Poetry.
Wiping the sweat off his forehead, Javed looked up: the moon waited white and immense over the earth, like a mandate to dream and create.
‘Sean Connery,’ he said out loud. Yeah, he had looked him up on the Internet. Very handsome man, Manju: but seriously old, too.
With a grin, Javed directed a giant brain-wave right at the Tattvamasi Building in Chheda Nagar, Chembur.
Pass me the hammer, Miss Moneypenny. I’m a young Javed Ansari!
•
Over the next few weeks, Manju became aware that two parties were in open conflict for possession of something precious and hidden inside him: his future.
First, his father took Manju to the local Subramanya temple and made him put ten rupees into the collection box before reminding him to keep his end of the contract with God and drop out of education, as he had long ago promised his father he would (and as the great Sachin himself did, remember), to concentrate full-time on cricket. ‘Yes, Appa, I’ll do it,’ Manju said.
He went straight to a pay-phone near the train station, wiped the receiver clean with his shirt, and called Javed, who listened and said: ‘Unless you want to be a slave, you must never drop out of college.’
Manju, in principle, agreed.
He gave Javed his word, no matter what manipulation his father and Tommy Sir tried, he would study all day and all night for the exams, and would get into Ruia College.
But the next morning, he went to JJ Hospital morgue. The boys were practising cricket at Azad Maidan, and he, still in his cricket whites, just slipped down the road, and took the bus. He found the morgue and told the guard, ‘Let me in, please.’ The old man in khaki squinted at him: ‘Only doctors, interns or medical students are let in.’
‘But I play cricket,’ Manju said.
‘Fine,’ the guard said. ‘Go on in.’
So at last Agent Grissom of the CSI Team (Las Vegas) walked into the JJ Hospital morgue (Mumbai) and suddenly shivered in the cold, and couldn’t go on.
‘Why not?’ Javed asked, when Manju, almost in tears, called him from a one-rupee pay-phone.
‘It smelled.’
‘Dead bodies smell. Didn’t you know?’
‘But Javed, it smelled.’
Finished. Manju could never again imagine himself Agent Grissom. He couldn’t even eat his food; his gorge felt full of all that was awful and real, and it came out of his eyes as tears.
How Javed laughed at the other end of the line.
‘Maybe I can go back to Manchester.’
‘Why? You think dead bodies don’t stink in Manchester? Idiot.’
Manju was so angry he announced he wouldn’t go to Ruia College. Or any college.
Two minutes later he dropped another rupee into the pay-phone, wiped the receiver clean again, and called Javed back to say, ‘Don’t tell anyone what I told you, okay? About the morgue?’
‘I won’t. But did you mean what you said, Manju, are you really not going to college?’
‘I mean it.’
‘You really are a slave. You think Javed Ansari wants to talk to slaves on the phone? I thought you were on my wavelength.’
Then, ten minutes later, Manju wiped the receiver clean a third time, and called Javed to inform him he was on the same wavelength.
•
August was almost over when one morning Manju tiptoed out of the boys’ bedroom, turned the tap in the sink, and ran three wet fingers through his hair.
‘Manju, don’t think I didn’t see you. Are you going to JJ Hospital morgue again? To look at naked dead women? Foreign naked dead women?’
Mohan Kumar followed the boy out of their flat; he leaned over the edge of the stairwell, hearing the boy’s quick footsteps, and boomed into the echoing airshaft: ‘Are you going to meet that Mohammedan cricketer at the morgue?’
From down below in the stairwell, Manju stopped and turned his face up to his father’s.
‘Why do you see that Javed Ansari so often?’ Mohan Kumar asked.
They stared. Then Manju stuck his tongue out at his father, and showed him his middle finger.
‘Mongoose has got to you, my little Manju …’ his father whimpered. ‘Mongoose, Mongoose, Mon—’
‘Don’t call him that again!’ Manju shouted from below. ‘He’s my friend.’
He went out of the building, turned around, came back in, and this time shouted:
‘He’s my real father.’
Free! Manju steadied his bag on his shoulder and walked fast. The door of the Subramanya temple was open. Chanting in Sanskrit the priest exalted the dark deity with a flaming brass vessel. Manju bowed before the fire-garlanded idol and asked the God of Cricket for a big favour:
‘Please don’t let my father stop me from going to college.’
Done praying, he walked to the train station, stopped, remembered, and ran back to the temple to ask for another thing.
‘And please let Javed stop losing his hair.’
Half an hour later, Manju got off at the Matunga station and stood, in a crowd of teenagers, outside the gates of Ruia College.
The third list of admissions had been pasted to a bulletin board on the other side of the college gate.
Manju had known already from the email and the letter, but he wanted to touch the admissions list. Touch it.
The gates were closed, so he walked back towards the station. They were playing tennis at the Matunga Gymkhana; someone threw a ball high up, and the act seemed to say ‘freedom’ in a way nothing in cricket could.
When Manju walked back to Ruia, the gates had just opened. The crowd rushed in.
Jostling against the others, he stood in front of the noticeboard where the admissions list was posted; his heart began to pound.
Even as elbows and fingers poked him, glancing over his shoulder to where he imagined Navi Mumbai would be, he fired, high over land and creek, a giant brain-wave of his own.
Javed. Javed. We did it. I got into Ruia.
Three months to Selection Day
FIRST YEAR OF JUNIOR COLLEGE
The Banganga tank, in Walkeshwar, high above south Mumbai, late in the evening. This is one of the oldest parts of the city, and even now, with its temple bells and wandering cows and narrow streets, it retains the look of a village tucked inside the metropolis.
White tubelights shone around the enormous open tank, and ducks floated on the black water, as two young men walked down the old stone steps that led to the water. One of them was in stained cricket whites; the other wore a leather jacket over blue jeans.
‘Do you ever miss it?’
‘It, Sir Manju, being?’
‘Cricket.’
‘Only you would ask a question like that, Sir Manju.’
Just a fortnight into junior college, and Javed had reinvented his image. His long-sleeved white shirts had given way to T-shirts and a leather jacket; the gold earring was gone, and his wavy hair was now streaked with copper highlights. It was receding, so dyeing it was the right decision, Manju felt.