•
Across a shining creek, in Navi Mumbai, Manjunath was waking up. Yawning and slapping his cheeks, he got out of bed and saw that familiar sparrow sitting on the fan. Can this really be my new home, he wondered. Can this really be my new bed?
Some part of him was starting to believe it.
It was his third morning in Javed’s flat, and he was growing used to waking up like this, a comic book under the cot, and a bird hopping about the blades of the fan. With each new morning, a life without cricket seemed to become more real.
Except this morning when the doorbell rang, and Manju opened the door, expecting to find Javed and breakfast, he found a strange man staring him up and down.
‘Javed is not here – he went to the mall to buy some film tickets. So I thought, it is time for me to come and see you.’
Bald and moustached, luminous in cotton clothes, Mr Ansari had the family’s trademark beak nose; but his slit-like hooded eyes reminded Manju of an Uzbek warrior he had once seen in a programme on the History Channel.
As the maid came in, and prepared the table for breakfast, Manju felt that pair of Uzbek eyes inspect him very thoroughly.
‘Mr Manjunath. My son is always talking of this Mr Manjunath. Now at last I see this Manju, and his famous forearms.’
They were served curry and pieces of warm bread, which the Ansaris, family of eccentrics, ate every morning in preference to parathas.
‘You know I am a cricketer myself?’ Mr Ansari spun a few imaginary balls towards Manju. ‘I got into Aligarh on the cricket quota, in 1976. Left-arm spinner, right-hand batsman. Cricket is every Indian boy’s dream; but not my Javed’s. Cricket and corruption: an old song, and not one that you two boys invented. Javed’s uncle Imtiaz said the same thing when they didn’t select him for India. It can happen. A selector can push his son into the team, yes: but when he stands at the crease, all three stumps fly. Not the best game, not the beautiful game: just the honest game, in the end. Have you ever heard me on the BBC Hindi service, by the way? I have some old tapes here. But eat now. Eat well. We’ll talk later.’
When they were done, Mr Ansari summoned him into his car, and they drove to an office, where they descended into a basement hall past a sign saying ‘Bulk Science Textbooks’.
‘You know left-handers are all brilliant people, like Leonardo da Vinci?’ Mr Ansari spoke suddenly.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘My Javed is a genius, if he fails at cricket – by the way, I hope you know he failed only because he wanted to – he will start a big company like Mister Steven Jobs. So I don’t blame you for anything, Mr Manjunath. That I don’t.’
Opening a door, Mr Ansari, importer of scientific textbooks, ushered Manju into his empire, an underground hall filled with textbooks, some still lying inside half-opened cartons, others arranged in bright piles which rose two or three feet tall. Men were lowering more cartons into the basement.
Manju counted the cartons and decided he would never again have to worry about the cost of college textbooks.
‘You know what I call my son Javed?’
‘The Nurse,’ Manju said.
Mr Ansari looked up sharply.
‘He tells you everything. Yes, you go to the hospital and you’ll see all the nurses are from Kerala. My Javed has a nurse inside him – he has a big fat Malayalee nurse inside him. That’s the only way he can take care of himself: if he’s taking care of someone else. It’s not charity. It’s the only way he can preserve himself. By falling in love. First he loved me. Now he loves you. But I don’t blame you for anything.’
You do blame me, Manju thought. You blame me for everything. But you’ve been too scared, ever since your other son killed himself, to tell Javed what to do or whom to see.
Now Manju understood why Javed had aborted his cricketing career – to prove a point to this sweetly manipulative father: and in Javed’s mind this raised him higher than everyone else he knew. But soon he would have to do this again, destroy himself again and stand even higher on that wreck (maybe the next discarded self would be labelled ‘College Student who talked like Harsha Bhogle’, and the one after that ‘Guitar Player who sounded like Freddie Mercury the Rock Star’, and the one after that . . .), until he was entirely isolated from other people by an enormous pile of his own dead selves. And when he got there, to that high and arrogant place, he would be lost to everyone else. Except me, Manju thought. I will always be able to get to him.
Mr Ansari turned to shout at the men delivering more cardboard cartons of books, and then turned back to Manju.
‘You think I don’t know Javed wants to run away with you and go to Kanyakumari and whatnot? Look at me as I talk, Mr Manjunath. That boy is mad sometimes. But another part of me says, he is seventeen, he is young, now is the time for him to run away with a friend. This is the most important time of your lives . . . seventeen and eighteen is when the world can still be saved, do you follow? Once the door closes . . . are you actually listening to me, Mr Manjunath?’
The workers had left: the two of them were alone in the room. Manju folded his arms; his eyes on the textbooks, Mr Ansari picked his way in silence through cartons and boxes to the far end of the room. Manju wondered if he could leave.
The textbook businessman scratched his jaw.
‘Look at me when I talk, Manju. Good. Now I told Javed, please be careful what you do, I don’t want the neighbours or the relations talking. Be quiet. Be careful. That’s all I ask for.’
Getting down on one knee, he ripped a carton of books open, and kept talking, even as he gasped from the exertion.
‘He has no discipline. No discipline or self-control. The only discipline he has is that he loves people very honestly and sincerely . . .’
Rising to his feet, wiping his palms against his trousers, Mr Ansari penetrated deeper into the labyrinth of textbooks, looking among the cartons as though for some lost codex.
Manju was no longer sure he could mind-read Mr Ansari, no longer certain that this bald man with the sly eyes was just a subtler version of a familiar figure.
Out there, Manju thought, with regret – a regret he would feel so keenly for the rest of his life – there must be fellows who are actually proud of their fathers.
•
Coca-Cola in his right hand, Javed Ansari sat at a table in the highest level of a mall in Vashi, and turned the pages of a legal textbook. Mastering the Indian Penal Code for Competitive Examinations. A cheap paperback edition, probably pirated, that an old man had been selling on the footpath outside the mall. Javed had bought the book while waiting for Manju, and now, pen in hand, he flipped through it while glancing at his cell phone.
He turned to a blank page at the end of the textbook, and, with only his finger for a pen, wrote:
What is it we search for, in drink and in the depths?
The sentence had occurred to him two nights ago, as he watched inebriated men staggering through Vashi. Why did they do this, night after night?
Producing a ball-point pen from his leather jacket, he completed the poem:
What is it we search for, in drink and in the depths? asks Javed.
A star fell to the earth, and we hunt for it in the world’s rubbish.
The name of the star is love.
He sucked his teeth. No. The poem didn’t click. He crossed out the three lines, and dropped his pen: nothing he wrote these days clicked. Maybe he should give up poetry and stick to guitar. Try to start a band with Ranjith and the others.
He continued reading randomly through the legal code.
‘Section 120-B: Possessing assets disproportionate to known sources of income.’ He amended it with his pen. ‘Section 120-B applied to Poets: Possessing goals and ambitions in life disproportionate to known sources of talent.’
He closed the textbook.
Manju, where the fuck are you? Sipping on his can of Coke, Javed checked his cell phone again. Nothing. Not even ‘Sorry Javed I’ll be late.’ Don’t tell me t
he boy is still thinking of going back to cricket. Yes, he is – obviously. Javed grit his teeth. Because Javed Ansari knew this Manju by now: knew this Manju’s tactic of exposing vulnerability, which drew others – boys and girls alike – to him, and then withdrawing from them, leaving those boys and girls angry, because they did not know he had read their minds and had been vulnerable in a way calculated to lure them in, and that this unselfconscious drawing-you-in-and-then withdrawing-from-you was the flaw in the alloy, the necessasary element of perversion in Manju’s character, which gave this boy who grew up in a slum the inner strength of steel.
Opening the legal textbook again, he turned to the last page once more and wrote: ‘Thoughts are like politicians that get between our bodies.’
Did that make sense? Catching himself about to burp, Javed stuck his hand into his jacket to rub his chest. Nasty stuff, this Coca-Cola. It must be fucking with his brain. Maybe it was also making his hair fall out, he thought, and ran his fingers over his forehead.
Stretching his arms over his head, he glanced up at the ceiling, wondering whether to call Manju – or whether instead to call Ranjith and talk to him about starting a rock band. Let’s wait another five minutes for Manju to turn up.
Stirring the Coca-Cola can with his right hand, he kept turning the pages of the lawbook until he reached ‘Section 377. “Unnatural offences.” ’
‘Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.’
Picking up his pen, Javed drew a giant penis over the page, before embellishing it with appropriately sized balls and pubic hair.
•
Fear: how it enters your world again, like the cool, dark, delicious current that ripples beneath the sun-warmed surface of a mountain stream.
Are you sure you’re done with cricket, Manju? Don’t you remember your innings against Fatima School, and that even better one against Ambani School . . . are you absolutely sure you want to leave cricket and stay here in Navi Mumbai?
Rather than meet Javed at the mall after leaving Mr Ansari, Manju had returned to the flat, opened the door with his spare key, and gone to the bedroom with its golden bed. After a long time, he was thinking about cricket, and at first he pretended that this was the result of Mr Ansari’s speech to him. But deep down, he knew it was not cricket that was making his heart thump: no, not cricket. It was the other thing.
Fear.
Opening the wardrobe, Manju ran his fingers through the pile of Javed’s shirts, and drew his nose closer to them. Sniffing through the cool beautiful shirts, his mouth filling up with saliva, he found a blue-bordered handkerchief doused with the scent of citrus, and put it across his face.
All that was warm in Javed’s heart touched his own heart and chilled it. Now that he had come to Javed’s home and slept on his golden bed, Radha would call him a gay. All the boys would call him that. Sofia would smile and say, ‘I’ll protect you, my friend. My gay friend.’
Then the phone began ringing, startling him.
Recognizing the number as Sofia’s, he did not answer.
It kept ringing. It kept ringing.
Manju kept hunting through Javed’s wardrobe. He looked over the bright shirts, and then at the rows of size-twelve shoes and sneakers and rubber chappals that were even larger than size twelve, until he saw, nearly buried under the footwear, an old blue cricket helmet, embossed with golden initials that said ‘J.A.’ Raising the helmet with both hands he brought it closer and closer, until the initials touched his forehead. Manju shivered from the cold touch of the grille that protected the batsman’s mouth.
With the helmet pressed against his forehead, he sat down on the floor.
Leave Javed? No, he could not just leave Javed now. If he went back to cricket, Javed would follow. He would write poems for him. The other boys would talk.
Getting out of Navi Mumbai, he thought, as he put the helmet back into the wardrobe, would take just as much preparation as getting in.
The phone began ringing again.
Hiding behind the curtain, Manju stood at the window, turning every now and then to the glowing phone on the bed. Down below on the street, a teenager on a canary-yellow bike zipped through the busy road. Behind the curtain, Manjunath Kumar watched: the silliest thing on a scooter was freer than he would ever be.
•
City bread is not served in the villages around the Western Ghats; nor is raita, pulao, biryani, basmati rice, or whatever else you’ve been fed in the city. Sit on the floor and be served raagi mudde like everyone else. Once a week you’ll get chicken, and once a week you’ll get mutton.
Eat, son.
Radha Kumar had still not grown used to the dark violet ball of raagi, which sat amidst a dark brown soup of sliced onion and cabbage.
He dreamed of white rice.
He talked to himself.
From eight in the morning, he had been sweeping the fields where wheat was being winnowed, cursing and mumbling and delivering long, bitter soliloquies that amused his cousins. He did not have to work in the fields. His uncle had made that clear, for they remembered their cricket hero Radha, and for people in this village he would always have a film-star’s eyes. But Radha wanted to work: and did not want to chit-chat or play cards or go to the movies.
He made them work him for eight, eight and a half, nine hours a day.
In the evening he washed himself with cold water and went to the dining hall, where his cousins, sitting cross-legged on the dining room floor, were eating their raagi mudde while his uncle Revanna talked on the cell phone, fixing the price of wheat or corn or something else that grew on fertilizer.
‘Phone for you.’
His uncle Revanna rubbed the Nokia against his shirt, and held it out to him.
‘Phone for you. From Mumbai. He called in the morning as well.’
Radha leapt up and grabbed the cell phone, and without pausing to confirm there was someone at the other end of the line, shouted:
‘Manju. Manju. Why does the boiling water turn into ice first?’
There was a long pause, and Radha brought his right thumb towards his teeth; but he heard his brother’s voice break into a laugh, the way it did in the bedroom, in the dark, when he made a joke about their father.
‘Manju. Manju,’ he said, pressing the phone so hard to his body that his earlobe grew hot. ‘How is Navi Mumbai, tell me everything. Tell me, tell me.’
Closing his eyes, Radha sensed from the words, from their tentativeness, that Manju was looking around to make sure Javed was not listening in.
‘Manju, you’re mad. Don’t think about doing it. Don’t think about going back to that man in Chembur. Stay with Javed in Navi Mumbai. Stay there for two or three years. Listen to your older brother for once.’
Silence on the other end of the phone; down on the floor Radha’s cousins kept licking raagi from their fingers. Blocking them out, Radha concentrated on what he had to tell his brother.
‘Manju, I’ve been thinking about you every day, every day. Manju, I know what your problem is. Manju: you always liked pain and thought you had to bear it for our sake. Remember when you broke your thumb and kept batting? Don’t do it again.’
He was aware that Manju was now talking about their father, about his health, so Radha shouted:
‘His health? I hope his balls fall off, I hope his fingers fall off, I hope he goes blind, I hope he has cancer on his tongue, I hope he is sent to some mental hospital where they beat him once a day.’
Radha was aware that on the other end of the line, his brother was asking him if he had gone mad, and so he shouted again:
‘No. No. I won’t go mad if I talk like this about that man, I will go mad if I do not talk like this about that man.’
Radha looked at his cousins, gorging themselves with the messy raagi, their
lips stained, their eyes dazed by country carbohydrates, and he said:
‘Manju, Revanna Uncle here says he knows where our mother is. He says she’s alive. She’s still in Mumbai, Manju. Ten years ago she sent Revanna Uncle a letter asking how you and I were – he showed it to me. There’s an address on it in Virar. She could still be alive. Maybe I can go to her and ask her for some money? No. She never wrote after that. No? Why not? You’re right, Manju, you’re right. Either she’s dead, or if she’s alive, she doesn’t want us, and we don’t want her, either. But I do want to go back to cricket, Manju. It’s all I’m good for. Listen: I think I know what is wrong with my backlift. I’ve been practising here in the fields. We have to reimburse Anand Mehta his 75,000 rupees, and then he’ll let me play again. If you do go back, will you tell them all to give me another chance to play for Mumbai?’
•
A coconut palm grew right outside Tommy Sir’s building in Kalanagar: it was time for it to be culled of its fruit before they fell on passers-by, and the man from South India who did the work each year was at it again. Stripped to the waist, secured to the tree by a cord around his middle and another around his legs, he had climbed up with a curved knife to hack at the nuts, which rained down on the footpath like artillery. Done with his work, the man wiped his face and glistening torso with a cloth, and rewarded himself: slashing open the final coconut on the tree, he threw his head back, raised the coconut high, and drank its shining water. It was like a tableau of triumphant completion.
Tommy Sir sighed, let the curtain cover his window, and went back to his desk.
A waste-basket next to the desk was stuffed with what remained of a torn manila folder; now he continued the business of tearing up his unfinished notes on the third battle of Panipat. The geological watercolours had already been taken away by the trash collector this morning. He remembered that he had to call the Jehangir Art Gallery to cancel his show.
Manjunath Kumar was gone, and his life’s work as a cricket scout was finished. He had emailed his editors at the Mumbai Sun asking that his column be terminated. They said that ‘Some Boys Rise, Some Boys Fall’ would continue, with or without him – they owned the rights. Pramod Sawant would write it from now on.
Selection Day Page 24
