‘Yes.’
‘Anything else?’
‘No. That’s all he ever does with me. With you?’
‘The same. Just examines my balls and cock. And lets me go. But I hate it.’
‘I hate it too.’
‘Manju,’ Radha said. ‘We’re going to be rich soon. You know this, right?’
He reached over and shook his brother. Radha had been, since the start of time, chief consoler and psychiatrist to the world’s second-best, but most intelligent, and most complex, young cricketer.
‘Manju, you know the first thing I’m going to do with the money? Buy you a bat. And you know from where? You know from where?’
Radha gave his little brother a good shake.
‘You do know from where.’
Every Sunday Radha took his brother to Dhobi Talao, the city’s sporting equipment district, full of shops glutted with fresh willow and lipstick-red match-quality balls covered in crackly cellophane. There the two boys went window-shopping from Metro Cinema all the way to a back lane, where, below a balcony with a red paper star from last Christmas and in between a store that sold golden sporting trophies and another that sold hard liquor in 180ml ‘quarters’, like the starting and finishing points of the average Indian male’s trajectory in life, was an open door that exhaled fragrant Kashmiri and English willow: Alfredo Athletic Centre. Some men are hand-made by God, Manju felt, and some are machine-made — Mr Alfredo, for sure, was machine-cut. With waxed moustache, black bowtie, and the halogen lights shining off his bald head, Mr Alfredo would kindly open a glass case to show the brothers a row of his best imported bats; kindly let them gaze at the best imported bats and discuss the best imported bats, and on some days, when in the kindliest of kindly moods, even let them touch the best imported bats. The moment they got that sponsorship cash, Radha Krishna Kumar and the world’s second-best batsman would wrap it in a handkerchief and run to Dhobi Talao and — and —?
‘SG Sunny Tonny.’ Radha tickled his brother. ‘Genuine English Willow! Wombat Select! World Cup Edition Yuvraj Singh Signature Edition! I’m taking your best imported, Kindly Alfredo — or your moustache!’
•
Closing the door of his home behind him so his sons could sleep, Mohan Kumar looked around, made sure he was alone, and then, by the light of a fluorescent streetlamp, slit open an envelope he had brought from the bank. The first instalment of the sponsorship money. Five thousand rupees in fresh cash. Rubbing the crisp notes between his fingers, he mentally divided them into three piles. One for the boys’ present (cricket equipment), one for the boys’ future (savings bank), and one pile (for this was a man who honours his contracts) for God, to be dropped into His collection box at the Chheda Nagar temple. He put the cash back in its envelope, leaned against the door of his home, and looked up at the night sky. He dialled on a phantom phone, waited till Lord Subramanya picked up in heaven, and then, both imitating and mocking the way in which the Indian elite speak English, told the God of Cricket: ‘Thank you soooooooo much, thaaaaaaaaank you s’much, Thank you soooo …’
•
Just inside the forest stood an old arch made of red laterite. No one knew who built this arch; but this kind of stone was not found anywhere nearby, and some people remembered that there was once a statue of a king on top of it. After sunset, people avoided this arch, because elephants and wild boar were known to sleep under it; but one boy was brave enough to go near it at night, and he found the spot loud with bullfrogs and louder with the twinkling of the millions of stars against which the arch etched its black shape. Sitting down on the forest floor, he looked up at all the stars, and felt himself a boy apart from all other boys in the world, resplendent, an uncrowned Adam.
Mohan Kumar had grown up in the poorest end of a poor taluk: Ratnagirihalli in Alur, in the foothills of the Western Ghats. As a boy, each morning at four, he stood on the back of an open lorry that took him to a coffee estate. There he signed his name in a long green register. Then he cleared twigs, dropped sunna from his forefingers in white circles around the plants, and watered the bushes, taking more care of the Arabica, and less care of the Robusta. At ten o’clock, the man supervising the estate paid him three and a half rupees, and he climbed back onto the open lorry. There was school for the rest of the day. He learnt to read and write. This was something new for his family. His dowry went up. Sex: with a prostitute out in the fields; marriage: to a girl from his own caste; employment: to the landowner who had hired his father; pilgrimage: to Kukke Subramanya, in the mountains of the Western Ghats, as soon as his wife fell pregnant. All this was as it had been for generations in his family.
But one morning a neighbour yelled, ‘Who is going to pay for the window?’
The window that had been broken by Mohan Kumar’s son in the most recent game of cricket.
Mohan looked at the broken glass and remembered what a boy in Mumbai had done to the windows in his neighbourhood. A boy named Sachin Tendulkar.
Now Mohan Kumar stood by passing trains and trucks and saw them in a different light. He observed highways and mighty things in a different light. He saw the sun, high over the peaks of the Western Ghats, charge from cloud to cloud like a soul in transmigration.
Mohan, Mohan — how people laughed. Why Mumbai? Take your son to Bangalore to learn cricket — it’s closer, cheaper!
Bombay it had to be. Mohan Kumar put his wife and Radha and his second son Manju into a bus and then into two trains before they descended into VT station in Mumbai to take a third train to his cousin’s small tin-roofed hut in a slum in Dahisar that was famous for its mechanical flour-mill, which ground wheat early morning and red chillies late morning. ‘Anything I touch in Mumbai turns into powder like that flour-mill makes,’ Mohan wrote to his brother Revanna back in the village. He had tried photocopying books, binding them, and selling them near the station; the police arrested him and kept him in lockup for a night. Ten lakh books are sold in black in Mumbai every day and he has to be put in lockup! Big Thief Walks Free. Small Thief Gets Caught. A year later he discovered his wife was fucking a Christian man near the train station. He waited for her, and bolted the door behind her. Never tell your mother lies, never tell your wife secrets. That was a golden proverb, why had he ever forgotten it? He made up for it with his hands. Nothing more than a man’s natural right, but next morning the social workers — six of them — barged in and told him to stop hitting his wife, or else go to jail again. Can you believe what they do to a man in this city? One night he returned home, and found that she had run away with his money and his honour. So he had nothing left; he lay in bed, and stared at the ceiling, and thought, I should just kill myself.
‘Get up, Mohan,’ a voice said. Though there was no one else in the room, he heard fingers snapping in the dark.
‘Why?’ he asked.
The invisible fingers snapped a second time: ‘Because I say so. Don’t you know who I am?’
Destiny, I suppose, he thought, and rose, and breathed in the crisp, energizing air of crisis.
Taking the bus all the way to a spot in Bandra where one could observe the new skyscrapers of Prabhadevi and Lower Parel, Mohan Kumar clenched a fist and held it over the kingdoms of Mumbai; after closing an eye to perfect the illusion, he brought his fist down on the city.
Except to grow a thin black moustache — a ‘statement’, he declared, of protest against his ill luck with women — he never complained; he never again looked back; he simply transferred all his hopes in life onto young Radha Kumar.