‘No. Are you mad? And it’s Pon-ting anyway.’
‘I hate cricket, dude. How will I know who that is?’
‘It’s Steven Waugh.’
‘Who?’
‘Steven Waugh?’
‘I’ve never heard of him. Now go get his autograph.’
‘No way. Waugh will want my autograph next year. Just you wait.’
Sofia laughed. ‘Sure.’
Avoiding the crowds around Steve Waugh, the two went down the steps to the boat docked at Jetty Number Two. It was getting ready to leave, and Radha had to help Sofia on board just before the trembling plank was pulled away. They found her ‘crew’ waiting on the upper deck of the boat — a girl with blonde streaks in her hair, and two boys, each of whom had big curly hair and wore horn-rimmed glasses. One of them, so Sofia said, was the son of a policeman.
The water began to seethe; a milky wave slapped the stone wall that stands around the Gateway of India, returning to the tourists some of the rubbish they and their predecessors had tossed into the sea.
Burning diesel generously, the ferry was heading away from the city.
‘That’s the RC Church. In Cuffe Parade. It’s too gorgeous.’
‘She’s just learnt this word, so she’s using it everywhere. Too, too gorgeous.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘Have you noticed how girls these days use dirtier language than boys?’
‘Shut off.’
‘You said “Shut off”. Everyone, did you hear?’
Their chit-chat was interrupted by a dark, sweat-covered man, climbing onto the upper deck and asking for tickets.
‘That …?’ The conductor pointed at Radha’s bag, ‘… is goods. Means you have to pay extra.’
‘It’s not goods,’ Radha said.
He removed an object from the bag to substantiate his claim. It was a shining slice of true wood: a Sunny Tonny Genuine English Willow bat with brand-new leather handle. All the noise was knocked out of the ticket-collector: hadn’t he too once hoped to play for Mumbai? He opened his mouth and left.
Radha had grown his hair long and tied it in a ponytail; with his powerful chest and arms and the contrasting delicacy of his eyes, he had fulfilled his boyish promise of film-star looks. Sofia slid a foot from her chappals, and touched Radha’s cricket bat with her toes. Then one of his feet came to the bat’s defence.
The ferry passed near oil tankers anchored in mid-ocean; garbage and seagulls bobbed up and down on the waves.
The girl with blonde streaks in her hair had been studying Radha.
‘You were on TV, yes or no?’ she asked, when the foot wrestling had ended. ‘You scored that 300. Shah Rukh Khan met you, yes or no?’
Radha gave her his television smile. ‘I scored 388. Yes. I met Shah Rukh Khan. He called me a human skyscraper. On Selection Day I will be picked for Mumbai.’
The blonde girl looked impressed.
‘Here’s a quiz for you: What does the term KKK stand for in modern cricket?’ Radha asked her.
‘No. What does it mean?’
‘Kiss, Kock and Kuddle. KKK. Isn’t that funny?’ Radha grinned. ‘Hey, Sofia, I made that up myself.’
Perhaps he could score with Sofia and this one with the blonde streaks. Anything goes on Alibagh, right?
‘His brother scored 600 or something and broke his record,’ Sofia said. ‘Why don’t you ever bring Manju along?’
In the distance, Alibagh just about made itself visible. Radha persisted with his TV smile.
‘Your brother has big eyes, so cute. The girls are going to go crazy for him.’
Still smiling, Radha narrowed his eyes and lowered his voice: ‘For your information: one, he didn’t score 600, and two, he’s not going crazy for the girls.’
But no one had heard him: because the policeman’s son, rummaging about in his backpack, had produced a pack of condoms.
‘Hey, cricketer,’ the other boy shouted. ‘You know what this is? KKK. Kondom, Kondom, Kondom.’ The girls laughed.
‘I have many more inside my bag. The real KKK.’
‘He’s so funny,’ Sofia said.
He stole my joke, Radha thought. To hell with these rich kids. Big thief walks free. He knew that Sofia was the only one here who was different — for the others, I’m just the boy from the slum, he thought, and looked down at his dirty shoes.
Then he closed his eyes and tightened his grip on his cricket bat: when the moment comes, when Radha Krishna Kumar scores his double century for India in the World Cup, when his name will be applauded in far-off and wonderful places like Cape Town and Christchurch and Trinidad, we’ll see who is laughing.
When he opened his eyes, Radha saw small white birds skimming the waves. The euphoria faded; his smile disappeared; he remembered his younger brother.
The boat docked; people shrieked; the girls held on to the seats for support and almost knocked Radha into the water.
When they reached Alibagh, the blonde and the boys walked down a grey beach. Radha kept his eyes on the water’s edge, where indistinct birds left deep black prints on the sand.
Sofia said, ‘You were saying something about Manju? I didn’t hear.’
Radha had seen something dark moving within the white surf — a turtle, or something like a turtle. He gnawed at his fingernails, and spat.
‘I said nothing about Manju.’
With his cricket bat in hand, he walked into the water, and the ocean swelled, mockingly, around his feet.
Two nights ago the TV had been on, and Radha, seeing Manju sitting on the ground and watching with narrowed eyes, had thought, CSI Las Vegas. But no: not CSI. It was a programme about the gays in America: they could now marry each other. He had stood behind his younger brother, watching him watch the programme. Manju heard his breathing, and jumped, and turned the television off: it was that leap, more than anything else, that had made Radha’s heart pound.
Now he smashed his bat into the Arabian Sea.
Is the world’s second-best batsman a homo? And is the world’s best batsman, the one with a secret contract, not going to be selected for Mumbai? Radha waded deeper into the ocean. He bashed at the waves with his SG Sunny Tonny. ‘Weight-transfer issue.’ The phrase was as heavy as a death-sentence. His jeans were now wet above the ankles, and he felt their soaking mass pulling him down. Weight-transfer. What I wouldn’t give you, ocean, to make this problem go away. The water had risen to his knees. See, sometimes I have to drink a beer to go to sleep. And when I wake up, the eyelids do not want to open, and a voice in my head says, ‘What does the morning have to do with a man like you, who can’t even hold a bat?’ And then the voice says, ‘Your little brother is a homo, and you can’t hold a bat anymore.’
Why? Why? Why?
Someone up there was rewriting the promised contract, and Radha Kumar, who could do nothing to undo the changes to the script, who had learnt — as his father had — what it meant to be only a man before he had learnt what it meant to be fully a man, bludgeoned the waves around him with his bat.
‘Radha!’ Someone was shouting at him. ‘Come back, are you crazy?’
The water rose above his knees now. Wading deeper into the sea, Radha Kumar raised his bat and looked around for that turtle.
•
While Manju slept in Mumbai, someone was thinking about him on the mainland.
A white moon moved over Navi Mumbai, and Javed Ansari had slipped from his bedroom, passed the couch on which his father snored, the cricket magazines his father had left on the dinner table in a pathetic attempt to revive his fading interest in cricket, opened a door, and walked, a free man, into the night. Vashi was deserted. Javed walked past a government schooclass="underline" click, click, he heard a rolled-up flag knocking against the metal pole in the school compound. A bike had toppled over outside the school; a policeman slept at a traffic light. Javed walked down the centre of the road, knowing that all the gates of the night were open to him. He could just kick at a door, go into someone’s flat and rob it, he thought, and half considered the idea before laughing into the darkness: U-ha, U-ha. Money was for idiots. Money and cricket were for idiots. He grabbed at the night air as if it were black, physical material, coal that his strong fist could crush into diamond.