd been as thick as thieves for years and that he'd tried really hard to get him made captain, and that Rawal had named his first child (from his ex-wife) after the old man. They were both from Rajasthan and Rawal was Jogpal's first big discovery.

  They'd met when thirteen-year-old Rawal smashed a six through Jogpal's fourth floor drawing room window during a game of galli cricket. The big man had come out, given the little street urchin a blistering tongue-lashing, then tossed the ball back to the kids and asked Rawal to play a few strokes....

  It was a sweet story. I had a vision of a husky young Rawal and a slimmer, beardless Jogpal walking arm in arm, bats resting jauntily on their shoulders as the sun went down behind them over the spectacular Jaipur Fort....

  Cho chweet.

  Rinku Chachi said, 'D'you think they're gay, beta?'

  I groaned. 'No, I don't think they could be gay, Chachi, okay?' I said. 'Maybe... maybe he's on the take too, huh? How about that? Maybe they all divvy up the money the bookies shell out?'

  And then Monita's eyes widened. 'Hey, maybe he tore out the visa from your passport!'

  ***

  Of course I phoned Nikhil the moment we got back,

  He didn't sound at all surprised. 'Hi,' he said, lightly. 'Been reading the papers?'

  'Yes, of course,' I said. 'How are you?'

  He laughed. 'Great, actually. I've no idea how that e-mail leaked. But I'm happy. It's quite a relief actually.'

  'How's Wes?' I asked.

  'He's right here,' Nikhil said. 'He's been singing philosophical country songs all morning. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose, did you know that one, Zoya?'

  'Are you drunk?' I asked, horrified.

  He chuckled. 'No, of course not. I wouldn't hit the juice over Robin Rawal!'

  'Where's he?' I asked.

  'I don't know. Shut up with his godfather in his fancy suite, I guess. Would you believe he hasn't spoken to either of us since this news broke?'

  'Maybe he'll give a press conference,' I said.

  Khoda said, 'You know what? You could be absolutely right.'

  'What about Wes?' I asked. 'Is he talking to the media?'

  'He's switched off his phone,' Nikhil said. 'He still hasn't recovered from the fact that somebody leaked his confidential e-mail...'

  'Tell him, I'm flattered he doesn't want me sent home too,' I said, 'and listen, Monita's got this weird theory. She thinks maybe Rawal tore out my New Zealand visa.'

  'Really?' Nikhil said. 'D'you know one paper in Lucknow is saying you're on the take too and that you tore out the visa yourself?'

  Oh my God, I'd never thought of that!

  Then Nikhil went, 'Another call coming. I have to take it. Don't give any quotes, stay put in your hotel and - I'll try to come see you in the evening, okay?'

  'Okay,' I said, but he'd cut the phone already.

  We stayed in our rooms and watched TV. The leaked e-mail scandal was on all the sports channels. In India it was the only thing the junta was talking about. Zoravar called me, on a crackly, buzzing connection from Poonch and yelled down the line, 'Shame on you, Gaalu! Taking ghoons from the chaddiwallahs! All my buddies are shunning me here.'

  I told him to shut up and get lost, but he went on and on for a while, hiding his concern for me under all kinds of inane utterances. 'How are you, anyway?' I asked him finally. 'All quiet on the western front?'

  'Eastern, actually,' he said. 'Yeah, everything's quiet. Major snowstorms, of course, but I still have all my fingers and toes and am making good bowel movements every five days.'

  'Gross!' I said. 'Your tent must stink.'

  'No, no, Gaalu,' he assured me. 'Our sleeping bags are totally airtight, you know. They just balloon up slowly in the night, and sometimes I wake up floating in the air on all that hot gas. The guys have to shoot me down.' I groaned, he chuckled and said, 'Be good, okay. And tell Rinku Chachi to remember she's a married woman. Tell her to leave all those hunky West Indian players alone. If her foot slips, we will not be able to show our face to the clan in Karol Bagh...'

  He kept chattering away about inconsequential things for a while, but he wasn't fooling me. Sure enough, as he was winding up, he asked casually, 'So, did you think about what I told you last time?'

  I said sweetly, 'No, Zoravar, I didn't,' and hung up on him.

  I got a lot of calls after that from numbers I didn't recognize (journos, I assumed) and ignored them all. The list of all the Super 8 teams was almost complete, there were just a couple of matches left to go. The next India match was still three days away, and on TV, the sportscasters were speculating madly about who the playing eleven would be.

  By seven-thirty in the evening I figured Nikhil was too busy to come over and got into my baggy pajamas and sat on the floor to put coconut oil in my hair. Rinku Chachi got behind me on the sofa and started giving me a teeth-rattling champi, talking about her daughter Monya, so far away in boarding school.

  That's when this breaking news came on and a thin Aussie sportscaster said: 'Indian Southpaw Robin Rawal finally broke his silence with a press conference this afternoon, saying that' - they cut to Rawal-the-creep's ugly mug talking into like a million channel mikes - 'he was sure that the leaked e-mail was the work of mischievous elements and had not been written by Weston Hardin at all and was confident that Hardin had the utmost faith in him. He said there was no question of him returning to India, and that he was looking forward to putting the bad memories of New Zealand behind him and giving a cracking performance in the Super 8s for the benefit of fans of the game everywhere.'

  So Rawal wasn't going home quietly. He'd cleverly given Wes a way out, by which he could save face and stick with the team till the end of the World Cup. My respect for Jogpal Lohia rose; he'd turned out to be quite a Subtle Bihari behind that beard, after all.

  I didn't think it would work though. Wes didn't sound like he was in the mood to deny the e-mail. Not from what Nikhil had described to me of his state of mind in the morning.

  But Mon and Chachi thought otherwise. 'Wait and see, they'll patch up and come to a compromise, Zoya,' Chachi told me, banging the top of my oily head vigorously. 'This Weston will be on TV soon, saying ki I never wrote any e-mail, Rawal is like my younger brother, it happens all the time. That fellow' - she yanked my hair into a plait so tight my eyes watered - 'tore up your passport, threw the match, betrayed his country. And nothing will happen to him, nothing! Because he is president ka aadmi. Jogpal's man.'

  'I think so too,' Mon said. 'After all, he wriggled his way into the side, didn't he? None of us thought he'd make it. Zing! didn't even want to renew his contract!'

  I wanted to say that I didn't think Nikhil Khoda was the sort of man who made compromises. But he'd let me pile on to his team table, hadn't he? And he'd accepted Rawal into his squad too. So maybe they had a point....

  Then when we were eating dinner, the same sportscaster, wearing a smug
, cat-that-got-the-cream expression came on and said, 'And with us in the studio is the vice captain of the Indian Cricket team. Luckshmun Singh Teja.' He grinned toothily. This was obviously some kind of coup he'd scored over the other channels.

  They cut to Laakhi, looking like a benign man-mountain, closely shaved and middle-partinged, his eyes twinkling naughtily, like the whole thing was a huge joke.

  'Laakhi, how are ya?' asked the sportscaster.

  'Good, thenkyou,' Laakhi said, right on cue.

  The sportscaster, a thin guy with protuberant teeth, leaned forward and, pinning Laakhi with his hugely-magnified-behind-horn-rimmed-glasses eyes, asked with what he obviously believed was disarming frankness, 'Laakhi, what the hell is going on?'

  Laakhi laughed expansively, his mighty shoulders shaking. 'Nothing, nothing is going on,' he said cosily. 'We are all one happy family, there are arguments between youngsters and seniors in every family you know, nothing is wrong, all is in the well.' He slapped the sportscaster on the back, making his glasses slip off his nose a little, and winked reassuringly.

  The sportscaster was one of those people whose lips and spectacles, if they don't stay vigilant, tend to slip, the lips backward over the sticky-outy teeth and the spectacles downward over the nose. Such people, I've noticed, deal with this unique two-in-one problem by making a peculiar snarling movement that hitches up their cheeks higher and then drops them down again. The first part of this movement makes their specs ride up higher and the second part makes their lips drop lower, covering the teeth.

  The sportscaster made his little snarling, cheek-hitching-up movement, startling Laakhi, who drew back slightly.

  'So who is the head of the family then?' The sportscaster asked, his glasses glinting.

  Laakhi eyed him warily and adjusted his collar (he looked like he'd have liked to adjust other parts but was heroically resisting). He said, 'Wes is head-of-the-family, of course. I know him for many years. He is great player, great man, great coach. He only has team's best interests at heart.' He nodded firmly and sat back.

  The sportscaster nodded, snarled and hitched up his cheeks, moving in for the kill. 'But what about your president, isn't he head-of-the-family too?'

  'But definitely,' Laakhi nodded vehemently. 'He is head-of-the-family also.'

  The sportscaster inched even closer to Laakhi (a bad move as we shall see in a moment). 'So is the family headed for a divorce?'

  Laakhi laughed his deep, barrel-chested laugh, slapped the sportscaster on the back so hard his spectacles slipped again and said, 'In India we don't believe in divorce, man!'

  The sportscaster snarled and hitched again, as Laakhi watched in horrid fascination. 'So am I to understand a compromise is being worked out?'

  Laakhi, looking a little intimidated with this hound-like persistence, not to mention the constant snarling and hitching, said, 'Look, this is husband-wife internal matter. Nobody can say anything!'

  The sportscaster smiled a constipated little smile. 'One last question before we move on, who is the husband and who is the wife?'

  'It depends. Sometimes one, sometimes the other. They take turns.' As the sportscaster looked totally flummoxed, Laakhi laughed uproariously, slapped him on the back again with violent desperation, obviously hoping to bludgeon him into unconsciousness, so the snarling and hitching would stop and so would the questions.

  I'd been fast asleep for over an hour, I think, when the phone rang.

  'Hello?' Nikhil's deep voice came crisply on to the line.

  'Hi,' I said, sleepily.

  'Are you up?'

  'Just about,' I said, sitting up in bed and cuddling the phone to my ear happily.

  'Can you come down to the poolside?'

  Could I ever! I jumped out of bed, caught sight of my reflection in the mirror and froze in my tracks. My hair was all tied up in a fat oily plait. I looked like a greasy laddoo.

  'Uh, can't we just talk on the phone?' I said.

  There was a little pause, and then he said, a little formally, 'Is there a problem?'

  'No, yes...not really.'

  'Then come, no,' he said. 'Please. I don't have much time and I really want to meet you.'

  I looked at myself in the mirror and sighed. I looked truly awful. 'Okay...I'm coming,' I said, with bad grace. 'Just don't laugh when you see me, okay?'

  I hitched up my baggy pajamas, slipped on my fluffy shoes and headed for the poolside. He was sitting in the shadows on one of the deck chairs, and I don't think he recognized me at first. The light from the lobby made me practically a silhouette and it wasn't till I was standing right in front of his face that he said, in an unsure voice, 'Zoya?'

  I sat down on the deck chair next to him. 'I look horrible, I know.'

  He laughed. 'No, it's just that I didn't recognize you at first. Is that why you didn't want to come downstairs?'

  I nodded crabbily.

  'Seriously?'

  I nodded again, feeling oddly exposed. I'm so used to lurking vampishly behind my curls. 'Yes, okay?' I said crossly. 'I don't like meeting people when I look like a gaalu aalu.'

  'You don't look -' he began to say, then a slight hint of impatience crept into his voice. He shrugged and said, 'Never mind.'

  Oh God, he's got all this stress on his head and he thinks I'm only bothered about how fat my face looks.

  Quickly, I sat down next to him and asked, in this very sensitive way, 'So, what's the latest on the stand-off?'

  He sighed. 'It's still just that. A stand-off. Wes refuses to deny the mail, Jogpal refuses to drop Rawal.'

  'What are you going to do?' I asked.

  He shook his head. 'I don't know. The whole thing has turned into a media circus. There's rioting in Rajasthan. There's even an sms going around asking all true Indians to burn their Bermuda shorts.'

  I giggled. 'Really?'

  'No,' he said, his voice smiling in the dark, 'not really.' He paused and then said, 'Well, the good bit is that it's all come out into the open before the Super 8s. It's a chance to sort things out before the matches start getting tougher.'

  'That's good,' I said idiotically.

  He said, 'In a way it's a second chance for me to fight for the squad I really wanted.'

  I nodded, muttering something non-committal, feeling way out of my depth, but at the same time also feeling very important, becausehe was having this high-level-type conversation with me.

  And then he said, 'What do you think, Zoya?'

  Oh no, what would I know?

  'I don't know,' I said hesitantly. 'What's the worst that can happen if you guys deny Wes wrote the mail, anyway?'

  'We can't really. The boys know how Wes feels. He didn't exactly make a secret of it. Yelled the place down, actually. He totally bawled out Zahid too, for not getting that last six.'

  I winced, remembering guiltily how happy I'd been when that happened. Good job, Khoda couldn't read my mind, he'd have probably thrown me into the pool instead of stroking the back of my oily neck in the absent way he was doing now.

  'Basically, they all know he's written it. If he denies it, he'll lose respect. If I back him up on it, I'll lose respect. Morale will plummet. And, of course, it'll mean fielding the same team we've got now. Ergo more dropped catches and run-outs.' He paused and then added, more bitterly than I've ever heard him speak before, 'All because of the glorious uncertainties of the game...'

  'And supposing you both say that yes, Wes did write it?'

  He shrugged. 'Well, the boys will rally around us, but if we lose the World Cup, we'll both lose our jobs practically as soon as we get home. Which will be okay for Wes, he can get another team to coach, but not so okay for me.'

  'And if you win?' I asked.

  'Then it should pan out all right, I guess,' he said. 'All will be forgiven. Happiness all round. But that's easier said than done, Zoya. There are nine matches to go still, and we're not exactly the best team in town.' He pushed his dark hair back from his face with a frustrated gesture
and glowered down at the calm swimming pool waters, a queer smile twisting his (seriously sexy) mouth.

  I watched him with eyes full of trepidation. I was crazy enough about him to tell him whatever he wanted to hear. Trouble was, I didn't know what he wanted to hear. And then he looked up at me, the queer little smile almost savagely challenging. He asked again, Boost-brown eyes boring right into mine, 'So, what do you think I should do, Zoya?'

  'See only thee eye of thee cupboard,' I said, feeling a little foolish.

  There was a little silence. 'What?' he asked, uncomprehendingly.