On the negative side — Mehta sighed, and turned the lights off — whereas, a year ago, the father of these two geniuses was crazy in a basically good way, now he was becoming crazy in basically the other way.
‘What’s wrong?’ Asha asked, squinting. Turning the lights on in the bedroom, her husband had gone to stand by the window and watch the happy boats below them. The truth was, Anand Mehta also had his doubts about the visionary cricket sponsorship programme — doubts which were rekindled on the first of each month, when Mohan Kumar turned up at his office and looked at the white envelope in Mehta’s hand which held that month’s cheque. Because Kumar’s eyes had in them what Anand Mehta called a ‘pre-liberalization stare’, an intensity of gaze common in people of the lower class before 1991, when the old socialist economy was in place, and which you found these days only in communists, terrorists, and Naxalites: the wrathful gaze of those who could not possess things, but only waste them. What he saw in that mad father’s eyes was not milk and honey for his sons: it was fire.
•
My Appa is once again a magician! — and I want the whole world to know this. If he promises something, anything, that thing will come true! Can your father do that? Or your father?
The anticipation began well before the last day of the month, when Manju would start tugging on his father’s shirt and ask, ‘Is it time? Is it time?’ And then, on the first day of the new month, the Younger Asset went with Mohan Kumar to Mr Anand Mehta’s office in Nariman Point, waiting in the lobby while a clerk brought the money in a white envelope and counted it out; then the Younger Asset returned with his father by train to Dahisar and walked with him to the bank and eavesdropped as he expounded to the branch manager on developments in the gold and real-estate markets.
The truth was, Mohan Kumar’s magic seemed to be growing more powerful by the day. Calling the two boys in for their medical check-up one morning — Radha, as usual, quiescent; Manju, as usual, squirming and complaining as his father examined his genitals — Mohan said:
‘Neither of my sons loves me anymore. Even when I give them a new home to live in.’
New home? Manju gaped. He ran to his father and embraced him.
Mohan Kumar had finally been able to sell that piece of family land in Alur, and Anand Mehta’s loan of 50,000 rupees was in a fixed deposit in Canara Bank, and they had been saving two thousand rupees, month after month, for over a year. All of which meant, ‘my two sons who have always doubted your own father, that …’
•
Manju ran screaming at the black Dahisar river. He went bullocking down the bridge. There was always a group of unemployed young men lounging about here, listening to a cell-phone radio. They smoked and watched the crazy boy.
‘Boy!’
‘Mad boy, come here. Why are you shouting up and down the bridge?’
With a sweet smile, hands behind his back, Manju walked up to them. ‘I’m not mad, I’m Radha Kumar’s brother. My father has made lots of money and now we’re going to leave third-class people like you and move to a first-class place like Chembur.’
They chased; he ran.
And two mornings later, it all came true.
Mohan Kumar, breeder of champions, had walked over the river, and through the WELCOME TO OUR HOME arch, holding three chrome-plated keys upright, displaying them first to the politicians of the arch, to let them know he was escaping their clutches for good, and then to his neighbours, one by one, while he said: ‘Did you laugh at me when I said I’d be famous, Ramnath? I think you did. You definitely did — didn’t you, Girish?’
Done with such taunts, Mohan Kumar offered a few words of valedictory wisdom to the inhabitants of the Shastrinagar slum.
‘Age sixteen to eighteen is the danger zone. Kambli and Sachin, both were talented. But only one became a legend. Why? Everything is falling to pieces in this country. Everything. Boys are taking drugs. Boys are driving cars. Boys are shaving.’
Some of the neighbours had brought along their sons and their cricket bats for Mohan Kumar to bless: perhaps God’s grace was contagious.
Only old Ramnath’s mood was sour. Standing in the window of his hut, apart from the rest of the crowd, pressing clothes with his coal-fired iron, he grumbled:
‘Gulli-Danda is the real game of skill. Cricket? Cricket was brought here by the Britishers to entrap us.’
Mohan Kumar smiled.
Ramnath continued. ‘Indians should play Indian sports. Kho-Kho, Kabbadi, buffalo-racing in the monsoons.’
Mohan Kumar began to laugh: it was the loudest laugh he had had since getting on the train to Mumbai.
‘Pack up,’ he told his boys.
Old Sharadha was not told to pack up. They would have a domestic servant in the new place. They were that kind of people now, the kind of people who hired other people.
Chheda Nagar was not just any suburb: in its heart stood a Subramanya temple, a satellite of the shrine of the thousand-year-old God of Cricket in the Western Ghats, and for a decade the three Kumars had gone there by local train to pray and to consecrate new bats, gloves and pads. Once they moved to Chheda Nagar, they could visit the God of Cricket, or at least a reflection of Him, every morning.
Nor was the Tattvamasi Housing Society, Chheda Nagar, just any housing society.
Only when their father held open the wooden door bearing the nameplate ‘B.B. Balasubramaniam’ (the landlord who had sucked 40,000 rupees out of them as a security deposit), and told them to go in, Radha first, did the boys start to believe it. Manju entered, touching the wall with both hands. Can this really be our new home? Overnight, they had become the kind of people who had a working air-conditioner, a big grey fridge, and a largely automatic washing machine. A wooden cupboard just for cricketing gear, equipment, food supplements and antibiotics. Attached to it, a full-length mirror, so they could rehearse their strokes at any time of day or night.
‘This is the reason I picked the Tattvamasi Building.’ Mohan Kumar opened a window, and pointed to something down below. Standing on either side of their father, the boys saw a little courtyard in between the concrete back wall of their housing society and the brick front wall of the neighbouring building. ‘Find your bats, pray, and go. First practice in our new home.’
So, ten minutes after they had taken possession of their new flat, the two boys were ordered out of it. From the window, Mohan Kumar waited for his sons to start using that beautiful brick wall.
But life, of course, can never be perfect. For four nights after they had moved in to the new home, when Mohan turned on their television, he and his sons found themselves witnessing the birth of a new Young Lion.
A star rises on the horizon: not in the city, the traditional nursery of cricketing wizardry, but across the creek, in the suburb of Navi Mumbai. Here, in Vashi, they gather every evening inside the Adil Housing Society to see a handsome young man practise while his father bowls at him. Is this youngster, as some believe, the best batsman Mumbai has produced in the last fifty years?
A stylish left-hander in the David Gower mould, Javed Ansari, a fifteen-year-old student of the Ali Weinberg School in Bandra, has got Mumbai’s sporting cognoscenti excited by his graceful strokeplay. He has already scored four centuries, six half centuries and two double centuries this year. Cricket is in his blood: Javed is a nephew of Ranji Trophy middle-order star Imtiaz Ansari, who now represents Yorkshire county in England. In addition, his father, a textbook importer in Vashi, once donned the flannels for Aligarh University and has been a cricket commentator for the BBC Hindi service.