Fine, he told his mother, I’ve given up mid-town Manhattan for you — but don’t expect me, please, to settle for just another stockbroker’s life. And so, for over a decade now, while his ageing father continued to sell securities from his Nariman Point office, Anand Mehta, from a large annexe in that office filled with computers, far-sighted business journals, and sacred piles of The Economist magazine, had been scheming, speculating, and squandering his family’s money. He bought big in Thane and Navi Mumbai and sold small; he had been cheated by an Englishman in Dubai and two Lithuanians in Abu Dhabi; and he had dabbled in and been dabbled out of Bollywood.
He licked his wounds; he recovered.
With a childless man’s passion for the crucial battles of World War Two, Mehta opened a Reader’s Digest Illustrated History and read again about Operation Barbarossa. He drank Scotch, and drove down to a two-star hotel near Gamdevi that was melodious with moonlighting college girls. In the mornings he washed his face and made new plans.
Movies gone, real estate gone: so what the fuck is left in Mumbai?
Two years ago, over a long breakfast at the Willingdon Club, Anand Mehta had heard from a ‘top’ friend, a member of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, a close analysis of a celebrated India versus Sri Lanka one-dayer from the 1990s. It was a fixed match, the BCCI man said. ‘You remember that ludicrous last over, don’t you? Now you understand why the two of them batted the way they did. I don’t know if you noticed back then, but there were endless stoppages in the final overs. Why? Simple. To let one of the physiotherapists take messages to the batsmen, warning them what would happen if they didn’t throw the game, as they had agreed to do — because the physio, you see, is the person no one ever suspects.’
‘So the match really was fixed?’
‘Phixed. Which is to say, it was done in our dismal, derivative, scatterbrained South Asian way, which leaves everything to the last minute and makes life so much more exciting.’
‘Wow. This is brilliant. Fucking brilliant. This is cricket!’
Flushed with this ‘inside’ look into the game everyone else in India only thought they knew, Mehta suggested that the Board of Control for Cricket in India (seriously North Korean name, that) start retailing a DVD box-set: Golden Moments of Match-Fixing, only 1,999 rupees, for Diwali, so that Indians could finally learn the truth about their most cherished national memories.
One day Anand Mehta wanted to do it himself — ‘phix’ a match — an international match.
In the bar, Mehta drank beer after beer, savouring the ocean breeze, the camaraderie of the students with their college badges around their necks, and the hint, which grew stronger with every sip, that a good life could still be lived in Mumbai.
After a couple of hours, he drove to his home on the eleventh floor of Maker Tower ‘J’ Block at nine thirty that evening. His parents were asleep.
The windows in the living room were open, and the sea breeze was divine — every one of the six rooms in the flat that his father had bought, even the bathrooms, enjoyed an unimpeded ocean view — but Asha, his wife, had to ruin the effect by insisting that they review ‘this business of cricket sponsorship’ on its one-year anniversary.
Madness. That was what she thought. Giving all this money to boys from the slums. Had he forgotten the cricket academy racket he was running in Azad Maidan, wasn’t that earning them a steady income every summer?
‘These two are sensational, you should see them,’ Mehta protested. ‘Only fat rich boys came to the academy.’
Over dessert Asha’s mood always became worse.
What if the two sensations ran away from Mumbai with the money and went back to their village? Did Anand take any guarantee? This was exactly the kind of trusting and neurotic nature that had ruined every one of her husband’s business deals.
And Asha hardly had to remind him of the time — before their marriage — when he actually gave money to a school for slum children, did she? Neurotic Man.
When Madame Mehta finally allowed him a chance to speak, Anand — with a Gotcha smile — pointed his dirty ice-cream spoon at her.
‘You know what it means in India when a woman calls her husband neurotic?’
Although she knew better, his wife asked, ‘What?’
‘“My husband’s neurotic” means, he doesn’t like my mother. “He’s psychotic” means, he doesn’t like me. Am I right or am I usual right? Listen: this is why I’ve made a good deal this time. In fact it’s a great deal. Because they’re honest.’
As he did when excited, he smoothed out his moustache with his left hand.
‘Mumbai is a dying city, true. But there is one thing that it will always have. One beautiful thing. Integrity. The integrity of the Bombay common man, known and celebrated throughout India, deeper than granite, the true bedrock of the city. True?’
Perhaps, Asha nodded, with her mouth full of ice-cream. Perhaps.
‘One thing I knew, the moment I saw the chutney salesman. He’ll sell his sons if he has to, but he’ll pay me back.’ Using his spoon, Anand drew a rectangle in the air. ‘Guaranteed.’
‘Why do you think people in Mumbai are honest?’ Asha, still non-committal, scraped the bottom of the bowl with her spoon.
She answered her own question.
‘It must be the Parsi influence. We had lots of Parsis once upon a time, and they’re a straightforward people.’
‘No, no, no.’ Anand scraped his own bowl faster, knowing that he was drawing close to the moment of Memsaab’s consent for his continued sponsorship of the two slum boys.
‘It’s the Gujarati influence. We’re an even more straightforward people.’
And now the whole family, even the domestic help busy with the dishes in the kitchen, laughed.
•
From their bedroom, Asha Mehta looked down on the rows of fishing boats buzzing with blue and red electric lights, docked right outside the Maker Towers compound for the 4 a.m. launch into the ocean to gather fish and prawns; as she lay in bed, she heard boisterous male laughter, battery-operated radios playing film songs, bodies splashing in the water, and the tk-tk of wooden prows knocking into one another. Beyond the water, Nariman Point, and beyond it, all of south Mumbai coruscated. Then Anand walked in, a smile on his lips and the future under his armpit: a rolled-up A4 sheet, covered with calculations, which he brought into bed and unfurled against the light. There. He showed Asha the figures for one year’s investment in cricket sponsorship. He had made payments worth 60,000 rupees to the two boys, plus a loan of 50,000 rupees to the father, plus 24,000 rupees to the old scout. In this same period of twelve months, he knew for a fact that the typical marketing contract of a player on the Indian national team had gone up, according to his ‘inside’ connection in the Cricket Board, to between 45,00,000 and 60,00,000 rupees. Radha Kumar had gained two inches in height, four kilos of weight (pure dark muscle); the younger fellow, Manju, had gained only an inch and a half, and three kilos of weight, of which half appeared to have accumulated as pimples. All that was on the positive side of the ledger.