Young Lions spoke to Mr Ansari and found he does not approve of his offspring’s single-minded devotion to the gentleman’s game. ‘Ninth Standard is the hardest year in school. Now is when you have to start studying for the Board Exams.’
‘So you would like to see him do something other than cricket?’
‘Do you think youngsters today will listen to anyone, even their fathers? Javed is hell-bent on playing for Mumbai, and then for India, and no one on earth will stop him.’
YOUNG LIONS
MONDAY 6.30 P.M. REPEATED ON WEDNESDAY
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•
Turning off the television, Mohan Kumar spat on the floor of his new home.
‘Go down there,’ he told his sons, ‘and start practising right now.’
No more long train rides for Manju and Radha; they were now living on the school bus route. Sitting at the back, they startled pedestrians with rude gestures, and fought with their classmates, as the bus wound its way from Chembur towards Carter Road, and into the lane known as ‘Ali’s Education Corner’, slowing as it went past the Karim Ali College of Law, the Karim Ali College of Arts and Sciences, the Karim Ali College of Dental Science, and the Karim Ali College of Medical and Alternative Medical Sciences, before it stopped at the Ali Weinberg International School.
But the moment the Kumars got down from the bus, they found a Honda City parked outside the school, as if it had been waiting just for them. A pair of legs emerged from the open door, while the rest of the body, visible in silhouette behind the dark window, reclined on the seat and composed a message on a cell phone.
Mr ‘J.A.’, the new ‘Young Lion’.
The previous evening, as Radha and Manju lay in their new beds, Mohan Kumar, while reintroducing his sons to the three principal dangers on their path to glory — premature shaving, pornography and car-driving — had added one more. This Mohammedan (a left-hander!) had every advantage that Mohan’s two sons lacked: his father had FDs and online stock-trading accounts; his father had probably built a home-gym for his son; and he had that thing you needed more than a rich father in Mumbai — he had a godfather. Wasn’t his uncle Imtiaz Ansari a Ranji Trophy man, and wouldn’t the combination of money and influence (which is how things work in this world, my sons) make this left-handed boy irresistible on Selection Day, which was coming, which was coming?
When Radha saw that silhouette inside the car, his heart contracted: he felt again that suspicion which now gnawed at him that despite everything his father said, his contract with God was not fool-proof, and he might not prove to be the best batsman in the world — and so he sweated; but what went through Manju at the sight of that dim body inside the car was a buzz — the same charge of electricity an ornithologist feels when he catches sight of a rare migratory species of bird.
Open-mouthed, the brothers stared at the silhouette inside the Honda City, until Radha said ‘Manju’, and Manju said ‘Radha Krishna’, and the spell was broken, and the two were free to walk again.
•
It was on the morning that Javed Ansari tried to steal Sofia from them that the brothers Kumar finally did something about him.
Sofia, the spotty-necked one, the girl with the car and driver, the girl whose father owned a big chemical plant in Thane, had come to Thambi’s that morning with the two brothers.
Thambi’s Fast Food Hut, just a few feet away from the Ali Weinberg School, served exactly the kind of food that teachers at the school warned their students against. Cooking in the open near piles of cowdung and buzzing garbage, the food doled out on plates freshly dipped in bilgewater — all of which meant, in addition to their dosa and idli, young people who ate here were likely to receive a complementary side-order of jaundice or typhoid.
Thambi’s, inevitably, had become the great place for romance at the Ali Weinberg International School.
That morning, Sofia sat on a bench with a textbook pressed against her chest, and a bag slung across her shoulder. Her long black hair was brushed down over her left eye, and she smelled like a large foreign flower. The blood-coloured spots, a birthmark, lay on either side of her fair neck.
‘I gave a presentation in class today, on women in today’s India. Do you want to know what I said?’
The little outdoor shop was an excitement of garlic and onions; two Tamilians transmitted Radha’s orders to a third behind the counter, who sizzled the hot-plate with water, scraped it dry with a truncated broomstick, put a hand on his hip and yelled, ‘Dosa?’
‘Dosa.’
‘Cheese?’ asked the man behind the counter, scraping the tawa.
Naturally. ‘Double Cheese. Double Double Cheese.’ Always impresses the girls.
Pointing his short broom at Manju, the man asked:
‘And if I see your father, am I to yell, like last time?’
‘Louder this time,’ Radha pleaded.
‘Getting back to what I said in class about women,’ Sofia continued, ‘I said, in India today, a woman is either a sucker or a bitch. My dad has taught me that. Do you know what it means? No? You must be good for cricket only. It means, if you’re a woman in a job in marketing or sales, for instance, men will treat you like you don’t know what you are doing, and they will try to cheat you. So you have to put your foot down, and get angry and shout at them, and then they’ll call you a — a …’
She turned from the elder Kumar to the younger one. She covered the spots on her neck and asked Radha:
‘Why is your brother staring at me like that?’
Manju wasn’t staring at her: only at the silver ‘H’ on her sequinned handbag.
The Tamilian arrived with a cheese dosa on a cellophane-covered metal plate. Chutney dripped down the side of the plate.
‘Are you really eating that?’ Sofia asked.
Oh, Radha certainly was. He tore into his food.
Sofia winced. Stroking her handbag with the ‘H’, she said:
‘I’m also a sportsman, by the way, so don’t think you’re special. My Mummy says we get 3.5 per cent added to our final SSC marks if we play sports at the state level, and that will help me get into a good junior college, so she made me join state-level badminton. I go every day after class. My knees hurt, but Mummy says, get into college, and become rich, and you can go to hospital and pay for shiny new knees. Isn’t that crazy?’
Radha smiled: ‘Let’s see the knees.’
Sofia lifted up her school skirt and showed. But when Radha grinned at her naked knees, she grew angry with herself.
‘Cricketers!’ She covered her knees with her skirt. ‘As a matter of fact, I don’t know anyone who respects cricket. Lunch-break! Nothing that stops for lunch can be called a sport. Everybody I know follows Arsenal or Manchester United. Although I hope you’re not into Barcelona because I hate their guts. Are you listening to me?’
Of course he was. Done with his food, Radha wiped his lips with the back of his palm, and then began whispering to Sofia about something that was this big (he showed her with his hands exactly how big), until she screamed: ‘Seven colours! Seven?’
It was true: Manju had seen his brother do it. Radha’s thing was enormous, and when he held it tight, after going to the toilet, and squeezed it so that the blood stopped flowing into it, he could make it any colour he wanted. It was all true.
But Sofia just pushed Radha away, and laughed hysterically.