The Match

by Romesh Gunesekera

  ‘Navaratnam can play,’ Hector added.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Our Harvard economist. The Colombo chap.’

  Sunny pricked up his ears at the mention of Tina’s father.

  ‘Of course, you are quite right. He even played for Royal, no?’ Lester kept files in his head of all sorts of random information, including the schooling of Ceylon’s growing band of international vagabonds.

  Hector nodded again. ‘He was always in the cricket crowd, you remember. Major league. Out here he has a bit of a craving . . .’

  So Rudolf Navaratnam was not just a rolling stone, he was a colossus of cricket – someone in the order of Grace, Bradman or Walcott – in whose presence Sunny would wilt and expire. Sunny imagined Tina’s father stepping out of his silver Mercedes and striding up to the crease in Urdaneta Park with a bat that would smash the hell out of a wimp like him.

  In Makati, Manila, at nine-thirty on the morning of Sunday, 10 January 1971, Sunny was the only one among his gang of spaced-out zonks who was awake. The prospect of cricket, and Tina, had upset the equilibrium he normally achieved through his reclusive passions of sleep, TV and minor self-abuse.

  He walked into the kitchen and found his father giving instructions to Rosa and Beatriz.

  ‘I have asked some people around for lunch,’ Lester said. ‘You will be here?’

  ‘Oh?’ Sunny was careful to reserve his rights, one syllable at a time.

  ‘Your cricket idea, last night, got me thinking.’

  Sunny cringed, aware that they were on dangerous ground.

  ‘I thought it would be a good idea to get the Navaratnams over. Hector will come, and the Thompsons. The Navaratnams have a girl, I think. And the Thompson boy may tag along.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why, what?’ Lester looked puzzled.

  ‘Why everything? Why Steve Thompson, for God’s sake.’

  ‘I thought we might get the team going, you know. The Thompsons will provide two – father and son. One for you, one for me. By the way, you shouldn’t swear. It achieves nothing, unless you are particularly religious.’

  ‘I was going to meet Robby and Herbie for a bit of batting.’

  ‘Ask them over here. Navaratnam was a first-class player in his day, you know. He can give us all a lesson.’

  ‘Anyways, I wasn’t swearing. Jeez, Dad.’ Sunny slunk back to his room to recuperate in front of his collection of Zen photos. It was all too much, too fast and too out of control. He couldn’t understand what had got into his father. This gathering was not of his usual type. No hangers-on. These were the Navaratnams and the Thompsons. Heck, he had even offered to have Herbie around.

  Sunny called and left messages for the gang. He said that there would be curry for lunch and that they could go out cricketing later. Herbie and Robby both liked the food in the Fernando house and would happily sneak in to munch leftovers at any time of the day. With their support Sunny believed he had a chance of coping with the arrival of both Steve and Tina at the same time.

  The immediate problem that Sunny faced was his room. Personally he didn’t mind the limey walls, the pukey bedspread, the dressing table with its wing-tip mirrors and cut-outs from perfume ads; but in daylight with the sun streaming in, the place did look a little girlish. It didn’t show anything of the real him, except for the collage of snaps stuck on the wardrobe door and the portrait of his dead mother. Sunny kept her on top of the chest of drawers facing the door. In the furthest corner from the photograph, there was a guitar which he couldn’t really play but which could for this occasion be brought a little more centre stage. Placed casually on the bed perhaps. He thought he would keep the curtains drawn, the lights turned down low and snug like at Herbie’s. With the murky rug on the floor, Tina might even think there was a kind of purple haze in there somewhere. Sunny turned the air-con high and put a bowl underneath to catch the drips of icy condensation.

  Rosa was outside, in the hall, singing along with Engelbert Humperdinck and cleaning the fretwork using a potato peeler wrapped in cotton wool. Sunny asked her for a duster. She giggled. ‘Is in the larder, na.’ He fetched the cloth and set to work on everything horizontal – bed, shelves, louvres – and hid his father’s latest Harold Robbins under a poncho. Then, after a shower and tons of deodorant in crucial places, slipped into a bright flowery shirt and his faded blue jeans with the zip that didn’t quite go all the way. He wanted to be ready for anything.

  Lester arrived back from Guadalupe Market with four kilos of belly pork and called for his son. ‘Sunny, you want to fry the pork?’

  ‘We need Coke,’ Sunny countered quickly. He didn’t want pork fat greasing his hair and the smell of his father’s curry clinging to his fresh clothes. It was not the aroma for Tina, regardless of their common culinary heritage. ‘You didn’t get any Coke, did you?’

  ‘I got a case of 7-Up.’

  ‘I’ll go get a couple of Cokes. Herbie likes Coke. And the Navaratnam girl also prefers it. I can walk over to the Supermart.’

  ‘You know the Navaratnam girl?’

  ‘I’ve talked to her.’

  ‘Good.’ Lester handed over a wad of pesos. ‘In that case, get some Ajinomoto also. And a lemon. Her father, the champ, is bound to be a G&T bugger.’

  Makati Supermart, right in the middle of the Commercial Centre, past the Tempura restaurant, the barber shop and the tenpin bowling alley, was Sunny’s first and favourite supermarket. Retail self-service hadn’t existed in the Colombo of his childhood. The first time he entered it he realized that this was truly an erogenous zone. Even in Manila it was special: the largest supermarket in the Far East. Customers were requested to ‘Please Leave All Firearms at the Desk’, an order Sunny wished he could obey with a personal arsenal as big as the best. And so polite – please. Everyone in the new Makati aimed to please, from pisspot to gunshot.

  Sunny walked down the confectionery aisle, feasting his eyes through a cool light tint, and then loitered for a while by the ice-cream freezers. Further on he picked a lemon and hung a left, thinking of Coke, girls and fretless chords.

  He found Hector stranded on a corner by the mini-pretzels. He was leaning on a shopping trolley, stroking his chin.

  ‘Sunny, look at this,’ Hector squawked the moment he saw him. ‘Look at the way they have done this. Are they trying to build a pyramid? How can you get a packet out of this heap? The whole thing will collapse.’

  Sunny led Hector down the aisle. ‘Those are for show. The ones to buy are here, Uncle.’

  Hector exhaled loudly, relieved. ‘You like these pretzel things? I thought I’d bring some along for lunch.’

  ‘Dad’s making pork curry.’

  Hector nodded vigorously, pleased. ‘Yes. Definitely. He’s not one for these nibbles, I know, but what about you?’

  Sunny nodded back, unconsciously keeping time to Hector’s bobbing head. ‘I came to get some Coke.’

  ‘So, I’ll take you back?’

  Sunny was grateful for the offer of a lift. Crossing Ayala Avenue in the heat on the way over he had realized it might have been better to be flavoured with pork fat after all, and found it quite a turn-on to imagine a kiss that turned into a wild tongue bath.

  Hector’s car was also a Mercedes, a mud-coloured diesel version of the one Rudolf Navaratnam had. ‘Does everyone in your office have a Merc?’

  Hector looked baffled.

  ‘The Navaratnams?’

  ‘Oh, oh.’ He nodded. ‘Ceylon, no? We old boys stick together. Team spirit.’

  ‘What about us then? Dad has a Buick.’

  ‘Ah, but he is the captain, no? He leads. Next year we will all have American cars.’

  Sunny wasn’t sure whether Hector was making fun of his father. His father was not a leader – not even a leader writer any more.

  Hector reversed slowly into the kerb. There was the crunch of a can, or a trolley, or some poor Supermart attendant. Hector looked at Sunny and shook his head helplessly. ‘G
ermans make hard cars.’

  It was true, Sunny thought. The seats were hard. ‘Will you guys really get a team together with Mr Navaratnam?’

  ‘Oh, yes. That’s what the pork curry is about.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Sunny was lost.

  ‘You see, I happen to know, Mrs Navaratnam – sweet Anjuli – can’t ff . . . fry a sausage. He gets only leftover adobo from the cook. Rudolf, poor bugger, has been dying for a hot curry for months.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Sunny could imagine his father picking up such a juicy domestic titbit – he had once been an investigative reporter, after all. But Hector?

  ‘It’s all he ever talks about when we meet.’

  ‘Really?’ Sunny tried to conjure up a conversation at the bank. ‘A pork curry, I say, men. GDP would double, no, with a pukka red-hot pork curry.’ Then he cut to Rudolf at home – a moody, menacing figure flinging Ceylonese recipe books at his clueless wife while Tina cowered in her room, traumatized. ‘But if he wants it so much, why doesn’t he learn to cook like Dad? Why should his wife have to do all the frying?’

  ‘Well, perhaps your father will teach him, in return for a trick or two with the old bat and ball. Anjuli, you see, is not very . . . compliant.’ Hector made a laborious wide turn into Urdaneta.

  ‘No power steering?’ Sunny asked.

  ‘It is very precise, this car. European engineering.’

  Having parked at the house without further mishap, Hector sniffed the air and chuckled. ‘Navaratnam will go absolutely mad.’

  Sunny wondered if the smell of pork frying could possibly reach all the way over across the Commercial Centre and seep through the sampalok leaves of San Lorenzo village, the next compound, to permeate the arid interior of the Navaratnam household. Would Rudolf Navaratnam already be salivating, bundling his wife into the back of his silver Merc and urging Tina to hurry up?

  Hector headed for the kitchen door. He had the brown paper bag stuffed with pretzels close to his chest.

  ‘I say, Lester, I brought you some party snacks.’

  Lester looked up from the sizzling pan, one hand bandaged with a small pink towel and the other wielding a ladle made out of a coconut shell. ‘Snacks?’

  ‘Pretzels.’

  ‘What the hell for?’

  Hector shrugged. ‘For Sunny and his friends. The young generation.’

  Lester’s scowl disappeared and his face relaxed. He put the ladle on the saucepan lid and turned the gas down. Then he saw his son. ‘You got the lemon?’

  Sunny pulled one out of his bag with a little flourish and tossed it over. ‘Catch.’

  ‘Oi.’ Lester managed to cup his free hand in time.

  ‘I say, what happened to your other hand, Lester?’ Hector asked.

  Lester looked down at his bandaged hand as though it had just appeared in front of him. ‘Oh that. Just a bit of hot oil.’

  ‘You are not preparing a little excuse to get out of the cricket, Lester, are you?’ Hector gave Sunny a wry smile. ‘Your father, you know, is a very shrewd fellow.’

  ‘I can play you lot for a six with one hand tied behind my back.’

  ‘Both hands.’ Hector laughed. ‘Why not both hands, Houdini?’

  Sunny left them to their banter and went to his room.

  The point was not to try too hard. Let it be, let it be. The Beatles’ Lao-tzu creed that made a virtue out of reducing effort was very dear to Sunny. Bahala na was to his mind a fair Filipino interpretation.

  ‘Zen,’ Lester liked to mock, ‘is the art of seeing everything but noticing nothing. A gift emulated by politicians, high priests and professional pundits. Divine, but useless.’ He was not a great fan of anything remotely mystical. Unlike Aunty Lillie, he preferred the physical world in spite of its difficulties and disappointments.

  Sunny picked up his mother’s portrait. In this picture he could see everything and notice everything. He could follow the very grain of it. He understood how it had been produced: the play of light and chemicals, the fragility of the paper-thin image. And yet there was more for him in that one photograph than in anything else he possessed. When Amma died he had just learnt the heady words, she loves you yeah, yeah, yeah . . . from Radio Ceylon’s re-broadcast BBC hit parade. Love? He had been desperate to grow up and find out about this thing.

  At twelve-thirty sharp the Thompsons arrived. Rosa knocked on Sunny’s door. He opened it and she gestured frantically. ‘Come, come. Your Daddy calling. Thompson family here already, na.’ She clutched her head and ran back to the kitchen.

  Sunny sauntered out.

  The three Thompsons – Martin, a lanky sunburnt man in a yellow shirt, Mary, his freckled bemused wife, and their tall, spotty son Steve – stood trapped in the front garden.

  ‘Hi, there.’ Martin Thompson waved a big hand. Sunny nodded, taking his cue from Hector who faced them, dumbfounded.

  ‘Hello,’ Mary added with the special consideration some mothers can’t help but offer the motherless. Her dress had patterns that belonged in a zoo.

  Sunny flinched.

  A small brown bird glided into the pine tree by the gate. Lester came and herded the guests through the house to the back patio where an assorted collection of chairs – wood, wicker, rattan – were set out.

  ‘Sunny, you’ll do the soft drinks for . . .’ He had forgotten the boy’s name. He was hopeless with names unless he wrote them down. He turned to Mary. ‘What can I get you, Marie?’

  ‘A Cinzano and lemonade would be nice, Lester.’

  Sunny decided then that if he was going to get his team together, he would have to rise above the petty prejudices of teenage angst. Steve Thompson had usefully long arms even if his carroty hair was cut square and his pimples a little off-putting. ‘7-Up?’ Sunny asked him.

  ‘Cool.’

  Sunny retreated to the kitchen and got a bottle out of the fridge. A curvy Coke rolled temptingly on the top shelf. He thought he’d wait a little longer. He’d read about the pleasures of delayed gratification.

  ‘You know Herbie?’ He handed Steve the 7-Up.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Robby?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘They’ll be here. You’ll meet them.’

  ‘Good.’ He didn’t look too excited. Sunny didn’t mention Tina.

  In the blazing heat of the patio, Lester asked Steve’s parents what they made of life in Manila.

  Mr Thompson mopped his face with a big hanky and grinned. ‘Fantastic.’ The class struggle, the strikes downtown and the student battles could have been on another planet.

  ‘He loves the nightclubs,’ his wife elaborated. She took a large swig of her drink and her voice sharpened. ‘Friday nights and Saturday nights are impossible with Martin. He’s so raring to go for those dolly hostesses on Roxas Boulevard. Even last night, he was in such a state . . .’

  Her husband interrupted. ‘We were in Borneo for two years, you see. Orang-utans are not party people, I can tell you. It makes a change. Never mind Roxas, you seen those all-out floor shows in Cubao? Hey, aren’t they something? They just do everything.’

  Sunny looked at Steve. ‘You lived in Borneo?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Borneo. Your Dad just said you guys were in Borneo for two years.’

  ‘Not me. I was in Melbourne.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Not Borneo?’

  He shrugged. ‘I visited.’

  Sunny reckoned even his brief exposure had had devastating effects.

  ‘You play cricket?’ he asked eventually. There was an echo as his father asked Martin Thompson the same question almost at the same time. Thompson father and son looked at each other, bewildered.

  ‘Cricket.’ Hector added his own echo for emphasis.

  Martin Thompson replied first. ‘Why, sure. Crikey, I used to play all the time. More my game than poncy golf.’

  His son shrugged again.

  ‘I wanted to stay on in Melbourne for that third Test, you know. I don’t know where th
e rain came from. Pommies must have brought it with them like some bloody good luck charm. It never rains like that in Melbourne. Bradman and dear Sir Cyril had to dream up this one-day match for the fans. You follow that?’

  ‘One-day?’ Lester’s head lifted.

  The doorbell rang and Rosa squealed, ‘Sir, sir.’

  ‘Excuse me, that’ll be Navaratnam. First-class batsman. He was our number one centurion in Colombo.’

  ‘Right.’ Martin Thompson’s jaw tightened.

  The arrival of the Navaratnams, like that of the Spanish, Sunny knew, could spell the end of simple innocence – his easy life of auto-eroticism. He looked down to see if his blood had seeped out of a hole in his heel, staining his Jesus sandals and ruining the patio. Involuntary fluid loss, he’d learnt from experience, was part of growing up.

  Rudolf Navaratnam, the great bull patriarch of the family, had landed what Lester called a comfort job at the ADB. Apparently Dr Navaratnam was an expert on economic development. His wife Anjuli was a plump woman with a smart nose for hot gossip, bouncy and frisky and always on the verge of laughter. Tina had inherited her mother’s features but fortunately neither her figure, nor the tittering that was her usual greeting. Tina was altogether more serious, focused and desirable.

  Mrs Navaratnam came first, a bundle of kingfisher blue preceded by the jingle-jangle of her gold bangles and a flight of skittering giggles. She jostled her way out between her husband, who was stuck in the shadows of the doorway, and a pot of lusty anthuriums. ‘Ooh,’ she cooed at Martin Thompson, who couldn’t take his eyes off her. ‘I am Anjuli.’ Then spotting Mary collapsed in the shade, she giggled. ‘How do you do?’

  ‘Mary.’ Mary replied with a weak smile.

  Tina nosed ahead of her father and winked at Sunny. Even if he had summoned sufficient motor control to do so, he couldn’t have responded. Her father was staring right at him. Rudolf Navaratnam smoothed the side of his Brylcreemed head with the palm of his hand and stepped out into the sunshine in a red shirt and dazzling white slacks. He could have been Lloyd, Walcott, Sobers, all rolled into one. A giant among batsmen.

  Lester did the introductions. ‘Anjuli, Marie. Sorry, sorry – Mary. How could I get it wrong? Mary. Forgive me. Mary, Anjuli, Rudolf, Mary, Mary, Rudolf, Martin, Anjuli, Anjuli, Martin, Martin, Rudolf, Rudolf, Martin and . . . Hector. You all know Hector, of course.’ Then he turned to his son in relief. ‘The kids, I think, know each other already. For this younger generation the whole world is already such a small place, isn’t it? But this, anyway, is Sunny.’