Three years before Selection Day

EIGHTH STANDARD

‘I’ve got news for you, Tommy Sir.’

‘And I’ve got news for you, Pramod. You see, when I was twenty-one years old, which is to say before you were even born, I began working on a history of the Maratha campaign at the third battle of Panipat. It had a title: “1761: the soul breaks out of its encirclement”. Because I felt that no truthful account of this battle had ever been written. All the histories say we Marathas lost to the Afghans at Panipat on 14 January 1761. Not true. I mean, it may be true, we lost, but it’s not the true story.’

‘Tommy Sir, there is a younger brother, too. He also plays cricket. That’s my news.’

‘Pramod. I am sick of cricket. Talk to me about battles, onions, Narendra Modi, anything else. Don’t you understand?’

‘Tommy Sir. You should have seen the younger brother bat today at the Oval Maidan. You should have. He’s nearly as good as his big brother.’

Darkness, Mumbai. The bargaining goes on and on.

‘And you know just how good the elder brother is, Tommy Sir. You said Radha Krishna Kumar was the best young batsman you’ve seen in fifty years.’

‘Fifty? Pramod: there hasn’t been a best young batsman in fifty years in the past fifty years. I said best in fifteen years. Don’t just stand there, help me clean up. Bend a bit, Pramod. You’re growing fat.’

Behind glass and steel, behind banks and towers, behind the blue monstrosity of the Bharat Diamond Bourse is a patch of living green: the Mumbai Cricket Association (MCA) Club in the heart of the Bandra-Kurla Financial Centre. Floodlights expose the club’s lawns, on which two men scavenge.

‘I ask you, Pramod, since you insist on talking about cricket, what is the chance of elder and younger brother from the same family becoming great cricketers? It is against Nature.’

‘You distrust sporting brothers, Tommy Sir. Why?’

‘Mistrust, Pramod. Pick up that plastic for me, please.’

‘A master of English cricket and grammar alike, Tommy Sir. You should be writing for the Times of Great Britain.’

‘Of London.’

‘Sorry, Tommy Sir.’

Sucking in his paunch, Pramod Sawant bent down, and lifted a plastic wrapper by its torn edge.

‘The younger brother is called Manjunath Kumar. He’s the biggest secret in Mumbai cricket today, I tell you. The boy is the real thing.’

Chubby, moustached Pramod Sawant, now in his early forties, was a man of some importance in Bombay cricket – head coach at the Ali Weinberg International School, runner-up in last year’s Harris Shield. Head Coach Sawant was, in other words, a fat pipe in the filtration system that sucks in strong wrists, quick reflexes and supple limbs from every part of the city, channels them through school teams, club championships, and friendly matches for years and years, and then one sudden morning pours them out into an open field where two or maybe three new players will be picked for the Mumbai Ranji Trophy team.

But he is nothing if he can’t get Tommy Sir’s attention tonight.

‘No one knows what the real thing looks like, Pramod. I’ve never seen it. How can you tell?’

‘This Manju is a real son of a bitch, I tell you. He’s got this way of deflecting everything off his pads: lots of runs on the leg side. Bit of Sandeep Patil, bit of Sachin, bit of Sobers, but mostly, he’s khadoos. Cricket sponsorship is a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant idea: now you can make it twice as brilliant.’

Grey-haired Tommy Sir, taller and wiser than Coach Sawant, kept his eyes on the lawn.

‘After thirty-nine years of service to Bombay cricket, they make me clean up like a servant, Pramod. After thirty-nine years.’

‘You don’t have to clean up, Tommy Sir. You know it. The peon will do it in the morning. See, I know Manju, the younger brother, is the real thing, because if he’s not, then what is he? A fake. And this boy is not a fake, I promise you.’

Having completed a round of the cricket ground, Tommy Sir had started on a second trash-hunting circle within the previous one.

‘Pramod, the idea that the boy has to be . . .’ he bent down, examined a stone, and let it drop, ‘either real or a fake is a very Western piece of logic.’

He moved on.

‘Do you know what the Jains say, Pramod? Seven varieties of truth exist. Seven. One, this younger brother might in fact be the real thing. Two, he might be a fake. Three, the boy might simultaneously be the real thing and a fake. Four, he might exist in some state beyond reality and fraudulence that we humans cannot hope to comprehend. Five, he might in fact be the real thing and yet exist in a state beyond our poor human capacity to comprehend. Six—’

‘Tommy Sir. Please. I know what I felt in my heart when that boy was batting. I know.’

‘My dear Pramod. Hockey is India’s national game, chess best suits our body type, and football is the future.’

Two old stumps lay in their path. Tommy Sir picked up one and Sawant pretended to pick up the other.

‘Football has been the future for fifty years, Tommy Sir. Nothing will replace cricket.’

The two men walked the rest of the circle in silence, and then Tommy Sir, holding the stump against his chest, started a third tour of the ground.

He spoke at last.

‘Pramod, the great George Bernard Shaw said: they haven’t spoken English in America in decades. And I say about Indians: we haven’t played cricket in decades. At least since 1978. Go home now. I am very tired, I want to hike near Mahabaleshwar this weekend. I dream of mountains, Pramod.’

Sawant, fighting for breath, could see only one piece of uncollected rubbish: a white glove lying in the very centre of the ground. Clenching his fists, he raced Tommy Sir to the glove, and picked it up first.

‘A bit of Sandip Patil meets a bit of Ricky Ponting. You should have seen the boy today.’

‘Are you deaf?’ Tense muscles extended Tommy Sir’s high forehead. ‘In 1978, Sunny Gavaskar lost the ability to leave the ball outside the off-stump, and since then we’ve been playing baseball and calling it cricket. Go home.’

He snatched the glove from Sawant.

Walking to a corner of the ground, he let the rubbish spill from his hands: in the morning, the peon would move all of it into the storeroom.

As Sawant watched, Tommy Sir got into an autorickshaw, which began to move. Then, as if in a silent movie, the auto stopped, and a man’s palm shot out and beckoned.

Loaded now with both men, the auto left the Bandra-Kurla Complex for the highway, and then turned into Kalanagar, where it stopped outside a mildew-stained housing society.

Suffering Sawant to pay the driver, Tommy Sir got out of the autorickshaw; he looked up at the fourth floor of the building to see if his daughter Lata had left the lights on in the kitchen despite his telling her, for twenty-two years, that this was against every principle of Home Science, a wonderful subject which they once used to teach young women in every college in this country.

Tommy Sir pointed at the sky over his housing society: the full moon was balanced on a water tank.

‘Pramod. On a night like this, you know the young people in Bandra just go crazy. Out in the Bandstand, those boys and girls walk all the way out onto the rocks, sit down, start kissing. They forget that the ocean exists. Slowly the tide comes in. Higher and higher.’ The old man raised his fingers to his collarbones. ‘All at once, the young people stop kissing, because they find themselves sitting in the middle of the ocean, and they start screaming for their lives.’

He paused.

‘Pramod – what is the younger one’s name? Manju?’

‘I knew you’d agree, Tommy Sir. You believe in the future of this country. I’ll tell the visionary. I mean the other visionary.’

‘Pramod Sawant: now listen to me. One, this visionary of yours is probably just a bootlegger. Second, I like Radha Kumar, but I don’t like his father. The Chutney Raja is mad. I met him six months ago, remember? Now I have to deal with him twice over?’

‘That’s the only negative point, I agree. The father is mad.’

Tommy Sir blamed the full moon over the watertank for what he said next.

‘How much Sandeep Patil?’

•

For nearly forty years now, a tall, grey-haired man with small eyes had been seen at maidans, school compounds, gymkhanas, members-only clubs, and any other place where boys in white uniforms had gathered. All through the cricket season, either at the Bombay Gymkhana, or at Shivaji Park, or at the Oval Maidan, Tommy Sir would be watching (hands on hips, brows corrugated) and yelling: ‘Greatshot!’ ‘Bow-ling!’ ‘Duffer!’ When he was angry, his jaw shifted. A boy scores a century in the sun, comes back to the school tent expecting an attaboy from the great Tommy Sir, but instead a thick hand smacks the back of his head: ‘What’s wrong with a doublecentury?’ He had broken many a young cricketer’s heart with a sentence or two: ‘Not good enough for this game, son. Try hockey instead.’ Blunt. Tommy Sir was given to the truth as some men are to drink. Once or twice in the season he would take a batsman, after a long and productive innings, to the sugar-cane stand; on such occasions, the boys stood together and watched with open mouths: Mogambo Khush Hua. Tommy Sir is pleased.

Not his real name, obviously. Because Narayanrao Sadashivrao Kulkarni was too long, his friends called him Tommy; and because that was too short, his protégés called him Tommy Sir. Like a Labrador that had been knighted by Her Majesty Queen of England. Ridiculous.

He hated the name.

Naturally, it stuck.

On the day before his marriage in July 1974, he told his wife-to-be, who had arrived by overnight train from a village near Nashik, six salient points about himself. One, this is my salary statement. Read it and understand I am not a man meant to be rich in life. Two, I don’t believe in God. Three, I don’t watch movies, whether Hindi, Hollywood or Marathi. Four, likewise for live theatrical productions. Five, every Sunday when Ranji, Harris, Giles, Vijay Merchant, Kanga or any type of cricket is being played in the city of Bombay, I will not be at home from breakfast to dinner. Six, one weekend a year I go to the Western Ghats near Pune and I have to be absolutely alone that weekend, and Six Point Two, because seven points are too many for any woman to remember, before I die, I want to discover a new Vivian Richards, Hanif Mohammed or Don Bradman. Think about these six points and marry me tomorrow if you want. Afterward don’t regret: I won’t give divorce.

Educated man, literary man, man of many allusions: his column on the traditions of Mumbai cricket was syndicated in sixteen newspapers around India. Artistic man, cultured man, self-taught painter: his watercolour interpretations of black-and-white photos of classic test matches had been exhibited to universal acclaim at the Jehangir Art Gallery a few years ago. Said to be working in secret on a history of the Maratha army in the eighteenth century. Possibly the best talent scout ever seen in India? Thirteen of his discoveries had made the city’s Ranji Trophy team, including ‘Speed Demon’ T.O. Shenoy, bowler of the fastest ball in the city’s history; plus, during a six-month stint in Chennai in the 1990s, he had uncovered two genuine rubies in the South Indian mud who went on to scintillate for Tamil Nadu cricket. On his desktop computer were testimonials from nine current, six retired and two semi-retired Ranji Trophy players; also signed letters of appreciation from the cricket boards of seventeen nations.

And all these people, whether in Mumbai, Tamil Nadu or anywhere else, know the same thing Head Coach Pramod Sawant knows: somewhere out there is the new Sachin Tendulkar, the new Don Bradman, the one boy he has still not found in thirty-nine years – and Tommy Sir wants that boy more than he wants a glass of water on a hot day.

•

There – opposite Victoria Terminus. Disappearing.

Manjunath Kumar ran down the steps towards a tunnel, the black handle of a cricket bat jutting like an abbreviated kendo stick from the kitbag on his left shoulder. Three more steps before he reached the tunnel. Fact Stranger than Fiction: place a glass of boiling water in your freezer next to a glass of lukewarm water. The glass of boiling water turns into ice before the lukewarm water. How does one explain this paradox? The eyes bulged in his dark face, suggesting independence and defiance, but the chin was small and pointy, as if made to please the viewer; a first pimple had erupted on his cheek; and the prominent stitching on the side of his red cricket kitbag stated: ‘Property M.K. – s/o Mr Mohan Kumar, Dahisar’. In his pocket he had fifteen rupees, the exact amount required to buy peanuts and bottled water after the cricket, and a folded page of newspaper. Fact Stranger than Fiction: place a glass of boiling water in your freezer . . . The smelly, cacophonic tunnel was filled, even on a Sunday morning, with humanity, hunting in the raw fluorescent light for sports shoes, colourful shirts, and things that could entertain children. Fact Stranger than . . . Manju worked his way through the crowd. Mechanical toys attempted somersaults over his shoes. To catch his attention, two men stood side by side and slapped green tennis rackets against tin foil, setting off sparks. Electronic mosquito-killers. Only fifty rupees for you, son. How does one explain this paradox . . . Only forty rupees for you, son. In the distance, Manju saw the flight of steps leading up to Victoria Terminus. One half of the steps lay in twilight. There must be a lunette over the entrance of the tunnel, clouded over with one hundred years of Bombay grime. Thirty rupees is as low as I’ll go, even for you, son.

But the upper half of the steps glittered like Christmas tinsel.

Emerging from the tunnel, and about to cross the road to Azad Maidan, he stopped. Manju had spotted him – the boy whom he saw every Sunday, but who wore a different face each time.

The average cricketer.

Today, it was that fellow staring at the footpath as he dragged his bag behind him. Wearing a green cap and stained white clothes. Fourteen years old or so. Talking to himself.

‘. . . missed. Missed by this much. But the umpire . . . blind. And mad, too . . .’

From his side of the road, Manjunath grinned.

Hello, average cricketer.

This was the wreckage of the first match at Azad Maidan – this fellow who was half a foot shorter than he had been at 7 a.m., who was blinking and arguing with the air, cursing the umpire and the bowler and his captain and their captain, and growing shorter every minute, because he knew in his heart that he had never been meant for greatness in cricket.

Hauling his kitbag off his shoulders and lowering it to the pavement, Manju unzipped the bag and extracted his new bat: he held the black handle in both hands, and gripped tight.

And waited.

The average cricketer removed his green cap and raised his head, and the eyes of the two boys met.

Manjunath Kumar showed him how to drive through the covers. He showed him how to attack, defend, and master the red cricket ball.

After which, like W.G. Grace, he stood with his weight on the bat handle. And then stuck his tongue out and rolled his eyeballs.

Across the road, the green cap fell onto the pavement.

Goodbye to you, Prince Manju waved to the average cricketer, and goodbye – Prince Manju turned to his left, then to his right – to all average things.

I am the second-best batsman in the whole world.

•

‘Stop right there. We were talking about you last night. I said, stop.’

The silhouettes of the Municipal Building and the spiked dome of the Victoria Terminus struggled against the morning smog, and the air in between them was scored by cable wires. Blue smoke rose from the garbage burning in a corner.

Between the buildings and the burning garbage stood a fat man, trying to catch Manjunath like a football goalie.

‘Come back, boy. Come back at once.’

With a grin, Manjunath surrendered, and walked back to where Head Coach Sawant stood.

‘Did you hear what I was saying? I said, we were talking about you last night. “We” means two people. So, who was the other man talking about your future? Ask me.’

Instead of which, Manju, drawing a hand from his cricket bag, showed the coach something.

‘What is this?’ Sawant asked, as the boy handed him a disturbingly large page of the Sunday newspaper.

‘Please, sir. What is the answer?’

Sawant took the Paradox in both hands. His brain struggled with High School Physics and his lips with Newspaper English.

. . . place a glass of boiling water in . . .

‘I have no idea, Manju. No idea at all. Take it back. Manju,’ the coach said, ‘why have you brought this to cricket? Is there no one at home you can show this to? What about your—’

‘My mother is away on a long holiday, sir.’

As Manju folded his precious piece of newspaper and tucked it into his cricket kitbag, Sawant studied him from head to toe, like a man wondering if he has made a bad decision.

‘Tommy Sir was the other man talking about you. You know what it means if he takes an interest in a boy.’

But Manju had flown.

‘Hey, Manjuboy! Come over here!’

Twenty other young cricketers stood around a red stone-roller with ‘Tiger’ written twice on it. They had been waiting for him.

‘Chutneyboy! Look at the chutneyboy come running.’

‘Chutneyboy who wants to be a Young Lion. Come here!’

It was a court-martial: a boy was holding up one of those new phones that were also tiny television sets, and Manju was told to stand on the stone-roller, while the circle tightened around him.

As Manju rose above the circle of white, Sawant, hands on his hips, walked around the stone-roller for a better view.

The boys were making Manju watch, as a woman reporter aimed a mike at a tall teenager, handsome enough in every other way too, but whose eyes, cool grey clouds, were like a snow leopard’s.

‘Chutney Raja! That’s what they call your father, Manju. Chutney Raja!’

‘You heard them on TV. My big brother is a Young Lion.’

‘Chutney Raja SubJunior! All you’re good for is your science textbooks. What do you know about batting?’

‘Thomas, today I’ll hit you for three fours one after the other. Then, I’ll hit you for three sixes. What did you say about my father?’

‘He’s a Chutney Raja.’

‘And what is your father then?’

‘Your brother is Chutney Raja Junior. That makes you—’

(Secret from God? Shit. Your father really is mad.)

(Ashwin. I heard that. Two fours!)

(This is true! This really happened!)

(Shut up, Chutney Raja SubJunior! And why is your brother called Radha? Isn’t that a girl’s name?)

•

Enough! Flailing his arms, Manju scattered his tormentors from the stone-roller: time for real cricket, at last.

‘. . . SubJunior! Get ready to bat!’

‘Oh Champion of Champions!’

A drum-beat had begun at the far end of the maidan. Padded up, helmeted, and swinging his bat in circles over his head, Manju walked up to the crease.

At noon, he was still batting. Manju Kumar had kept his word to the bowlers, punishing each one of them in a different way for what they had said about his father (and about his brother having a girl’s name), lofting Thomas over mid-wicket, driving Ashwin twice through the covers, and cutting, pulling and flicking the others.

Pramod Sawant stood, arms folded across his chest, and watched Manju: passing over the boy’s dark, eye-heavy face, pointy chin and solitary pimple, and then over his shoulders and biceps, to settle on the crucial part of a batsman’s body. In Australia they bat with their footwork. In India we do it with our wrists. Manjunath Kumar’s forearms in action made his coach’s mouth water. Dark and defined cunning, those forearms were broader than the biceps; they were a twenty-five-year-old man’s forearms grafted onto the body of a four-foot ten-inch child; they were forearms which, as they petted, coaxed, and occasionally bludgeoned the hard red ball to the boundary, made Head Coach Sawant remember, with a shiver, the muscular man in black shorts who had come to his village with the travelling circus three decades ago.

•

There – shirtless, on the floor of a 320-square-foot box of brick. Home. Manjunath was back in the one-room brick shed, divided by a green curtain, where he had lived since his father brought him and his brother to Mumbai, nine years ago. Pressing his palms against his cheeks, the boy went over the newspaper once again:

One theory relies on the ‘Lake Effect’, which is seen in the cold countries of northern America . . .

His cricket gear lay around him, and he was stripped to his waist.

Manju saw shadows moving in the blade of light beneath the closed metal door of his home. His father was outside, answering the neighbours’ questions. When is Radha Krishna coming back? Does he think he is too big now to talk to his own neighbours?

On the table there was dinner made by his aunt (or possibly great-aunt) Sharadha. The world was in order, except for one Scientific Paradox.

A quick crust of ice forms over the lake, keeping the water underneath it liquid all through winter. Similarly, when lukewarm water freezes, a thin crust forms on top. In a glass of boiling water, in contrast, evaporating steam stops the . .

A clattering noise made him look up: a vermin cavalry went galloping over the corrugated tin roof. Rats, rushing towards the flour-mill in the centre of the slum. Manju turned on the television, and increased the volume.

Reaching far behind the television set, he picked up an instant-noodle cup filled with dark mud in which two horsegram beans, planted forty-eight hours ago, had sprouted. New life, fathered by Master Manjunath. He looked at the tender shoots paternally, spilled big drops of water from a glass into the pot, and then returned the life-bearing cup to its hiding place behind the TV.

The final image of the day’s episode flashed on television: the cadaver of an American man lying naked on a green dissecting table under a cone of hard white light, before the screen went black and the credits rolled.

Manju looked down at his own body: that thing had started again – he was hard. It was happening all the time now, sometimes even when his father or brother were in the same room. He lay down and pressed himself against the floor.

He wondered what colour his cock had become under the pressure of his own body: and then he felt that it was liquefying under the weight, and spreading, an icy liquid, all around him.

Now he found himself on a frozen lake. He was not alone here. Beamed from the CSI inspection table, the foreigner’s cadaver now lay in the middle of the lake.

Promoted to the elite squad of CSI Las Vegas, Agent Manjunath Kumar-Grissom crawls, scraping the surface of the ice with his right toenail, inching nearer and nearer to the naked dead body that he must retrieve; but when he is almost there, click, crack, the surface of the lake starts to break under him.

Whistles and cheers explode all around – Ra-dha! Ra-dha! – for a Young Lion has just returned to the slum, but Manju, who must now go out and smile for the neighbours, is still on the floor, trying to crush his hard-on.

•

An egret flew in from the river and watched the boy, who lay above a well, watching a turtle.

It was an open well, the kind that still exists in a suburb like Dahisar, raised three inches from the ground and covered by a rusty iron grille: and as he lay face down on it Manju watched something beneath the water’s skin.

His legs made a ‘V’ on the chequerwork of the grid, which creaked as he shifted his weight. Through its interstices, he shone a pen-torch down on the black water.

He lanced his beam of light around the well. There! Splashing out of the black water, it came curiously to the light, a dark and domed creature, its limbs paddling fast.

Manju turned his pen-torch off, and put his face to the cold grille. His heart beat hard against his ribcage which beat in turn against the metal of the grid. In a few hours he would have his chemistry class. He knew a surprise test was coming.

Please, please, help me: O God of Cricket and also of Chemistry.

From the depths of the well, a cool draught tickled his cheek; the boy’s imagination transformed it into a breath from a range of blue mountains. He felt his hair blowing in the breeze: the mountain air of the Western Ghats.

Each summer, the family went back to their village. Taking the train from Mumbai to Mangalore, they then got on a bus that carried them over the hills and towards the shrine of the God of Cricket, their family deity, Kukke Subramanya; past trees with red leaves, and little streams that skipped a heartbeat when a schoolboy leapt into them, past waterfalls shrouded in waterfalls, until they reached a temple hidden deep inside the Western Ghats, where, leaving the bus, and standing in line for hours, moving past burning camphor and sharp temple bells, past a nine-headed painted snake, the protector Vasuki, they finally came to the silver doorframes, beyond which, lit by oil lamps, waited the thousand-year-old God of Cricket, Subramanya.

‘Remind Him, my sons. We can’t offer Him much money. So remind Him, monkeys.’

‘One of us should become the best batsman in the world, and the other the second best.’

Mohan Kumar had his own way of reminding God. As he did each year, he rolled barechested over the hard granite floor of the temple, rolled from one side of the wall to the other, and then back again, until his torso was lacerated, and the secret contract was renewed in his blood.

‘Are you licking yourself again?’

‘No,’ Manju said. ‘Just watching.’

‘Get up.’

Manju didn’t.

And now Radha lowered himself beside Manju, and there were two bodies lying on the old metal grid over the well.

‘Let’s go. He must have woken by now,’ Radha said.

Manju pointed the pen-torch to a spot below them.

‘It’s that turtle again. She’s the mother.’

‘Maybe. Let’s go home. He may hit you again if he’s in a bad mood, Manju.’

‘It is the mother. I’m not going till you agree that it is the mother.’

‘I can’t see it from here, Manju.’

‘I’m showing you, I’m showing you.’

Radha, the Young Lion, was square-jawed, tall and muscular, and was sometimes mistaken for Manju’s uncle, though there was just a year and a month between them. He strained to see through the grating to where his younger brother was directing the pen-torch beam.

‘See. The mother. Do you agree? Then we can go.’

‘Wait, Manju. Point the light over there. I think there’s one more.’

The pen-torch moved: a second turtle was discovered. It raised its head towards its two human observers. How fascinating, it seemed to be saying, to see the turtles that live in that bigger darkness up there. Done, it lost interest in the boys, and sank back into the water.

‘Do you agree? That’s the mother. Then we can go.’

Manjunath Kumar pressed against his brother’s body; the warmth sharpened his senses.

Suddenly a new turtle came into view: its body angled towards the light, jaw wide open, a rim of gold glistening around its shell.

‘Manju, you’re wrong. That’s the mother. It’s bigger.’

‘I’ve hidden it behind the TV,’ Manju whispered.

‘What?’

‘My biology experiment. I want full marks in class this time.’

Two months ago, his model fighter jet plane, a project for his Physics class, left on the dining table, had mysteriously vanished after he had put four days of work into it.

‘He’s going to find it anyway, and then he’ll throw it out, Manju. Come. We have to go. He’s woken up by now.’

‘I want to watch the turtle.’

‘Manju, it’s not that morning.’

‘I want to watch the turtle.’

‘Manju, it’s not a check-up morning,’ his brother said. ‘Don’t be afraid.’ Radha poked his brother in the ribs. ‘And if you don’t come now, I’ll show him where you’ve hidden your science experiment.’

The brothers looked at each other for a moment: then both bodies sprang from the well and ran.

Their father had already folded up their cots and propped them against the wall, forming two isosceles triangles; his own cot was on the other side of the green curtain. Next to the dining table stood a metal almirah, which complained of its years of ill treatment in a rash of rusty patches and livid scars; leaning on three of its sides were seven cricket bats.

Old Sharadha, relative of some kind, aunt or great-aunt, polyglot remonstrator in Kannada, Hindi and English, the only woman to have entered their home for a decade, perhaps longer (neither boy can remember exactly when She left), was cleaning the stove and last night’s dishes.

Standing before the mirror on his side of the green curtain, Mohan Kumar was painting his moustache, a grooming procedure that could take a quarter of an hour. He turned around with his dye-brush and looked at his sons.

‘Were you looking at girls again? Naked girls bathing in the morning?’

‘No, Appa. We were looking at turtles.’

‘Boys,’ Mohan Kumar said, closing his eyes and restraining his anger. ‘If you are looking at naked girls, half-naked bathing girls, tell me. I will not punish. But don’t lie. What were you two looking at?’

Emerging with a pitch-black moustache, Mohan called his second son to him, held his chin, and turned his face from side to side.

‘There’s blood in your cheeks, Manju. That comes from hormones. You were looking at girls, weren’t you?’

‘No, Appa.’

When Mohan Kumar raised his hand, his palm rotated ninety degrees to the left and vibrated, like a man having a fit just as he was saluting; Manju cringed and readied himself; the blow fell on the right side of his face.

In ten minutes, the boys were in school uniform and had packed their cricket bags: they stood at attention while Mohan slid his fingers into the bags to check their contents.

And then, closing the door of their home behind them, the family Kumar left for cricket practice.

When they passed the tyre-repair place with the sign saying PUNCHER SHOP, Manju stopped, and shouted, ‘Wrong, that’s wrong!’

‘Quiet,’ Radha said.

But when he looked at his father, Manju knew that he wanted him to continue: he was proud of his son, smarter than everyone else his age in the slum.

‘Do You Want Pan Card!’ Manju raised his voice. ‘Pumpkin Carrot Banana Shapes Fruit and Vegetable Salad Decorators! Pandal, Marriage, Birthday Experts! Everything in English is written the wrong way and I alone know!’

But Manjunath Kumar, world’s second-best batsman, knew something much more important than how to spell English correctly: Manju knew how to read other people’s minds. It had come to him like one of those special things that some children can do; like being able to move your ears without touching them or curling your tongue up as if it were a dried leaf or flexing your thumb all the way back. If he let himself be still, Manju could tell what other people wanted from him. And he could complete their sentences for them.

He knew that this secret gift, this mind-reading power, had come to him from his mother. Her long, elegant nose; her ravishing smile; her way of looking at him sideways – he remembered all this about his mother. This, too: her sitting on a sofa, fixing her beautiful smile on her visitors, all the time rubbing the silver coin embossed with the image of Lord Subramanya that hung from her marriage-necklace as if it were an amulet that read minds for her. She could always say what her guests wanted to hear, and she pampered them with flattery after flattery, till they left her with their egos refreshed and glowing, as if they had just stepped out of a hammam; and then one day, she read his father’s mind and vanished. That is what saved her from being killed by Mohan Kumar. Manju was sure of it. That is why their mother had never come back to see Radha or him, even though she must have heard they were famous. She was so scared of her husband she had forgotten her sons.

Right now, reading his father’s mind, knowing what he had to do to give him satisfaction and pleasure, Manjunath kept shouting in English, while Radha (who did not have his brother’s secret gift) protested:

‘Didn’t you hear him? Shut up, Manju.’

Manju did shut up: but only because of the grinding noise and a cloud of particulated flour produced by the wheat-mill. It was a tyrant of blue pipes and funnels, the most famous object in the slum, which brought even people from good buildings to Shastrinagar every morning. The noise and choking white dust temporarily pacified the youngest Kumar, but then he began again:

‘Internet Gaming Cyber Mahesh Cafe!’

‘Manju, shut up, I told you. I know English too, but I’m not showing off.’

Following their father, the boys had passed the shuttered shops of their slum, and through a cardboard WELCOME TO OUR HOME arch. The gift of a political party, it was painted blue, and covered by the beaming, disembodied faces of city, statewide and national leaders, at least two of whom were serving jail sentences, a fact which only heightened the impression that they were so many medieval criminals whose grinning heads had been hoisted up above a city gate. An observer from a distance, however, might well judge that the faces on the blue arch were so many genies gathered there to perform friendly magic: for the family Kumar now appeared to be walking on water.

The slum had grown at the very edge of Mumbai’s municipal limits. For most of the year, the Dahisar river was a rock-filled sewer, lit up by egrets and the flutter of a paddy-bird returning to its nest of twigs. A series of bricks, spaced two feet apart in the water, formed a makeshift bridge: their father had hoisted his cycle over his head, and the boys followed him step by step, as they crossed over the river and into the rest of Mumbai.

At the station – get in, get in – Mohan pushed the slow cricketers and their bags into the fast train. Hurry, hurry. Miss this train and there won’t be space on the next one. It’ll be rush hour. Yes, I know there’s an empty seat, but you can’t sit down, Manju. All three of us will stand. I don’t want anyone sleeping in the train and yawning during practice.

A thin, tall gap-toothed child went about the first-class carriage, offering or threatening to polish shoes for five rupees each. Mohan Kumar’s shoes were polished for free. As he worked, the gap-toothed child looked up at the father of cricketers.

‘Young Lions? Young Lions. Young Lions? Young Lions. Young Lions?’

‘I sell unique chutneys,’ Mohan told one passenger after the other. ‘Twenty-four chutneys for each hour of the day. You like Mint? We have Mint. Garlic? We have Extra Garlic. Chilli, Hot Chilli, Green Chilli, Sweet Chilli, Mango, Rainbow, 100 per cent vegetarian.’

Manju leaned his face to his brother’s shirt and dozed against his body.

At Bandra, the family Kumar got off and walked along the pedestrian bridge, a grid of inverted ‘V’s, that zigged and zagged, yellow and metallic, over the swamps and green vacant fields of east Bandra. The sun burned, the wet earth reflected, and the two brothers knew they had to run. Down the yellow bridge, in the direction of the Kalanagar Traffic Signal. Radha surged. Yee-haah. Manju wanted to touch his brother – I’ve caught you, I’ve . . . But to his right (he surrendered a yard to his brother) he saw fields of water-lilies, and right beside them newly rutted mud roads on which men fought to move their motorbikes. He caught up with Radha and they ran past security guards playing with their lathis, and a cluster of Muslim youth with their feet dangling down the bridge. Because their father was now invisible behind them, Radha turned to his brother and—

‘Sofia.’

At once both of them skidded to a halt.

‘Spotty Neck Sofia.’

Putting his hands on his hips, Manju turned his lower lip inside out; while Radha, just a year older but so much wiser, smiled.

‘Everyone saw Young Lions on TV.’ He touched his brother on the shoulder. ‘You’re the brother of a Young Lion. Which girl in school do you like?’

By way of reply, Manju said, ‘Shut up,’ because their father was coming up behind them.

The three walked down from the bridge and went into the suburb of Kalanagar.

An armoured car painted in camouflage drove past them; they had reached the Matoshree compound, home to the most important man in Mumbai. Surrounded by sandbags, a machine-gun unit guarded the home of Bal Thackeray, Permanent Boss of the city. They passed the guns, and roadside canteens serving hot breakfast, and then the Kumars stood before the Middle Income Group (MIG) Cricket Club.

Making his sons wait by the gate, Mohan Kumar negotiated with the security guard:

‘We were on the TV. Young Lions. We’re here to see . . .’

‘Tommy Sir doesn’t come until ten o’clock.’

‘He told us nine o’clock. We came all the way for him. My boys shouldn’t miss a day’s cricket practice.’

‘Can’t practise here,’ the guard said. ‘Down the road.’

Where they found a rubbish dump, and a patch of ragged green beyond it.

Radha and his father took the ragged green. Manju strapped on his pads near the rubbish, one eye on the big holes in the ground. Rat-holes. Tightening his calf-muscle, Manju raised his right foot on a low brick wall to double-check that his pads were fastened. Going down on his haunches, Manju now launched himself over the rat-holes. Master Kumar, Rat-Tamer, jumped up and down; underground, rodents shivered. While doing his jumps, Manju turned himself 180 degrees, to see his father lecturing Radha.

‘The bat is touching your toes, Radha. You won’t be able to drive cleanly.’

Manju saw the irritation on his brother’s face.

But the Man had to be obeyed, and Radha readjusted his stance. From a distance, Manju gripped his bat and waited. Radha Kumar attacked; Manjunath Kumar imitated.

The ball had flown from Radha’s bat to a distant corner of the wasteland, and Manju took off, until his father announced: ‘He who hit it will retrieve it. That is the rule.’

So Radha raised his bat, sucked his teeth, and ran after the ball.

Radha Krishna Kumar meant to honour his end of his father’s contract with God. Two years ago, God sent his living viceroy, Sachin Tendulkar, to meet Radha at a practice match at the MCA grounds: Sachin stood at the wicket, and Radha was tossed the ball by Tommy Sir. The boy, who had let his hair grow long, like Sachin’s, and had watched Sachin’s videos, especially Perth 1992 and Sydney 2004, at least 120 times each, spun the ball right past Sachin’s forward defensive stroke and into his stumps. ‘Well done, sir,’ God’s viceroy said and, as everyone clapped, made Radha the gift of his own batting gloves.

At the age of fourteen and a half, Radha was now conscious that his father’s rules, which had framed the world around him since he could remember, were prison bars. He saw the red cricket ball inside a thicket of wild grass and thorns. Getting down on his knees he put his hand into the thorns.

Why must a boy not shave till he’s twenty-one?

Because the cut of a razor makes hormones run faster in his blood.

And why must a boy not drive a car till his father allows him to?

Because indiscipline will destroy anything, even a secret contract with God.

Drenched in sweat and his father’s mad theories, Radha seized the ball and threw it back at Mohan, who had already started stepping back to catch it. Radha admired the method, the textbook correctness of his father’s pose. Before teaching his boys, Mohan Kumar had taught himself the science of cricket. But when the ball landed in his palms, it hit the flesh and bounced out, and Radha smiled, and became a year older.

‘I told you not to come! He hates fathers!’

Radha and Manju saw Pramod Sawant, their head school coach, half walking and half running towards them, pumping his arms.

Mohan Kumar summoned his boys to his side and put his arms on their shoulders, as if posing for a group photo.

‘They’re my children, I made them,’ he shouted back, ‘and neither you nor your Tommy Sir is going to steal them from me.’

Coach Sawant clacked his tongue.

‘Steal them? This boy loves you, Mohan. If anyone says a bad word about his father, Manju will murder them. But for their sake, you must leave now. Tommy Sir’s plan is visionary.’

Mohan Kumar pulled both his restless sons into his body.

‘Why must I leave? My sons always play better when I am watching them. I’ve never heard of a cricket scout who doesn’t like fathers.’

But Coach Sawant reached over and squeezed Mohan Kumar’s right shoulder.

‘Do it for your sons, Mohan . . .’

After a moment, Kumar let go of Radha. Part of any Bombay school coach’s job is to declaw the parent and gently prise from his grip the boys who will contribute to the greater glory of Bombay cricket. Sawant smiled, pointed at Manju, and made ingratiating contractions with his eyes.

‘. . . both your sons, Mohan. And you must go now.’