‘Manju: it’s nobody’s fault. Your father is fucking you in the head again. Leave him now.’
‘Leave and go where, Javed?’
‘Come to Navi Mumbai. I have my own flat now. You’ll be safe here.’
Manju heard, on the other end of the line, the sound of Javed’s jaws moving and crushing darkness.
He would be safe there. Javed would protect him.
The store-owner kept turning the pages of his Mumbai Sun.
‘Come stay with me, Manju. How many times do I have to say it?’
There was a pause.
‘But one thing: don’t call me till you’re ready to give up cricket and come here. Javed Ansari won’t break his word again. No more calls from you will be taken. Everyone in my house has received instructions. Because I worry you will come to Navi Mumbai, say “Fuck cricket, I am here for good,” and next morning decide to go back to Daddy.’
The phone went dead. Manju replaced the receiver; the store-owner folded his newspaper, placed it on his desk, and smiled. This act of kindness refreshed Manju, but then he saw the story on the last page of the newspaper:
Woman Kills Husband, But Not Without
A Reason, Police Say
The 32-year-old wife of a building contractor who murdered her husband yesterday in horrifying circumstances, as reported in this paper, did so only after discovering that he had been having an affair — with another man, the police have disclosed. The full story of this lurid act of revenge, the police say, forces us to reconsider …
‘Everything alright?’ the store-owner asked.
‘Everything is perfectly alright, sir,’ Manju replied.
And then added a smile to his statement.
•
Perched upside down on the telephone wires along the road, parakeets screeched at the passengers in the bus.
Radha Krishna Kumar licked his lips to rid them of the coating of metal. He had slept with his face against the bars, and now, when he moved his head, there was pain, as if a wrench had been left behind in his neck.
Radha saw hills in the distance, and day breaking over them. The bus had come to a stop, and the passengers had descended to line up in front of a man pouring tea from a stainless-steel kettle.
He had caught the bus from Crawford Market the night before, as his brother had suspected he would. He was on his way to his village, to his uncle Revanna’s house, where he would be safer than at home: his uncle would never hand him over to the Mumbai police.
When the engine restarted, a baby whimpered; Radha saw a black sobbing face, raw, wet, rising in front of him, like something just lifted out of the primeval pond: and then rising further, towards the ceiling of the bus. Its father was lifting the baby high up, so it could see there was nothing to fear from the noise: the child saw, and squealed. But to Radha’s ears it had roared like a lion in the jungle. He turned to the iron bars of the window in tears. My father never did that for me; never held me up like that so I could roar over the noise of the world. He watched the inverted parakeets. He wanted to bite the rusting bars of the window; yes, bite and break them, one by one: how else was he to tell God what he thought of having been given a man like Mohan Kumar for a father?
When he looked up at the sky, the light of the new day seemed unbearable: for what did the morning have to do with a man like him, a man who was no longer good for cricket?
‘Close your eyes, Radha,’ a voice whispered; he obeyed. Fingers snapped in the dark; and then he saw, beneath a rusty grille, black water, which foamed and parted to reveal a domed creature with quick limbs rising up into the light.
A small soft voice said: ‘Radha Krishna Kumar, elder brother of Manjunath Kumar, the morning will always have something to do with a man like you.’ Then the turtle sank back into the deep. Radha’s soiled and tensed body relaxed; though the light now struck his face directly, he slept.
•
To call, after you have been told not to call; to press the redial button after the dial tone has been silenced; to sleep with the phone next to your pillow in the hope that it will wake you up in the middle of the night; these are new experiences for a sixteen-year-old.
Not a word in twenty days. Three weeks tomorrow.
You can’t even pick up the phone when you know it’s me, Javed?
Sitting in the last seat of a bus, Manju wore his ear-phones as he scrolled down the songs on his cell phone to find Eminem. Around him were Mumbai’s most promising under-19 players, selected by the Cricket Association; they were on their way to the P.J. Hindu Gymkhana for a ‘Friendly’.
Manju had made a round wall of music surround him: yet in its centre, he sat, exposed, naked to any pair of eyes that knew of the pain that one boy could inflict on another.
Someone turned to look at him, and at once the wall was breached: so Manju hid his deepest troubles behind others. There was only bad news of Radha from the village: their relatives complained that he sat in a corner and said nothing but ‘Punish me’. And every day, as soon as Manju opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was Anand Mehta Sir ordering him to suck his whisky. There? Happy? He glared at the boy who was looking at him.
Happy that I have troubles that someone like you can understand as troubles?
Now he closed his eyes and thought of how Javed was treating him, just because he hadn’t left everything and gone to Navi Mumbai.
I am not slave, he had texted him six times. You are not nice to me. Four times. I am coming but I can’t come right now. Twice.
No reply.
Now he wanted Javed’s hair to fall. Let it be eaten up, in widening bays of bald skin. Let that Muslim boy become ugly. Let him wish he had never met Manjunath Kumar.
Slowing as it passed Chowpatty beach, the white bus stopped in front of the P.J. Hindu Gymkhana. When Manju opened his eyes he saw Tommy Sir standing outside.
He clutched his cricket bag, pushed his way out of the bus, stopped and realized that the old scout had been waiting for him.
Tommy Sir started to say something but Manju walked right past him.
Tommy Sir found him in the dressing room of the pavilion, apart from all the other boys, earphones still plugged in to his cell phone.
Tommy Sir removed one of the boy’s earphones, put it into his own ear, and indicated his approval.
‘English music? Good. I too like English music.’ He relinquished the earphones but placed a hand on the boy’s thigh. ‘Manju. We have to talk. Look at me, I say, look at me. How is Radha doing? Is he okay?’
The boy looked at him as if he failed to understand. Then Manju’s features changed.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Manju. Look at me. Answer my question.’
‘I don’t know,’ the boy said.
So Tommy Sir asked the question again, and for the third time, Manju, in the voice of one who was unmistakably enjoying himself, replied:
‘I don’t know.’
Tommy Sir took a while to understand what was happening.
All the other boys left the dressing room.
Tommy Sir reached out to seize Manju’s shoulder to shake some sense into him, but his hand stopped in mid-air.
Staring back at Tommy Sir, Manjunath Kumar looked like a Doberman barely restrained by a metal fence. Remembering what his elder brother had done to Deennawaz Shah, the violence in the blood of this family, Tommy Sir checked himself. But he hadn’t been scared of anything his whole life — and he certainly wasn’t going to be scared in a boys’ changing room.
‘Manju,’ he said, ‘because the selection match the other day was disrupted by your brother, everyone’s a bit nervous about the two Kumars, and the selectors just want to make sure you’re okay, so you have to come to Shivaji Park tomorrow and show—’