Before Manju could say ‘Shut up’, a glass broke.
A waiter brought a broom and swept the shards towards the black beam. ‘We don’t want all that glass here,’ Manju protested.
Suddenly smoke filled the bar. The manager, performing a ritual that was either religious or fumigational, circulated a black pot filled with burning coals around his table, and then proceeded to walk with the smoking pot from table to table, starting with Manju and Radha’s. Once a Quarter Bar decided to be obnoxious to its patrons, there was no end to it.
The western side of Santa Cruz railway station led towards good residential areas in well-planned blocks; the eastern side was a sea of people.
Coming out of the bar, and re-entering the sea, the brothers were confronted by a beggar. A woman without legs sat on a wooden platform; she began pleading for money, but stopped when she saw how Radha was walking, and sighed.
After all these years, Manju could not get used to the sight of his handsome brother limping, his grotesque left foot in its custom-made shoe. As they left the bar, he turned his eyes away from Radha and pretended to look at the skywalk. The pedestrian bridge, which stood on giant columns down the centre of the road, had a glossy metal frame covered by a glowing blue canopy, and looked like a giant UFO, stretched, partly dismantled, and abandoned over Santa Cruz. The lights of the traffic illuminated the underside of the bridge, and Manju could read the posters stuck to the columns: ‘One call can change your life. Phone Rita Mam or Sanjay Sir. Rs 25,000–40,000 per month. Guaranteed.’ At least half of the posters were upside down.
Making their way through beggars, drunks, commuters and vendors, the brothers turned towards the Milan Subway, one of the underpasses that led into the western side of Santa Cruz.
Now they passed by an open blacksmith’s workshop, the men in masks cutting metal with oxyacetylene flames, raw sparks flying out at passers-by. Manju seized his brother to shield him from the sparks. He was only five foot four inches tall, but he still had the strongest forearms in all of Bombay. He wanted to protect Radha from all of it: the pavements filled with craters, the cars driven by drunks, the cars without headlights, the unpruned tree with the sharp branches ready to fall, the maiming carelessness of life in Mumbai . . . but the sparks flew too thick. The autorickshaw driver had been on his cell phone, eight years ago, as he turned his vehicle over Radha Krishna’s left foot.
‘Manju.’
‘What?’
Radha thumped him on the back with his fist.
‘Scientist. My little scientist.’
Manju winced: he knew what was coming next. Radha would tease him for still being a virgin.
‘Little brother, have you ever tried . . . group sex? Just wondering.’
‘Yes, big brother,’ Manju replied. ‘I once used both hands.’
Radha Krishna Kumar resisted; but then gave up, and howled with laughter.
‘Everything was wasted, Manju. Your balls and your brains.’
They walked and limped as one body, Manju with his arm around Radha, beige holding on to blue.
They were now right beside the Western Expressway. The cars sped up a ramp towards the airport, giving the brothers the impression that they, in contrast, were descending into a nether-city. Honest work continued around them: shops that sold gravestones engraved in Urdu and Arabic emitted the high-pitched noise of drilling and a fine marble mist that enveloped the brothers. Manju knew that Radha lived somewhere nearby, because he had once asked for a loan to start his own marble-cutting shop. Radha had not met their father in a decade.
When they came out of the Milan Subway an old man in a suit and tie shouted at them from the other side of the road.
‘You!’ he said. ‘You two – Egypt shall slobber about like a drunk with vomit on his shirt. It is written.’
Radha had apparently seen the old man before.
‘He’s a Telugu Christian from Dharavi. He preaches near the pipeline in Vakola, even when there’s no one there. Maybe he wants to convert the petrol.’
Manju frowned.
‘Who is Egypt?’
‘Egypt,’ said Radha, who had gone to a church for a year after his accident, ‘means someone rich and powerful.’
‘So why is he yelling at us?’
The old man kept shouting; a passing bike-rider slowed and said something to him; then a breeze wafted the smell of shit everywhere: the uninterpretable madness of the urban night surrounded the brothers Kumar.
Listening to the crazy preacher across the road, Manju began to laugh. ‘Though I am not at home in the world,’ he thought, ‘I am at home in the street.’ A proverb – a new one. He felt he could walk through Mumbai like this forever.
But when he turned he saw Radha biting his fingernails.
Suddenly he found he couldn’t bear Radha’s company – he wished he hadn’t come.
‘I am not normal people.’ He should just tell Sofia that the next time she asked him to meet Radha. ‘I want to be alone on my birthday, as I want to be alone every single day.’ His excellence, his uniqueness, was not in cricket, not in batting, he had discovered – but in withdrawing. He could pull back from human beings like the ocean. That was his contract with God: Manjunath Kumar would never have to compromise with another person – man or woman – would never again have to do for him or her the things he had done for his father. Never. If the whole world vanished tomorrow, Manjunath Kumar would barely notice. Didn’t Sofia know all this already? Hadn’t she said, more than once – ‘You are the Einstein of being alone?’ So let me retain my one excellence: let me be alone!
But when he looked up at the sky, he saw a white moon, as bright and powerful as a man’s fist, over Mumbai.
It took his breath away: a sight to remind one of a poet.
‘Kattale,’ Manju said, and held his palm over his right eye, as if to block the sound and smell of his city. Yet behind his mask, he began smiling, thinking of the surprise he had in store for Radha.
Lowering and raising his palm, Manju teased his brother, as if they were playing a children’s game, and now Radha permitted himself a smile; for in each of the Kumars had been renewed, by this rare proximity to the other’s body, the belief that their shared destiny had not yet been stolen from them.
‘This is what I brought you to see,’ Manju told his brother.
Behind a ten-foot-tall steel-ringed fence, a floodlit asphalt courtyard was criss-crossed with yellow lines, the kind of place where you saw American children playing basketball in the movies, except here, under the white lights, boys were practising cricket. Dozens of teenagers, padded and helmeted: either sitting on the benches, or standing in the nets while grown men pitched tennis balls at them.
Radha and Manju pressed their faces to the steel-ringed fence.
‘This is what I’m going to do from now on. It’s part of the severance package.’
‘Looks like a cricket factory.’
‘They’ve just opened it. SwadeshSymphony owns it. You come here after school, and train for the IPL. It’s open till eleven. You pay this much for three months, then you work with coaches on your batting or bowling.’ Manju put his fingers through the steel rings and tried to shake the fence. ‘They’re paying me eighty-five thousand, and bonuses for finding new talent.’
Manju’s eyes reacted with excitement, as always, to the white glare and dark shadows of floodlights: he wanted to get out there and hold a bat. And hit a six, the biggest ever hit in history.
Radha turned to his brother.
‘You’re going to become a coach? You’re going to end up as Tommy Sir?’
‘Don’t mock him,’ Manju said. ‘He’s dead.’
But Radha was no longer mocking anyone; there was emotion in his voice. He put his fingers through the metal rings of the fence.
‘Why don’t you get married?’ he said.
Radha saw that furrow on Manju’s brow, the flame-like mark that inclined left, and which indicated that his younger brother was eith
er angry or ashamed or (once upon a time) thinking.
‘No,’ Manju said. ‘Whatever I am, I’m not a fraud.’
‘What the fuck are you then? Are you sure you don’t like women? You’ll die and go to heaven and even God won’t know if you were a homo or not. When we’re walking, do you know that if you see any two people holding hands you stare? If two donkeys are happy together you stop and watch. I don’t know what you really want, but I know it all seems a big mystery to you: two things of any kind being together. It’s not a mystery, it’s very simple. Get married. There are always women chasing you. Why, I don’t know. Even better: you know what you should do? Catch a train right now and go to Navi Mumbai. That’s what you’d do, if you ever got drunk, and that’s why you don’t have the guts to drink.’
There was a loud sound of wood cracking: one of the boys at the practice nets had broken his bat.
‘You really sound like him now,’ Manju said.
‘He still talks?’ Radha asked. ‘I thought he was a vegetable.’
‘He’s stronger as a vegetable than you and I are as men. He still tries to hit me sometimes, would you believe? Texted me ten times today. “How much did they give you as severance, how much?” Ten times, though he can barely move his hand now.’
A son’s true opinion of his parents is written on the back of his teeth. Radha, who had gnashed his just thinking about Mohan Kumar so often that his upper incisors had moved from the pressure, opening up a gap between them and ruining his once perfect smile (one more thing he blamed his father for), bit his teeth.
‘Why are you here, then?’ he shouted at Manju, when he could again talk. ‘Why do you meet me once a year? Stay with the vegetable on your birthday.’
Radha could see there was no hope for his brother, who seemed to desire men at one moment and women at another, and lived in between his two desires, like a hunted animal – an animal which had finally run to their father for protection.
‘Why are you here?’ Radha asked again. ‘Why?’
‘I’m not here,’ Manju said, gripping the fence. ‘You’re not here.’
But he thought of what his brother had said a few minutes ago: take the train and go to Navi Mumbai and meet Javed. Was it still that simple?
Repression may be a red-hot distortion of the truth, but what follows it, acceptance, when a man finally examines his heart and says, ‘This is what I must have been, partly or in whole,’ is hardly liberation. Nothing much changes because you have stopped lying to yourself. A moment of relief, yes, the sense of shedding some terrible weight – but it passes. Manju had long ago accepted – it had occurred to him one evening in the changing room of the Wankhede stadium, after a particularly fine innings – that what he had known for Javed must have been what the film songs called love, and that his fear of this fact had driven him away from Navi Mumbai and back to cricket. After he wet his hair in front of the mirror and combed it with his fingers, Manju stretched his neck first to the right and then to the left, and accepted that he had been, and was still, attracted to men as much as to women: but knowing and accepting all of this had meant, in the end, not much. The fire of denial had set into the ice of acknowledgement. For himself, for his lies and cowardice, Manju had scorn – (although what else could he have done back then?) – but he had much more scorn for a world that had never shown him a clear path to love or to security.
This was enough, he sometimes felt, this anger was enough. A man could feed on it for the rest of his life.
Except that sometimes he saw the moon, and sometimes he heard this laughter in his head: U-ha. U-ha. Even now, he remembered that first morning when he really noticed Javed – was it a morning, or an afternoon? – sitting in that circle of stupid cricketers, the only one unenslaved and unmastered, with his beak nose and his black-panther limbs and the sickle-shaped dimples emerging when he grinned, like the most gorgeous thing created.
O thou Tiger-King!
Manju controlled his breathing. He steadied his pulse. He did all the things he had learnt to do as a professional sportsman, and yet his heart beat fast. Still, with every step he took he was more in control of himself – he remembered that Javed was in the newspaper again – and now it seemed eleven more years might easily flow before they met. If they ever met again.
Standing by his side, Radha tried to read his brother’s mind. Why did this fellow leave Javed to return to cricket – did he imagine he would save everyone by coming back? Radha remembered what his father used to say: a snake would have to rescue his family from Javed Ansari. But the snake that bit Manjunath had come from within his own heart. He was meant to be the hero of the story, and look what he has become.
Coward!
A whistle blew from the court: cricket practice was over for the day. The boys in white were already leaving with their gear, and workers went about the field, picking up rubbish. One carried a plastic bucket with him, and he splashed the asphalt floor with water.
‘I told you to throw your wicket on Selection Day.’ Radha raised his voice. ‘I told you. If you had done that, I wouldn’t have got mad, I wouldn’t have hit Deennawaz, and they would have given me a second chance to play cricket. And you could have become an engineer, a scientist, you could have gone to America by now. You could have sent me money from there, instead of—’
He threw Manju’s envelope to the ground.
‘You’re drunk, Radha. Eleven years ago, I had no choice. How many times have I told you?’
‘Then have children. And make sure they have a choice. You know I can’t.’
Children? While Radha bent down unsteadily to pick up the envelope, Manju saw in his mind’s eye, as he had so many times over the years, an old image from science television: a strand of red-and-blue human DNA, turning nonstop, like a strip of unwinding plastic, the twisted strip of DNA that we inherit from our fathers. And on this red-and-blue helix was inscribed the message from Mohan Kumar to his sons and their sons: that life, if it is to be lived, is to be lived but badly; is to be, if it is to be anything, but an agreement with hell; and can have for fire and light, if it is to have either, but rage and remorse. Joining a thumb and index finger through a steel ring of the fence, Manju caught the strand of DNA in his fingers and stopped it from turning: no more cricketers.
‘No.’
‘Tommy Sir.’ Radha laughed. ‘Have some self-respect, little brother. Do anything else. Beg. But don’t go back into cricket. Don’t become Tommy Sir.’
Manju took a deep breath.
‘I told you, don’t mock him. He’s gone. Tommy Sir had his stroke right after they picked me for Mumbai. He was hiking in the mountains, they say, and when they carried him to hospital he kept saying, I have to live till I see that boy bat for Mumbai. That would have been my one satisfaction: for him to watch me fail with his own eyes.’
Stepping back from the metal fence, Manju cupped his palms, as if he were holding an invisible bowl. He looked straight down into it.
Radha still held on to the fence.
‘But he was not the one, Manju. Not Tommy Sir. He was never the one to blame.’
Manju stood frozen in his strange gesture. Radha guessed that his younger brother, excited by the sound and smell of live cricket, was imagining himself holding a cricket helmet again. Radha ground his teeth. The boy had just been fired – and here he was dreaming of getting back into the game. Every man must martyr himself to something: but we have martyred ourselves to this mediocrity.
Freeing one hand from the metal rings, Radha pinched Manju in the right shoulder and said:
‘I want to fight you again. Till one of us falls. Right here.’
‘No.’
Radha pinched harder.
‘No.’
And harder and harder: until Manju, at last, shouted –
‘Yes!’
Acknowledgements
Over a period of five years, my friend Ramin Bahrani read and edited several drafts of this novel. In the jungle of my life, he has been
the white tiger – the only one who ever believed.
Makarand Waingankar, the dean of Bombay cricket writers, shared his knowledge of the game with me over several months in 2011 and 2012. Thank you, Mac.
Ramachandra Guha, Jason Zweig, Malcolm Knox and Jeremy Kirk read early versions of this book and encouraged me to persist with it, as did my editors, Ravi Mirchandani, V. Karthika and Andrea Canobbio, and my wonderful agent, Karolina Sutton. I am grateful to each one of them – but above all to Dr Guha, who always found the time to write back.
Girish Shahane, Naresh Fernandes, and Jehangir Sorabjee (in Mumbai), Vikas Swarup and Sudeep Paul (in New Delhi), Shalini Perera and James Payten (in Sydney) have helped me more than I deserved to be helped.
Over the oceans that separate us, I send my thanks to an old friend, Mark Greif – and to a new one: two-year-old Simone Greif, who will surely grow up to be every bit as compassionate and intelligent as her father. Some families, I am forced to conclude, work.
When I finished Selection Day, I knew for whom I had written it – my mother, Usha Mohan Rau, who died on 20 January 1990.
Also by Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger
Between the Assassinations
Last Man in Tower
ARAVIND ADIGA was born in 1974 in Madras (now Chennai) and grew up in Mangalore in the south of India. He was educated at Columbia University in New York and Magdalen College, Oxford. His articles have appeared in publications including the New Yorker, the Sunday Times, the Financial Times, and the Times of India. His first novel, The White Tiger, won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2008. His second novel, Last Man in Tower, was published in 2011.
First published 2016 by Picador
This electronic edition published 2016 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-5098-0650-8
Copyright © Aravind Adiga 2016
Selection Day Page 27
