‘Salim.’ Sofia touched her driver’s shoulder with her BlackBerry. ‘You know who this is, Salim? He’s Radha’s brother. But he doesn’t look like Radha, does he?’
‘No, ma’am.’
An idol of Durga with a red tongue scraped past the windscreen as devotees transferred the goddess from one side of the car to the other.
‘By the way, I’m participating in a paid marketing brand survey for Amaze cars versus Polo. Which do you prefer? Sorry. You can’t drive. Your father won’t let you.’
Manju concentrated on the image of the Goddess Durga, still in the distance, to calm himself.
‘Radha has taught himself to drive. He’ll teach me one day.’
Sofia clicked her tongue: sure, sure.
‘You know Radha and I broke up, right? One day he hit me, and I said, Don’t dare do that again. It’s abuse. Get out of my life. But we’re still friends. Do you approve of friendship after a relationship?’
‘Yes,’ Manju said.
Her magenta T-shirt had a gold-rimmed hole around her navel, and big letters above it said: POW. How silly he would look, Manju thought, wearing something like this; how silly anyone would look in it. Not Sofia, though. She pulled it off, she could pull anything off: she knew her prerogative as a rich girl in Mumbai, which was to be one step ahead of the city she lived in.
Sofia helped him understand Javed. The same note of irritation sounded in her voice even the first time she asked for something; and the same carelessness when probing the personal life of one not of her class.
‘Salim,’ Sofia said suddenly to her driver, ‘Salim, be careful, we’re going to hit and kill someone. Look at all these mad people doing this puja. All these Hindus! Did they walk out of a film set? Now, Manju, I’m on your side. We’re all on your side. No one likes what your brother is saying about you, okay?’
Manju felt that churning in his stomach grow stronger and stronger. Ask her what your brother says about you, he told himself. Ask her.?She knew this; Sofia, like his mother, like most women, could read minds.
‘Are you scared of me, Manju? Don’t be.’
She had rehearsed for this encounter: it was not by chance she had driven up just as he had stepped out of the college.
‘People discuss you a lot, do you know this, Manju?’ Sofia said at last. ‘But we’re all on your side. I told Radha, stop talking of your brother like this. I mean, it’s Manju’s choice, Manju’s lifestyle, let him be whatever he wants. I defended you.’
That he was being talked about, analysed, and gossiped about, came as a shock; and as Manju sat with Sofia, he felt a net falling over him. Frenzied devotees of Goddess Durga pressed against the windows of the car.
‘What does my brother say about me?’
‘I just want to be your friend, Manju,’ Sofia said, and bit her lip, and told herself she sounded exactly like one of the men who creep closer and closer but claim they are only looking for ‘friendship’. But talking to Manju was so much harder than talking to his brother, who was a simple soul, after all.
Enough. She leaned forward and yelled at the driver’s shoulder:
‘Salim, stop the car at Ram Ashraya. Tendulkar,’ she touched his shoulder, ‘relax, okay? This is the twenty-first century and you are in junior college. Be who you are. Look at me, dude. The other day I told my father, I’ve grown up. I told him, Dad, I’m on the college committee to protect turtles and birds. We go to Crawford Market every Sunday to free them from cages. I’ll protect you too, Manju.’
‘Protect me?’
Fine. To make it clear to one and all that she was not behaving with Manju the way boys sometimes behaved with her, but out of a genuine and sincere interest to protect him, Sofia just cut through the bullshit and told Manju it was normal, perfectly normal, 100 per cent normal, lots of people these days were homosexuals, it was no big deal anymore, there was even a gay and lesbian club in Xavier’s for chrissakes, so why make a fuss over the fact that his brother was going around telling everyone he was a—
The next thing Sofia knew, cymbals and drum-beats were deafening her and her driver had had to brake hard; because a door had opened in the moving car and a body had leapt out and run. Sofia reached over and shut the door at once.
•
Off stump line pakado, bhai. Kaise bowling kar rahe ho? New ball hain, waste mat karo!
Waiting, waiting. Now bowling.
Lavkar daud — Ramesh!
From the Fort Vijay Club, Manju had gone counter-clockwise around Azad Maidan, past the Lord Northbrook Cricket Club, the Times of India Sports Club, and the Bohra Cricketers Club until he was just outside the Young Hindu Cricket Club. Cloud and wind and unbearable sun; the smell of woodsmoke in the breeze; spike-marks in red mud; the sounds of balls being struck and bodies colliding from one match and another.
And at last he found what he had been searching for.
Radha Kumar, his brother, fielding in the covers, fingers spread out, eyes on the wicket.
There was a loud cry: a fielder, running after a ball from his own match, had been hit in the shin by a ball flying from another match, and had fallen with a cry. Now there were spots of blood on the mud. As he stood up, with torn trouser and bloody knee, the fielder grimaced at Manjunath.
At the far end of the maidan stood two traffic policemen.
Manju watched them.
When at last the match was over, Radha returned with the other boys, tossing the red ball from hand to hand with a big grin. Reaching his tent, he stopped.
He dropped the ball, and looked at his younger brother.
‘Radha,’ Manju said. ‘What have you been telling people about me?’
Looking at the earth, Radha bit at his right thumbnail, tore away a part of it and let it fall.
‘Radha. What have you been telling people about me?’
He did the same thing with his right index fingernail, and then looked at the ring finger as if he were considering whether to bite it; instead, he turned and began to run. In his cricket whites Radha ran — and in T-shirt and jeans Manju ran after him — all the way down Azad Maidan and past Xavier’s College, past the soccer ground from behind whose wall and barbed-wire fence came the noise of a marching band, and then to Metro Cinema, and through Dhobi Talao, before taking a left at Alfred, the dance bar he had visited only that weekend with his friends, and further past the blue Parsi Dairy Farm, and up the bridge, past a basket of peeled pineapples carried on a coolie’s head, and down past the flyover, and out into Marine Drive and all the way to where the pigeons had huddled in the noisy kabootarkhana, the metal enclosure designed for them to gather and feed. A man in white pajamas, having just emptied a sack of grain for the birds, stood with his palms folded before their auspicious gluttony.
Radha stopped, panting: from here he could see a game of cricket being played in the Gymkhana beyond the pigeon-stand; and another game of cricket in the Gymkhana beyond that one; and another game of cricket beyond that one too. There was nowhere to escape.
He turned around to see Manju slowing down.
Sounding its long horn, a train drew into Marine Lines station.
Folding his arms across his chest, Radha braced himself for a blow, as Manju came running up to him. He kept his eyes on the feeding mass of birds, the rippling crowd of emerald necks and grey pulsing bodies, which paid attention only to their free grain, and waited.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Manju had moved a pace to his right. There was something new in his face: there was malice in his smile. As Radha watched, he climbed over into the kabootarkhana, lifted his shoe over one of the feeding pigeons, which kept clucking at the grain, oblivious to the danger over its head; he kept his shoe like this, and then, very deliberately, brought it down on the bird.