Nevertheless, out of respect for his father, his years in New York, and his entertainment value, most of his classmates generally agreed to listen to his next big idea.
‘Imagine an Economist article. A real Economist article. That only the two of us can read, a whole year before it is printed.’
A TV showed an old cricket match at one end of the bar; at the other, a wide window gave a view of trees swaying on Marine Drive. Anand Mehta sat on a sofa with a bottle of Foster’s, and nibbled on two bowls of fried snacks.
His visitor, who had just wiped his face with a white handkerchief, said: ‘I’m sorry I am late, Anand. Really, I am. See, I thought we were meeting at the Taj President.’
The man who had arrived late was Rahul ‘Jo-Jo’ Mistry, whose father, like Mehta’s, was a stockbroker; unlike Anand, he still worked with Daddy in Cuffe Parade. When Anand had sent around a mass email about Radha’s triple century, inviting potential investors to purchase equity in his unique cricket sponsorship programme, Mistry was the last man he had expected to reply. Old Money types, unless liberated by an instinct for debauchery, which ‘Jo-Jo’ seemed unlikely to possess, rarely took risks.
Refusing Mehta’s offer of the fried snacks, ‘Jo-Jo’ Mistry, heir to a 200-crore brokerage fortune, insisted on further explaining his tardiness.
‘When you said the Trident I thought you wanted me at the President. I always thought this hotel was just called the Oberoi. Isn’t that funny?’
Anand Mehta took ‘Jo-Jo’ Mistry’s small cold hands in his and pumped some life into them.
‘Relaaaaaaax, Jo-Jo. Relaaaaaaax.’
How, Anand Mehta thought, as he reached for more deep-fried starch, could you live all your fucking life in South Bombay and still mix up the Trident and the Taj President? Only if, like old friend ‘Jo-Jo’ here, you were not required to think in order to survive, because Grandpa Mistry had bought big fat plots in Worli and Chembur in 1955 at eighteen rupees an acre and shoved the title deeds up your baby bum, which you have kept tightly clenched ever since. Reaching for a few more fried rings, Mehta looked at ‘Jo-Jo’ Mistry and licked his lips.
(But his eyes looked up at the ceiling when he was lying, and this had tipped off his friends for years.)
‘Now, I would like to make you the exclusive gift of an Economist article, one year in advance.’
Here they were interrupted again, because ‘Jo-Jo’ had brought another potential cricket investor with him, an old white man in a beige suit. Mehta shook hands with him, and discovered he was American.
‘Are you in sports management?’
The old American smiled and said, ‘I am the one man who is despised on every country on earth.’
Mehta thought about it. ‘Are you a plastic surgeon?’
Which made everyone laugh.
‘Let’s try this,’ the American said, enjoying the game, ‘I like my prose paratactic, my women flexible, and my governments libertarian. Who am I?’
‘Chinese communist.’
‘Close enough. I’m an investment banker,’ the American confessed, and Anand told him of the three years he had spent in New York — and of his intimate knowledge of Central Park, especially the pond area called Hernshead, towards the south — and of his knowledge also of Peter Luger, Scalini, Wolfgang’s Strip House, Bouley, Daniel (Lithuanian waitresses!), Union Square Grill (the things you can do in that Men’s Room of theirs!), Gramercy Tavern, Grimaldi’s, Lombar—
‘You know, Anand,’ ‘Jo-Jo’ Mistry interrupted him, ‘I actually played cricket.’
‘I remember, mate.’ Anand Mehta smiled. ‘I remember. You were a keeper, weren’t you?’
‘Substitute wicket-keeper. Being ambidextrous, I was good at collections with my left hand too, which most Indians are not.’ Mistry demonstrated how he gathered the ball this way and that, this way and that. ‘Coach never gave me a chance. Even now it hurts.’
‘Like the first time you wanted a girl. Can’t be forgotten. Ah, cricket. We had to get rid of the English, I always say, in order to enjoy the benefits of English civilization. You will keep hearing,’ Mehta turned to the American, ‘that other sports are becoming popular in India, like tennis or volleyball, but the thing to understand about cricket, sir, is that our government has no option but to enforce the mandatory playing of this game in India. You see, we are sitting on a time-bomb: we’re missing about ten million women from our population, due to female infanticide. This extraordinary fact is known to you, I assume? Do not make any business decision in India until you familiarize yourself with our male-to-female sex ratio, the result of decades of selective abortion. I predict that young Indian males, lacking women to marry or even to mate with, are likely to become progressively more deranged. This is already visible. Now, only one thing on earth can save us from all this rogue Hindu testosterone. Cricket. Have you ever tried to kill someone with a cricket bat? All but impossible. The deep and intrinsic silliness of cricket, I think, all that fair play and honourable draw stuff, makes it ideally suited for male social control in India. Can you imagine what will happen to crime and rape in Delhi and Mumbai if boys here start playing, say, American football? I believe that in the years to come, to pacify hundreds of millions of desperately horny young Indians of the lower social classes, our government has only three real policy options: to legalize prostitution, which it won’t do; to make liquor significantly cheaper than it currently is, which it can’t afford to do; or else, to supply us with a never-ending stream of narcotizing cricket-based entertainments. Bread and Tendulkar. Televised cricket in India is essentially state-sponsored lobotomy (you must hear our cricket commentators) — and we’ll be getting a lot more of it soon. What do you think, Jo-Jo? Am I right or am I as usual right?’
But ‘Jo-Jo’ Mistry was still demonstrating his ambidextrous wicket-keeping skills along the table’s surface. Anand Mehta knew exactly why Jo-Jo was acting like an idiot, the same reason he had so cunningly brought an American along: because any moment he could say, Oh, Cricket, we thought you meant High-Yield Corporate Debt, and leave.
Mehta excused himself for a minute.
Out in the lobby of the Trident, dipping his finger in a brass bowl filled with rose petals, he answered his phone.
‘Tommy Sir, I’m in a business meeting. You keep texting and calling.’
‘Mr Anand. Can you come to St George Hospital at once?’
‘Absolutely not. What a question. I’m in a meeting.’
When Tommy Sir explained the situation, Anand Mehta put his palm on his forehead and wished the game of cricket a speedy extinction.
•
Although he was that rare cricket lover who was not also an Anglophile — kept safe from that lunacy by his knowledge of what the British had done to India in the twentieth century (Partition, the Bengal famine, the Gandhi — Nehru family) and the greater horror they had deposited here in the nineteenth century, the Indian Penal Code, which was still in force (like the mad grandfather everyone knows should be locked up in the attic, but who sits in the living room with a cane in his hands) — Tommy Sir had, nevertheless, developed a grudging respect for the rascals, freebooters and thugs who had carved out the Raj in the eighteenth century. James Grant Duff writing the history of the Marathas with one hand while discharging his flintlocks at the Marathas with the other. That takes balls. French call it sangfroid. And of that eighteenth-century legacy of balls, more respectably termed sangfroid, the sole surviving shard we possess in India is the game of Test cricket.