•
Beyond Mankhurd, the Harbour Line went past slum after slum, slums that were gloomy and hopeless in a way that Manju couldn’t remember the old place in Dahisar ever being, past the clustered buildings of a Slum Redevelopment Authority project, and into green wilderness.
Then came a bridge, and glowing water, and in the distance, a new city: Navi Mumbai — New Mumbai.
•
In the men’s toilet at Vashi station, Manju looked at himself in a mirror and washed his face with soap, twice, and checked his hair.
Right outside the station, he found a shopping mall made of glass. A foot away from the entrance, where security guards waited with metal detectors, a boy stood admiring himself in the glass wall. His powerful neck was shaved clean below the hairline, and his shoulders were exposed by his low-cut T-shirt.
From the reflection in the glass Manju could see that the boy was wearing Aviator sunglasses, and had a gold ring in his right ear.
He began to run towards him.
But Javed had seen his reflection in the glass: waiting till Manju was almost upon his back, he turned around and caught him and for a long moment they held on to each other.
•
Knowing that Javed’s first question would be: What is England like? Manju thought, I will tell him about the forest bird. There was a garden behind the school, and there were deer in the garden. Deer? Yes. In England you have deer everywhere. On the way to cricket, Manju would stop to watch the deer in the garden, and one day, he heard a sound from the bushes. Parting open the leaves of a big dark bush, he found a forest bird, motionless and curled-up in a wet nest, like an ebony foetus. Indian boy and British bird stared at each other, for a full minute, each asking the other, What are you doing here? Then, with a beating of wings, the bird made Manju’s heart stop as it rose right over his head, as if it meant to seize him, like the roc that lifted Sindbad over the seven seas.
But Javed had seen a roc of his own: and he had caught his. Because while Manju was away on his grand Manchester scholarship, Javed Ansari, without leaving India, had also visited a foreign country. He had celebrated his sixteenth birthday a fortnight ago. Around midnight, in Colaba, alone, walking past the open-air mutton and chicken kebab grill of Bademiya’s, seeing a young man smile in a certain way, a young man with blond streaks in his hair, Javed had smiled back at that young man, to feel a finger scrape diagonally down the back of his jeans, and turned around in surprise to see the young man now standing behind him, no longer smiling, but with his nostrils tense, his eyes candid, and realized that all of these formed a closed door: and that the door could be opened, and would reveal something — something as big as an ocean, and as turbulent — behind it. And Javed, right there, went up to the blond man, negotiated a deal without saying a word, and with a beating heart followed him up wooden stairs to a room on the third floor of a private hotel behind the Taj, where the blond man inserted a key into a door, and said, ‘Go in,’ and when Javed entered the room, trembling, he smelled the ocean for the first time in his life, early in the morning after his sixteenth birthday.
•
And now Javed walked alongside Manju, hand on his shoulder. He smiled condescendingly, and asked: ‘So what was England like, Superstar? What is England’s food like?’ The two of them rode the escalator up into the mall. Manju said: ‘The Britishers eat cheese all the time.’
Javed removed his Aviator glasses and put them in his pocket to get a better look at the superstar.
‘Manju. Please.’
‘I’m telling you, the white people eat cheese for breakfast and smell of it all day.’
Javed laughed, just once, but so hard the Aviator glasses fell and he had to grab them with both hands.
‘Manju. Did you really go to England?’
The boy looked the same as he had before leaving for England, just a bit fairer, a bit broader. He was also definitely wearing some sort of deodorant.
‘Pass me the hammer, Miss Moneypenny’ — Manju spread his arms wide, and lowered his voice an octave — ‘I’m a young Sean Connery!’
Javed stared.
‘There were workers on the roof of the school, and they would bang their hammers and sing that all day.’
Javed tried it out himself. Pass me the hammer, Ms Money …
‘Who is Sean Connery?’
A whistle blew. Short women in blue uniforms stood by the sides of the escalators, making sure no young ruffian ran up or down the metal steps or did anything else to set off a panic among the crowd, many of whom were using an escalator for the first time in their lives.
Keeping his eye on the blue-uniformed guards, Manju said: ‘You didn’t come to Kanga League the other day.’
‘Fuck cricket. Why didn’t you come to see me till now?’
‘At the press conference they complimented my accent.’ Manju beamed. ‘It’s called a Mancunian. It’s got glottalstop. Do you know what glottalstop is?’
‘It’s sexy,’ Javed said.
He said the word as casually as he could, but he saw it wiping the grin off Manju’s face, and stopping his breath: It’s sexy.
Javed tapped on his gold earring and looked at Manju.
‘Did you go to the police yet? And tell them about the investor, how he invaded your home? That’s what they call what he did. Home invasion. Did you tell—’
‘No.’
‘No?’
Javed felt his ears move on their own, as they always did when he gritted his teeth. Look at Manju go to England, spend six weeks there, eat the cheese, breathe the scented air, and come back and still behave like a slave!
The escalator had now reached the highest level of the mall. There was a bowling alley up there, in what was called the Play Park, where they could talk.
‘What was the point of going to England, Manju?’
‘I went to the Science Museum and read the Daily Telegraph newspaper.’
‘Bullshit.’ Javed touched Manju’s left cheek with the back of his palm. ‘You went to a CSI morgue. To see dead bodies.’
The whites of Manju’s eyes expanded, and he looked to this side and that, and then grinned. Wanted to, sure, but he had been too shy to ask the white people for directions to the morgue in Manchester.
‘Thank God. Otherwise they would think all Indians are mad like you.’
At the entrance to the Play Park they found a machine with illuminated numbers on it; a boy swung a mallet — thud! — and the numbers began to light up, one by one.
‘To see how strong you are,’ Javed said. ‘Want to try, Captain?’
‘No.’
Javed took him on a tour of the video games. Ghost Squad (‘No’), Police Squad 3 (‘No’) and Formula One (‘No’) until Javed said, ‘Relax, Captain. I’m paying. Is that what you’re worried about?’
Air hockey: a group of boys standing on either side of a table were smashing away at something small. Saying ‘Yes,’ Manju went closer, inspected the boys at the table, and then said, ‘No.’
‘Man. You keep changing your mind. They sent you to England and you became an English lady.’
They stood by the side of the Play Park, watching others try their luck or skill at the machines.
‘Did you think of your family when you were over in England?’