Rashid Latif hit the winning runs, and a cry rang out in the stadium. A beautiful woman in a salwaar kameez clapped emphatically.
For the “big one” the stadium was full again. Pakistanis jostled one another; and Indians jostled Pakistanis; and here and there, sheikhs, cell phones in their hands, deshabille, in small, male harems, looked around them, listening to the roar. Boycott knelt in his pressed trousers and short-sleeved shirt and felt the pitch with an arcane hesitation again and again. It was like a dry piece of land, a bit of Arabia, that had never been rained on. He patted it one last time and said to the camera: “Yes, Rahvi, the pitch is flat and true, and there will be runs in it”—as if “runs” were some sort of seed that would sprout shortly, and unexpectedly, from the barren soil.
Mrs. Shweta Kapoor, wife of the relatively recently appointed CEO of Britannia India, was sitting not far from Urmila Deshpande, whom she didn’t know, but whose last film, Jaadu—“Magic”—she’d seen twice already. The Pakistanis won the toss, elected to bat, and every time Saeed Anwar executed the pull shot, the camera panned to the celebrating Pakistanis and the studiedly sceptical faces of the Indians, and also to Shweta Kapoor, who’d once been a newsreader, a personality in her own right, and to her husband, whose youthful face was overhung by prematurely greying hair, and then to Urmila Deshpande, who was inscrutable and indecipherable behind her dark glasses. There was a rumour, uncorroborated, that she was seeing Jadeja, who was standing hunched, not far away, at mid-off.
The previous day, both Mrs. Kapoor and Urmila Deshpande had had their hair done at the Hilton; Urmila had acquired the permanent curls she’d need for a film once she got back. Mrs. Kapoor had bought a portable CD player, with a three-CD changer, for her son. The camera now discovered a group of men in the cheaper stalls who were holding up a placard: HI URMILA YOU HAVE DONE JAADU TO OUR HEARTS. The moment they realised they were on television, the sign began to vibrate as if it were alive in their hands. The next minute Ijaz Ahmed was out to a catch at gully held by Azharuddin. The camera showed Mrs. Kapoor smiling and saying something to a beautiful woman next to her, as if exchanging a particularly unworthy piece of gossip; and then it showed a young man clapping, fair, with blond hair, colourless eyes, who could have passed for a European but for the fullness of his lips.
“They’re all there,” said Inspector Khatau, sucking in his stomach.
“Who’s he — never heard of him?” Yusuf asked with justifiable irritation.
Raghav Chopra had displayed his latest collection only two weeks ago at the Taj: cholis, twenty-first-century ghagras; “Clothes are a language that changes before other languages do,” he’d said in an interview. Mita Reddy had been one of the models. In her column, Mita Reddy had been christened “a dark Kate Moss” by Shobha De, a “will-o’-the-wisp.”
“Where is Sharjah?” asked Khatau finally.
“I don’t know,” said Yusuf, looking blank. “Near Du-Dubai.” He added, “That guy doesn’t look Indian, yaar!”
As far as everyone knew, though, Raghav Chopra was a real blond. How he’d come to be one was a mystery no one enquired into. The colour of the hair had changed probably as the universe had changed temperature; just as orange frogs were found recently in English gardens.
“Three hundred and five,” said Khatau, rising suddenly. “Phew!”
All out, 305 runs. Boycott proclaimed that defeat was at hand.
“It’s a known fact,” he said, “that Eendiuns are no good at chasing!” He shook his head and seemed to smile in bewilderment at his words. Floodlights had been switched on about an hour ago, night had come and brought with it a school of dragonflies cruising through the field. The saris were lit up, and the women moved uncomfortably. The desert sky was like a great, empty theatre.
Twenty minutes later, Tendulkar came out with his heavy bat in one hand, followed by the taller, shuffling Ganguly. The camera noted two people in deep conversation, but it was impossible to hear what they were saying.
“Sachin’s our secret weapon,” observed one of them, a gentlewoman who lived on Malabar Hill in a flat overlooking Kamala Nehru Park.
“And not Trishul or any of the other warheads?” said her husband’s colleague. She smiled politely and refused to indicate that she’d understood, then fanned herself gently with a magazine.
As Aquib Javed bowled the first ball, the crowd’s voice swelled in a hum and then subsided again. On the television screen, Tendulkar’s bat, its face as remorseless as its staunch owner’s, descended straight on the ball and hit it onto the ground. A deep thud, magnified by the microphone in the stump, accompanied this event.
“Hey! Hey!” said Khatau. “Look, bhai.”
The camera had come to rest, in innocence, on the face of a man scratching his cheek.
“It’s our man, bhai! It’s our bridegroom, who left at the wedding!”
The camera now withdrew prudently to a safer place, a minor and timid crook in a nasty area. Then, panning from a group of agitated men holding up a sign saying TON-dulkar, it framed the man who’d been scratching his cheek thoughtfully moments earlier, sitting next to the chairman of the Board of Cricket Control and his wife and, a few seats to the right, Urmila Deshpande, who seemed absorbed in the course of the match.
“Saala!” said Yusuf; and his mouth remained open.
“Don’t abuse your brother-in-law,” said Khatau, but he didn’t feel like laughing.
The man who’d almost blown up Bombay, who’d had bombs placed in Nariman Point and Dadar and eleven other places, had taken care to wear a pale, pressed green shirt, and had probably had a haircut; he now took out a cell phone. With excessive politeness, he spoke a few words into the receiver. His face, when in close-up, revealed a ravaged and uneven skin.
* * *
THERE WERE sixty runs on the board, forty-six of them made by Tendulkar off fifty balls, when the sky darkened. The weather reports had made no predictions; the batsmen looked up at what little they could see of the sky. The floodlights dimmed.
“Oh dear, oh dear, it seems like a dooststorm,” said Boycott.
The women in the expensive seats looked uneasy; their husbands laughed in their suits and belligerently talked business with one another. A man leaned forward and said something in Ummar Aziz’s ear. Tony Greig and Gavaskar initiated a detailed discussion of the match so far, and replays of a brighter time, when batsmen had played their shots in the light of day, began to be shown.
“Chai lau?” said a ten-year-old boy in shorts.
“No, idiot,” said Khatau. “What, tea at this time of the night?” Reprimanded, the boy sat down quietly, and gratefully, on the floor before the television.
Every time the camera returned to the ground, it showed the dust swirling in minute particles across it. Tendulkar was still wearing his protective headgear, boiling in the dressing room, staring back hard at the night; yet, in the prolific commercial breaks, there he was again, leaning against a van and drinking Pepsi-Cola, or wearing a striped T-shirt and flashing a Visa card. Meanwhile, the Bombay housewives pressed saris against their faces and looked for a moment like local Muslim women; but Urmila Deshpande’s face remained composed, as if nothing had happened. Again and again, the commentators scrutinised a slow-motion almost-run-out from the afternoon, Saeed Anwar raising his bat and setting out infinitesimally on his long odyssey, while Ijaz Ahmed, too, in agonising protractedness, lunged towards the white line.