Old Sharadha came in every day to do the cooking. She made chutneys from green mango, lemon and raw guava, and Mohan Kumar tried to sell them. This meant that every day he cycled around Mumbai swallowing insults more pungent than any chutney he took with him; yet every night when he lay down to bed, he could say: ‘Today my son has become a stronger and better batsman.’ Mohan made Radha hold the cricket bat low down on the handle, exactly as Sachin had done. At the age of five he made Radha grow his hair long and pose with the bat for a black-and-white photo exactly as Sachin, Bacchus-haired, had posed at that age. At the age of seven he took Radha by train to Shivaji Park to listen to Ramakant Achrekar, exactly as seven-year-old Sachin had been taken to sit at the great Achrekar’s feet to learn the science of batsmanship.
Around this time, his second son also began to break windows when he was playing cricket.
•
‘Did you see how much money he had with him?’
‘Are you awake? You were snoring.’
‘I was pretending to be asleep. Just like you. Did you see the money?’
‘No. I didn’t see.’
‘Manju, you know what I did find on his cot the other day?’
‘What?’
‘Dirty magazines, Manju. You never saw these magazines?’
‘Don’t lie. Appa has no dirty magazines.’
‘You’re an innocent, Manju.’
Radha sat up in bed; his younger brother was turned away from him.
‘Whatever you’re thinking about, scientist, don’t keep it to yourself. Only girls do that …’
When Manju faced him, his eyes were narrowed, and a furrow cut into his brow, dark and slanting noticeably to the left. Radha remembered that the same flame-like furrow had appeared on their mother’s forehead when she was thinking: it was like a bookmark left there by the woman.
Manju looked at Radha. ‘When you become a famous cricketer and I’m your manager, do I have to give him all your money?’
‘I’ll kill you if you give him my money. It’s just for you and me.’
Radha kicked the body beside him, which kicked back; and each knew what the other meant to say. Let their father become old: they would make him beg for every rupee they gave him.
Every. Single. Rupee!
Both of Mohan Kumar’s sons, too, were becoming entrepreneurs of revenge.
Two years before Selection Day
NINTH STANDARD BEGINS
A fork-tailed black kite wheeled over the wet trees; a rainbow arched over the city. Beneath the circling kite stretched miles and miles of wet trees — banyans, neems, mangoes, gulmohars and palms — whose leaves glistened like ripples in a dark ocean. Rejecting raintrees, palmyrahs and coconut palms, the kite settled on an incongruous wonder, a Christmas pine planted at the highest point in south Mumbai: perched on its crown, the hunter surveyed the city, from Marine Drive to the new towers beyond Pedder Road.
Through ceiling-to-floor windows, Anand Mehta gazed down at the Hanging Gardens of Malabar Hill. Beside him stood a childhood friend, the owner of the windows and the view. Even the bad blood occasioned by their morning meeting, and his friend’s point-blank refusal to join in Anand Mehta’s latest business venture — cricket, two spectacularly talented slumboys, what could go wrong? — was dissolved by the spectacle before the two men. They remembered being young.
Assuring his friend, ‘No worries, mate,’ and inviting him over for dinner — Asha’s home-made strawberry ice-cream! — Mehta left to make the same pitch to another investor in Nariman Point.
He drove down to Chowpatty.
One hand on the steering wheel, he removed his cell phone from his trouser pocket to find that all six new text messages were from Mohan Kumar.
Pls call must talk sons
He scrolled down to the next, which read:
Must talk sons
Before he could read the third, the phone began ringing.
‘I keep sending you updates on my sons, but you never respond, Mr Mehta. There is something I must say …’
‘Mohan Kumar, I am driving. The police are cracking down on cell phones. Please.’
‘No, you must listen to me, Mr Mehta. It is now one year since we started.’
‘As honoured as I am by your involvement in my scheme,’ Anand Mehta looked at the roof of his car, and raised his voice, ‘I cannot pay more. We haven’t seen results yet. Goodbye.’
The first time he met the father of the boys, Anand Mehta was sure he could place the man: an Indian version of that Manhattan bartender you meet sometimes — Mexican, shaved headed, bushy eyebrows, just a touch of Spanish in his accent, who asks if your MacBook Air is thirteen-inch or eleven-inch, and how much memory it has, two gig or four, and who has an expert opinion on every cocktail but will confide with a quiet grin, ‘I never drink, sir,’ and who secretly aspires, one day, to run the Gringo establishment he is now a servant of. Yes, that was this chap, this Mohan Kumar: a Mumbai incarnation of that Mephistophelean Mexican bartender. But guess who owned the bar? Ha Ha. And that is why the deal happened.
But now, as the father’s text messages kept coming, and coming, irritating Anand Mehta so much he had to stop at Chowpatty on the way back, at Café Ideal, to order a beer, he had to fight the feeling that this cricket venture might just possibly be a very stupid idea.
Mehta was not one of those Parsi gentlemen whose Uncle Freddy or Firdaus would any day now be found cold by the nurse inside Cusrow Baug, leaving his nephew a million in the will. If he lost money he bled.
Anand Mehta thought of a friend, the managing director of the Indian branch of a German bank, who knew someone at the construction firm that built the Bandra — Worli Sea Link. This contact had given him a free pass for the Sea Link — lifetime validity. The banker had millions of dollars in his accounts, three homes in Mumbai, a slim mistress in Pali Naka, yet he hoarded one more privilege. Fortune favours those already fortunate.
Mehta’s father had been a stockbroker. There had been a family tradition, handed down from generation to generation, of gently ripping off loyal customers. But Anand had quit that racket: the one known as A Normal Life. Thousands of his generation and social class were still living that normal life: for eight hours a day they sat in their air-conditioned offices in Nariman Point and spoke English to their clients, after which they sat in their air-conditioned cars and spoke Hindi to their drivers, after which they sat at their air-conditioned dinner tables and spoke Gujarati to their mothers. Anand Mehta had been a communist for a semester and a half; but then, changing his politics, he had read Kahlil Gibran and Friedrich Nietzsche; had gone to New York to study business and have an affair with a black New Yorker; had enjoyed life in that meritocratic metropolis, a coliseum of competing nationalities and races (but of all these pulsing ethnicities, one stood out: driven, Anglophone, numerate, and freed by post-colonial entitlement from almost all forms of liberal guilt or introspection — and of this privileged group, Anand Mehta intended to be the most privileged, because he was the one Indian financial analyst who had read Nietzsche); until finally, one long night, he had consumed marijuana in three different forms and stood on a rock by a lake in Central Park and decided to resign his mid-town desk job and confront human potentiality face-to-face in its locus of maximum remaining concentration, which is to say, East, South East, and South Asia. Anand Mehta was going home. The disappointments that await a young Indian in America, alas, are minor compared to the disappointments that await him on his return to India. It hurt Mehta that not a soul in Mumbai — not even his mother, and certainly not his wife — knew what a sacrifice there had been, Manhattan and Central Park given up for Chowpatty and Shitty Park. He summed up his predicament in a recurring mid-morning fantasy: ‘Nuclear war has broken out, Anand. You can save only one city on earth. Choose.’ Anand Mehta saved Mumbai, home of his family and culture, of course — but then flew to New York and unbuttoned his shirt to die with everyone there.