But I never thought of myself as a visitor; and I do not know what my cousins thought, as we finished reading our stories in different languages, and looked up, and became conscious once more of the house, with secret flashlight signals and demons who could grow eight times their size in a minute still in our heads. Once finished, the books lost their interest, but remained precious as material objects, that we would pretend to sell each other as make-believe hawkers. But our worlds, essentially, remained locked to each other; we never read each others’ stories, though I admired the covers of their books, with severed heads dripping blood, and dragonfly-wing-frail princesses. They would never know what it meant to live outside this world, as I did, of magic and small means; and I would never know what it meant to grow up reading those stories by Saradindu and Sukumar Ray and Hemendra Kumar, and to be transported, for that half hour, more completely into another world, as I believed, than I was.
The Great Game
IT WAS INHUMAN to play cricket at this time of the year, in this heat, but that was precisely what they were doing these days. Moreover, the team was being sent out into that cauldron to pick up something called the Pepsi Cup. You had to feel for them, though they looked like young braves. While others might shop at the airport in Dubai, one would expect them not to glance at the watches and shapely state-of-the-art CD players, to have nothing but a glass of orange juice at the hotel before going into the nets.
Among them was Tendulkar, whose name, everyone agreed, sounded like an ancient weapon of destruction, and who carried a one-and-a-half-ton bat. He disembarked from the plane with a singleness of purpose, and a sealed, expressionless face. He and the “boys” (though you wouldn’t ordinarily call Azharuddin a “boy”) were here to deal with the English and the vigorous Pakistanis, mainly the Pakistanis, who came from a country that had sprung troublingly from a gash in the side of their own about fifty years ago.
Among the spectators was to be Ummar Aziz, who had no place to hide in India and who, rumour had it, had been living around here in a mansion with a swimming pool for the last three years. He had expertly orchestrated a series of explosions in Bombay in 1993, bombs that had gone off in the Air India Building and in Prabhadevi, not to speak of eleven other places. He strenuously denied it, but from this safe haven; and indeed the charge might be a fiction dreamed up by the police. It was heard that he was coming not so much because of his love of cricket, which was considerable, or of the Indian or Pakistani teams (the Pakistani side was a depleted one, with its main bowlers discredited and removed), but because of his fascination with Urmila Deshpande, the star of Ishq and Jaadu, who was also going to be present. Ummar Aziz had been watching Hindi films since he’d been an orphan child of the Bombay streets.
The team practised nimbly, without exhausting themselves. Now and then a reporter or a television crew came and asked them questions. When Azharuddin answered the questions, you could see the others in the background, throwing their arms about, Tendulkar doing exercises, his glasses so dark they bore no reflection. When he spoke, you had to look at his mouth because of the challenge his dark glasses threw you.
The English were the first to wilt. Ganguly hit the winning shot, a six that saw the ball take flight in a way unlike any bird in these surroundings. Then, the desert sun long set, he got the first Man of the Match award of the tour.
Watching him ascend the crowded podium on a small Sony television, and talk with some assurance, Khatau, who’d just returned from a hard day in the tenements in South Bombay, commented to his colleague Mohammed Yusuf that Ummar Aziz didn’t seem to have come to watch the game.
“He certainly wasn’t in the crowd; otherwise they would have shown him.” Khatau and Mohammed Yusuf were policemen who regretted the way Aziz had, one day, slipped like sand through their fingers. All those explosions; they hadn’t been able to do anything about it. Here they were four years later, on their sofas, watching Ganguly under the floodlights.
“Arrey, he won’t go to these small-fry games,” Yusuf said, shaking his head slowly and with great conviction, while looking at an English player waiting tentatively in the background. Ganguly was shaking hands with Ravi Shastri. Yusuf wasn’t looking at them but staring at the screen and thinking. “He’ll come to the big one,” he concluded; or words to that effect.
The “big one” was still a few days away, however, days and nights away that is, because they were all “day and night” games, inducing a degree of sleeplessness in the spectator. Before then there was Pakistan versus India, or India versus Pakistan (whichever way you decided to think of it), and Pakistan versus England. After that England would take the first flight out to Heathrow, leaving the battleground open to the warring cousins.
The next day Mita Reddy, former Miss India and runner-up Miss Universe, who had only last year surprised everyone by saying to a panel of judges that her favourite person was Mrs. Gandhi—“Indira Gandhi?” “No, Kasturbabai Gandhi,” embarrassing all by invoking the Mahatma’s small, self-effacing, long dead wife — was seen in the stands, sitting next to Marshneill Gavaskar, grinning because she could see herself on television. She smiled; and waved — at whom, no one, among the millions watching, knew.
During the thirty-fifth over, by which time seven wickets had fallen for 126 runs, and an Indian medium-pacer and an all-rounder were putting up an obdurate partnership, there was a spell of inactivity that sometimes occurs in the middle of an over, when members of both teams suddenly forget the thousands in the stadium and the TV cameras, and behave like a family inside a house, unaware they’re being watched. Tony Greig and a minor English ex-bowler were sitting in the commentator’s box and discussing plans and strategies, while the little microphone in one of the stumps, placed there to detect the sound of a nick, eavesdropped on two players conversing:
“Lagta hai woh Aziz kal ayegaa.”
Greig was too busy composing a litany about Aussie spin-bowling, even if he’d known any Hindi, to register anything; but Khatau, on his sofa, heard the comment, though at first he wasn’t quite sure he had. Yusuf confirmed with a nod that he’d heard it, too. They hadn’t realised that they had an informant in the middle-stump microphone on the pitch; but then the game started again. Someone had said Aziz would come tomorrow; they couldn’t be sure if it was one of the Indians, or a Pakistani, or one of the Indians passing on the information to a Pakistani, or vice versa. Any of these alternatives might be the right one.
“Fantastic shot,” said Yusuf, as Srinath belted an unexpected cover drive.
Then the camera moved to a tall and swarthy Ravi Shastri, his cricketing days long over, but finding himself in the midst of a commentary renaissance, a tie knotted round his neck, laughing and talking to Anju Mahindra, who had once almost married Rajesh Khanna and gone out with Sir Garfield Sobers. She was past her heyday; even the long-distance lens couldn’t conceal the tiredness beneath her eyes; she looked abstracted as she listened to Ravi Shastri.
“Is that what they get paid for, yaar?” asked Khatau, reaching for his beer.
“God it must be hot over there,” said Yusuf.
But, contrary to what the microphone in the stump had told them, there was no Aziz the next day, and neither had the more raucous Pakistani supporters, with their shining green flags, come; were they not interested in watching England lose? The Bombay “glitterati” were there again, dutifully, the executive vice president of Pepsi sitting next to the chairman of the Board of Cricket Control in his dark glasses, their wives, in their flaming saris which might have received interrogatory looks from passersby in the streets outside, smiling vacantly at the camera as they stared back at their friends in Bombay, to all appearances unmoved by the hot desert breath. Their children, in striped T-shirts and shorts or jeans, either leaned and lolled against their fathers or revolved like satellites around their parents and parents’ friends, tripping lightly down the steps.