‘You cricketers,’ the girl said, ‘are too funny. You’re even worse than J.A.’
‘Than who?’
While Radha frowned, Sofia explained that both Young Lions had been trying to impress her, because earlier in the morning, she had been given this by Mr Javed Ansari. A piece of fragrant white paper. Radha read it, while Manju, putting his chin on his brother’s shoulder, spied.
Miss Sofia:
You walk in beauty, like the night of
cloudless climes and starry skies.
J.A.
‘What the fuck is this?’ Radha asked.
Sofia said it was Javed’s love poem, written just for her, and that she found it ‘touching’.
‘He likes me. You cricketers are all too funny.’
When Radha saw Manju reading the love poem with a frown, as if he was trying hard to understand it, he couldn’t take it anymore.
‘Scientist,’ he said. ‘Give that back to her.’
That Saturday, when no one was looking, the two brothers broke into the school changing rooms, found a green cricket bag embroidered in gold with the initials ‘J.A.’, and unzipped it. Radha had brought the pen. He examined Javed’s gear — his thigh pad, his box, his gloves — before settling on the chest-guard. Placing it on his knee, he wrote something on it. ‘Done,’ Radha chuckled, and asked Manju to read what he had written on the chest-guard — but what was his younger brother up to? His mouth open, Manju had slid his whole forearm up to the elbow into Javed’s green kitbag. The arm was trembling. And more of it was still going into the bag!
‘That’s filthy.’ Radha slapped Manju on the head. The younger boy withdrew his forearm at once. Radha held the pen out to him. ‘Now you write something on his chest-guard.’
Afterwards the two brothers howled and screamed all the way up and down Carter Road in celebration of their victory over Mr ‘J.A.’.
•
During the monsoons, the maidans in the heart of south Mumbai — Azad, Oval, Cross — are overrun by weeds. By Independence Day, with rain still falling, dark nylon nets have cordoned off parts of the maidans, and rectangular patches of reddish earth are taking shape inside those protected areas. Similar rectangles turn up at the Police Gymkhana and the Islam Gymkhana along Marine Drive, puzzling the black kites, which fly circles over them, balancing their wings on the sea breeze.
In September, stone-rollers are applied over these patches, levelling out the earth. At the Oval, the rectangles of stubble are now russet, the colour of some of the tiles in the Bombay High Court building, which towers over the maidan. Mounds of cut turf are stacked up; men in khaki shorts sit by the turf; mynahs land and take off, and pigeons roost on the pitches. Two white sight-screens are moved into place against the fence, just beyond which the bronze statue of Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, first Baronet of Bombay, sits with his hands on his lap and his back to the Oval, disdaining the common pleasures of sport. Then one morning, a bare-chested man materializes on the cricket pitch at the Oval and starts meditating. His palms are folded by his chest and his eyes are shut; only his lips move. A stone-roller waits beside him. Raising his palms over his head, the half-naked man claps once — twice — three times, and opens his eyes.
It is October, and the cricket season has begun.
NINTH STANDARD CONTINUES: CRICKET SEASON
Was she really really dead? Radha seemed to think so. Maybe someone had murdered her and hidden her body in the Dahisar river. No — she had to be alive: Manju was sure of it. Because he remembered the last evening he had ever seen her: he had come home early from cricket practice, and she had been sleeping on the bed. Manju had watched her and thought, when his father slept, his lips thickened, and his face became coarse; but how radiant his mother looked in her sleep. Her lips twitched. Her eyelids pulsed. And as Manju drew nearer to her sleeping body, her lips began moving silently, as if intoning something, some prayer, some secret Sanskrit, some message meant for her son.
‘Tommy Sir is here: stop dreaming!’
Manjunath opened his eyes. Through a colourful umbrella overhead he saw the sun; and then dark grinning faces and white shirts all around. He was sitting on a plastic chair in the Ali Weinberg tent at one end of the Oval Maidan.
As if it had fallen from a coconut tree above, he was holding a bat in his hands.
Manju looked around. Holding on to the black bars that ran around the maidan, men watched the cricket; the lucky ones, day labourers with a morning off, sat on the trunk of a palm tree, sipping tea, silenced at the moment a ball hit a bat. In the middle of the Oval, a Young Lion hunted for runs: Radha Kumar was on fire this morning.
But Tommy Sir was nowhere to be seen.
Showing his middle finger to the other cricketers — they responded with a squeal of delight — Manju closed his eyes and exercised his right to dream.
What was she trying to say, lying in bed like that with her eyes closed and her lips moving? Manju had brought his ear to her lips, and he could almost hear the words she was struggling to form: ‘Manju, let us find Radha and run away from here before it’s too late.’
‘Stop bloody dreaming, and get up from that chair, Subjunior!’
This time it was Tommy Sir, striding up to the Ali Weinberg tent, along with a middle-aged man. Manju stood to attention with the other boys.
‘Boys, this man is the most important man in Mumbai. He will determine your fates one day. Who is he?’
The middle-aged man smiled. ‘Please don’t embarrass me, Tommy Sir. I’m just a selector.’
‘That’s exactly what I said, Srinivas, and in plain English. Now, boys, this very important man will tell the story of how he knew Ravi Shastri would play for India just by looking at him. Tell them, Srinivas.’
‘That was years ago, Tommy Sir. Ten years ago, we could say, this boy, from his stance, from the way he grips the bat, will make the team. Today, it’s all different. Today, it’s all a mystery, even to the selectors, who will make it and who …’
The workers sitting on the fallen log cheered. A Young Lion had just roared: twisting his torso, Radha Kumar had pulled a long hop past the mid-wicket fielder, and through the boundary, which was marked with white flags.
•
‘Just look at him bat, Srinivas. Do you know his scores in the Pepsi tournament?’
‘How can I not know his scores, when you text them to me three times a day? It’s a rich crop, his batch. There’s Javed Ansari, Kumar, and I’m hearing a lot about T.E. Sarfraz too.’
Manju stood close to the two men to overhear.
‘Kill it like Yuvraj!’ All around their school tent, the cricketers had begun clapping in rhythm.
‘Kill it?’
Tommy Sir pointed to Rajabai Tower.
‘You heard the story? That Yuvraj Singh hit the clock tower with a six during trials?’
The selector looked at Rajabai Tower.
‘It’s seventy-five metres to the boundary wall — then thirty more over the coconut trees. Bullshit. No one’s ever hit the tower from here.’
Tommy Sir, who had written about Yuvraj’s Rajabai Tower-shaking sixer in a newspaper column two years ago (‘Some Boys Rise, Some Boys Falclass="underline" Legends of Bombay Cricket and My Role in Shaping Them Part 16 — How I Made Yuvraj a Young Prince of Cricket’), looked to his right, where he found little Manju.
‘This is the brother, Srinivas. Scientist by nature. If I ask him, he’ll recite your life story. Shall I ask him?’
But right about then Tommy Sir saw a man pushing a bicycle into the Oval Maidan.