'How about a lucky kiss?' he asked, his fingers warm as they raised my chin.
A lucky kiss? I thought dazedly. Nikhil Khoda's asking me this? I could instantly hear Zoravar's urgent voice going, He's surrounded by hot women, why's he zeroing in on you?
I said, 'I thought you didn't need luck to win a match?'
'Oh, I can manage without the luck, all right,' he said ruefully, pushing me up even closer against him, 'but I'm finding I can't manage without the kisses.'
***
They won. Easily.
Khoda demolished their attack by contemptuously slamming a hundred off 63 deliveries, and wound up being declared Man of the Match.
I should've been ecstatically happy I know, but I was really, really low. See see, my mind whispered. Zoravar's right! He lured you into the elevator, kissed you thoroughly and went out there and scored.
Then when he'd called me right after the match and wanted to come over and see me I'd said yes, and now I was waiting for him, very wound up, scared of what might come out of my mouth when we met.
I sat curled up by the poolside, fiddling with my hair, trying to stay calm. And when he walked in, very lithely confident, flashed me a cocky, quizzical grin and opened his arms wide, I just looked at him stonily.
'Congratulations, Nikhil,' he hinted mock-reproachfully, dropping down on the deck chair beside me and nuzzling my neck. 'You played an awesome innings, you brute of a man, you!'
I shifted away from him, hugging my knees.
'Zoya?' he asked, his voice changing. 'Are you all right?'
I turned around to look up at him, tears brimming bright in my eyes and blurted out, 'Zoravar says you're pretending to like me because I'm lucky.'
There was a long silence.
The water lapped quietly against the pool walls, a gentle breeze blew, flies hummed busily around us, and the silence stretched out, like forever.
Nikhil sighed and leaned back against the deck chair. He crossed his arms and closed his eyes meditatively. 'How long,' he asked mildly, 'has this been on your mind?'
'How does that matter? It's true, isn't it?'
He shrugged. 'What do you think?' he asked, opening his eyes, not looking at me but at the cluster of frangipani trees in front of him. 'Do you really think I made a 103 out there today because you kissed me? Really?'
I couldn't talk. I was all wound up and shaking. The back of my throat hurt crazily with suppressed tears. I waited tensely for him to tell me it wasn't true, that my brother was nuts. I wanted reassurance like I'd never wanted it before in my life.
'You know, Zoya,' Nikhil said deliberately, still not looking at me, 'a lot of people might say you just like me because I'm the captain of the Indian cricket team.'
That struck me like a blow to the solar plexus. My mouth opened automatically to refute the allegation, even as my brain went reluctantly, Well, he does have a point....
He turned on me then, his brown eyes gleaming savagely. 'Would you like me so much if I wasn't the captain? Would you like me so much if I was a reserve player, the sixteenth man? Would you like me so much if I was a Ranji player, huh? Or what if I was a life insurance agent or a...I don't know, a banker or something?' He said it really fast and nasty. I couldn't get a word in.
He went on, talking without any intonation or feeling in his voice. 'I see you hug my boys before every match. Every single one of them. And if I want something a little more, from my girl, before I go in to play, my motives are suspect.'
I tried to reach for him, but he shook me off, shaking his head. 'You know, at this point in time' - he gave a bitter laugh - 'all I need is absolutely unconditional support.' Then he looked up at me, his eyes so cold they seemed almost opaque, 'But it was too much for you to give, wasn't it?'
'Nikhil, no - ' I started to say.
But he got up. 'It's cool, Zoya,' he said. 'You keep your distance. Stay away from me. Don't even come for breakfast if you'd rather not. I don't need your bloody blessings to win me a World Cup!'
And with that, he turned around and strode out of the hotel, and out of my life.
***
Things got pretty grim after that.
Oh, of course I kept going for breakfast with the team, but as far as Nikhil was concerned, I might as well not have been alive. He was the first to leave the team table every time, with not even a nod in my direction. So, obviously, I ignored him right back. I laughed and kidded around with the others, but inside I was pretty close to cracking up.
It didn't help that he was in superb form. Jay and Beeru couldn't stop raving about him. Here's a captain that leads from the front, they rhapsodized constantly. Great cricketing mind, cool under pressure, deservedly arrogant, and so on and so forth.
'Vul, with a rampant lion at its head, even a herd of cattle can win a war, my friend,' Beeru had declared just the other day. 'And the Indians are not cows.'
I glowed with pride when they said all that stuff, swore to myself that I'd speak to him the next time we met (he didn't return my calls and after three times, I stopped trying) but then, whenever we'd meet he'd freeze me out with that distant, dismissive look in his eyes and my courage would shrivel up inside me, shrinking down to a size where all it could power me to do was toss my hair and smile a brilliant, radiant smile around the table.
Privately, I had to admit that everything he'd said to me was justified. I did fall for him because he was the captain, so glamorous, so gorgeous, so successful. Would I have felt the same if he worked on Maximilk, pushing layouts to a pharmaceutical company for a living?
I tried to imagine Nikhil Khoda with a small-time, plastic briefcase, his lunch in a steel tiffin carrier, rattling up to AWB in a Maruti 800 wearing a jacket and tie.
But I couldn't visualize it. Because, every time he opened the Maruti door and strode into the conference room, the scene would slide into slow motion and the back of his coat would fly up, all Matrix-like. His eyes would narrow into slits and he'd start chucking Junior Maximilk layouts up in the air and catching them again without looking at them, his eyes boring into the eyes of the cowering clients across the board room table, just like in the Boost ads. 'Buy these, you morons,' he'd say. 'Buy them, or die...'
Basically, I really had it bad.
Meanwhile, 'my bloody luckiness' seemed to be working wonders. The boys won the next three matches on the trot. (They'd have won four, but one got rained out.) Apart from my rift with Nikhil, it was a crazy, heady time to be Indian. We whooped and cheered and drank ourselves silly in the stands in different stadiums all over the country. Cries of Chauka! Chhakkaa! Indiyaa! rose constantly into the surprised Aussie skies.
The sequence of events was more or less the same everywhere. Khoda would saunter in, and win the toss. He'd tell the umpire what he wanted to do and then, he and the boys would just do it. No fuss, no fumbles. One of them would pick up a Man of the Match trophy at the end of day's play and the Indian 'poishun' would be a little more secure.
They were making it look incredibly easy.
The commentators had started calling the season an Indian Summer and were all busy claiming they'd been predicting an Indian victory or at least an Indian side in the finals for, like, forever.
The media had also, ever since that dumb episode with Rawal and the Benito's pizza guy, developed a huge fascination with me.
The Zoya Factor was being debated on every possible channel and forum. Panels full of balding men, of every colour, accent and nationality, held forth on Luck as a Factor in Cricket. An entire half-hour programme had appeared on Channel Seven about me, with lots of footage on me that God only knows how, they'd managed to get hold of. They'd started with my baby pictures, interviews with Zoravar's old colony friends, that wretched retired colonel again. They'd included the old footage of Zahid and Khoda that had run in India too and there was even an interview with Jogpal Lohia's Lingnath Baba. I prayed he would say nothing about my propitiousness being directly proportional to my purity, and luckily he
didn't. Instead, much to my horror, he pulled out my janam-patri!
They'd done full 3-D graphics on it, so all these planets revolved most majestically as he pointed them out one by one, saying how my Mangal and Shani and Braspati were super-shubh and that if I'd been born even a nano second here or there I would've been no use to the team. 'When an individual longs for something with his whole soul, the entire universe conspires to make sure he gets it,' Lingnath said, lisping slightly and making large mystic gestures with his hands. 'And we are talking not of an individual here, but of an entire nation. The very cosmos bowed to the prayers of a united Bharat and wrought mighty changes in the arrangement in the paths of the planets that day in June 1983. Owing to which an entirely propitious girl child, an avtar of Durga-ma herself, was born.'
It was unadulterated crap from start to finish, but the goras seemed to love it. Either that, or they were running out of things to discuss on all those panel discussions. They even had a debate on whether I should be allowed to sit at the table with the boys, because I was giving them an unfair advantage.
Of course it was all very heady and I did lap it up a bit. But it was just so very fragile, dependent totally on how the boys performed. Dependent totally on Nikhil actually.
The third point the commentators were kicked about, besides Khoda and me, was how well everybody on the team was playing. 'Indian cricket has always been about individual brilliance,' they said, 'now here's an entire team that's brilliant!'
It was true. Maybe buoyed by the dropping of Rawal or whatever, the boys were playing superbly. In all three matches, different people had come through to take us to victory. It was truly a team effort.
The old Indian hands, however, still looked all dour and pessimistic about India taking the 'spoils of war' home with them next month. All the ususal phrases - 'peaking too early', 'Indians are chokers', 'lack of killer instinct', 'psychological disadvantage' and 'snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory' were trotted out.
'It's just the superstitious fear ki nazar lag jaayegi,' Shanta explained to me. 'As in, "Let's not get too excited or our boys' splendid performances will attract the"' - she made a graphic, jabbing gesture with her index and little finger - '"Evil Eye"!'
But you could smell the hope in the air.
It dripped out of everybody's pores even when they were being all balanced and careful, scented the air with a heady mix of spring-fever and monsoon madness and hung above us everywhere we went, sparkling tantalizingly.
'It's the manic dhak-dhak-ing of a billion brown hearts, Zo,' Vishaal told me one morning by the poolside of some hotel in Perth. 'Hesitant and insistent! Isn't it driving you crazy?'
It was actually.
Because every time I sensed the pressure (which was constantly), I was eaten up with guilt over the last thing Nikhil had said to me. At this point in time, all I need is absolutely unconditional support.
And I'd been unable to give it to him.
***
The next match was in Brisbane again. We got there a full day before the match and stayed at the same hotel we'd stayed at before.
'C'mon,' Monita said to me in the evening when I was moping about in my room. 'Let's go out for a fancy dinner.'
'Haan, Zoya,' Rinku Chachi said, 'last time you didn't come with us to the casino! You have to come today!'
I'd been sitting hunched up by the windows looking out at the river and thinking about how I'd overheard Nikhil talking to somebody on the phone a couple of days ago. He'd been saying, I miss us too, in this very half-exasperated, half-caressing manner. For a single ecstatic moment I'd thought he was talking to me, till I'd seen the headphone clipped to his ear....
'I don't know, Chachi,' I said vaguely.
'Zooooya? Are you coming? Come na, we can share a red pizza.' I looked down to see Armaan hugging my knees insistently. I sighed and shoved Nikhil Khoda back into my subconscious where he seemed to have taken up permanent residence. 'Okay, dude,' I said, smiling brightly, 'but only if you'll be my date for the night!'
He nodded. 'I want to wear my suit,' he said solemnly.
'Of course you must wear your suit,' I said, planting a smacking kiss on his cheek, 'and I'll wear a "suit" too!'
So Armaan wore the black, two-piece tuxedo Mon had got for him in Sydney along with wrap-around sunglasses and gelled hair, while I wore a sleeveless rose-pink salwar kameez with a floaty pink-and-white dupatta.
Armaan and I strutted down to the lobby, arm and arm, Mon and Rinku Chachi clattering behind us, wafting expensive perfume.
'There's a very nice Indian restaurant close by, ma'am,' the concierge said, taking in my outfit. 'Shall I book you a table?'
I looked questioningly at my three chaperones (not that I needed them any more, I thought sadly; Zahid was so cosy with Ritu now and Khoda, of course, had given up on me forever) and they all nodded. 'Book it,' I said.
It was just a short drive away, in South Bank, and it wasn't till we reached the entrance and I looked up and saw the neon sign glowing The Sultry South above that warning bells went off inside my head. By then, of course, it was too late.
Maybe she won't be there, I told myself as a pretty dark girl in a pavada choli came up noiselessly to show us our table. Maybe he won't be there!
But no sooner had our tamarind-tomato savouries arrived that Armaan stood up and chirped, 'Look, look Nikhil Bhaiya!'
I promptly dropped my soup spoon and then dived under the table to retrieve it.
I heard Nikhil's deep voice going, 'Hi monster,' and winced.
'Arrey, Nikhil!' Rinku Chachi was saying, sounding very pleased with herself. 'How are you, beta?'
'Great performances!' That was Mon.
'Sit with us! Sit with us!' Armaan shrieked. I could see his feet jumping up and down.
'Chup, Armaan, he's with somebody,' Monita remonstrated and then, with a sinking heart I heard her say pleasantly, 'Hello, I'm Monita.'
And this really husky, exquisitely pitched voice answered, 'I'm Reita, hope you're having a good time.'
Everybody chorused in agreement and then I heard Khoda say casually, 'Is it just the three of you, tonight?'
Okay, I couldn't lurk under the table forever, could I, so I decided this was the time to make my entry. I shook back my hair, squared my shoulders and emerged, slightly red-faced, with my spoon held out before me like a talisman. 'I dropped this,' I said idiotically, and then, 'Oh hi,' to Nikhil and Reita Sing.
She was super hot, half Mallu half Singaporean, I think. With a sinking heart I took in her long, black, luxuriantly curling hair.
'Zoya!' Reita gushed warmly. 'What an honour to have you in my restaurant!'
I muttered something idiotic and spooned some soup into my face.
'Sit with us, sit with us,' Armaan prattled on at Khoda. I gave him a dirty look.
'Actually, why don't you, Nikhil?' Reita said, putting one hand on his arm appealingly. 'This is a working dinner for me, anyway!'
Nikhil hesitated, his hand on the back of Armaan's chair, and I - smarting from the fact that I must have called him at least six times only to hear his stupid voicemail message - said, 'Hey, Armaan, you said you're my date tonight!'
Nikhil's face hardened instantly. 'I'll be with the rest of the guys by the bar,' he said and stalked off.
Reita smiled unsurely at us, then said, 'Okay, enjoy!' with a nervous little laugh and hurried away too.
Leaving me to face three reproachful faces.
'What is your problem, Zoya?' Chachi said.
'Nothing,' I said defiantly. 'What's yours?'
The encounter with Nikhil made me completely lose my appetite. I pushed back my chair and headed towards the washroom where I banged into Lokey. He drew back and grinned at me. 'Joyaji! Where are you hiding? I am calling and calling you every day.'
'I'm here only, Lokey,' I said, smiling back at him, happy to see a cheerful face.
'Well, we have to have a serious chat soon, y'know!' he said, fishing out abou
t half a kilo of shelled pista from his pocket and offering it to me. 'Please have.'
'No thanks,' I said.
He registered astonishment at this lack of good taste, then shrugged and tossed the entire consignment into his capacious mouth and chewed on it thoroughly. Then he beamed at me. 'I have some papers for you to sign.'
'Lokey, I've been meaning to tell you,' I said, 'I'm not very sure about doing Tauji's ad.'
'Hain?' His ears cocked instantly. 'Why why why?'
I shrugged. 'I think my doing an ad, claiming credit for India's World Cup victory will do neither me nor the team any good.'
The Zoya Factor Page 28
