When play resumed an hour later, Tendulkar came back looking intent; at the other end, Ganguly began to prod the ball gently and sent it to somewhere near the boundary. Raghav Chopra ran his hand through his hair; it looked absolutely white in the floodlights. The women from Bombay self-consciously dusted their saris.
“If there’s anyone who can win India the match,” said Ravi Shastri in his oratorial voice, “it’s that man out there.” For no one referred to Tendulkar by name anymore.
“He’s gone,” said Khatau, despondent.
Ummar Aziz had disappeared; Khatau had been absorbing this fact for the last five minutes. Urmila had gone as well, probably to a different destination, but he couldn’t help noticing it. The one nondescript and aging, the other resplendent. “Beauty and the Beast,” thought Khatau in bold letters.
Almost immediately, Tendulkar, on sixty-one, was bowled by an in-swinger. One large section of the crowd — the Indians — stared into the distance, as if a film they’d been watching had been stopped midway. The others danced festively, as if a country separated them from the Indians.
“How did that happen,” enquired Boycott, “to the little master?”
The executive vice president of Pepsi moved impatiently in his seat; he’d been talking to his companion about a rival bid from Coke at that moment. Tendulkar, his head bowed beneath his visor, strode heavily towards the pavilion; but, almost immediately, he was drinking Pepsi, leaning against a van, and flashing a Visa card (“Now You Go Get It”), indifferent to his debacle.
“But how did you know, yaar?” said Yusuf, curving the palm of his hand in a question.
“What?” asked Khatau, straightening his shirt.
“You said just now, ‘He’s gone.’ How did you know he’s going to be out?” Yusuf smiled. “You’re a clairvoyant or what?”
The dismissal was shown twice from the point of view of the stump camera: the ball rising from near the batsman’s feet, so quickly as almost to hit Khatau’s and Yusuf’s faces, and then the lens falling backward and staring lidlessly at the sky, a dead eye gazing at space.
In spite of the floodlights, the Indians in the stadium could see only darkness about them. It was left to Ganguly and Jadeja, throwing huge and fluent shadows, to build up a partnership of two hundred runs and steer the side to an unlikely victory. Anju Mahindra, who half an hour ago had been exhausted, now looked rejuvenated and fifteen years younger, and waved at someone who was presumably still awake in Bombay. Jadeja leaned forward and hit the winning four; on another channel Urmila Deshpande, her hair long and with no curls in it, sang sweet, tuneless words to Salmaan Khan upon a beach.
At one o’clock in the morning, a loud celebratory firecracker went off in Bandra. Khatau shuddered at the noise of the explosion, and thought of Ummar Aziz, small, nondescript, scratching his cheek thoughtfully.
Real Time
ON THEIR WAY to the house, Mr. Mitra said he didn’t know if they should buy flowers. They were very near Jogu Bazaar; and Mr. Mitra suddenly raised one hand and said:
“Abdul, slowly!”
The driver eased the pressure on the accelerator and brought the Ambassador almost to a standstill. Not looking into the rearview mirror, he studied two boys with baskets playing on the pavement on his left.
“Well, what should we do?” Mr. Mitra’s face, as he turned to look at his wife, was pained, as if he was annoyed she hadn’t immediately come up with the answer.
“Do what you want to do quickly,” she said, dabbing her cheek with her sari. “We’re already late.” She looked at the small dial of her watch. He sighed; his wife never satisfied him when he needed her most; and quite probably it was the same story the other way round. Abdul, who, by sitting on the front seat, claimed to be removed to a sphere too distant for the words at the back to be audible, continued to stare at the children while keeping the engine running.
“But I’m not sure,” said the husband, like a distraught child, “given the circumstances.”
She spoke then in a voice of sanity she chose to speak in only occasionally.
“Do what you’d do in a normal case of bereavement,” she said. “This is no different.”
He was relieved at her answer, but regretted that he had to go out of the car into the market. He was wearing a white cotton shirt and terycotton trousers because of the heat, and shoes; he now regretted the shoes. He remembered he hadn’t been able to find his sandals in the cupboard. His feet, swathed in socks, were perspiring.
He came back after about ten minutes, holding half a dozen tuberoses against his chest, cradling them with one arm; a boy was running after him. “Babu, should I wipe the car, should I wipe the car…,” he was saying, and Mr. Mitra looked intent, like a man who has an appointment. He didn’t acknowledge the boy; inside the car, Mrs. Mitra, who was used to these inescapable periods of waiting, moved a little. He placed the tuberoses in the front, next to Abdul, where they smeared the seat with their moisture. Mr. Mitra had wasted some time bargaining, bringing down the price from sixteen to fourteen rupees, after which the vendor had expertly tied a thread round the lower half of the flowers.
“Why did she do it?” he asked in an offhand way, as the car proceeded once more on its way. Going down Ashutosh Mukherjee Road, they turned left into Southern Avenue.
Naturally, they didn’t have the answer. They passed an apartment building they knew, Shanti Nivas, its windows open but dark and remote. Probably they’d been a little harsh with her, her parents. Her marriage, sixteen years ago, had been seen to be appropriate. Usually, it’s said, Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, and Saraswati, of learning, two sisters, don’t bless the same house; but certainly that wasn’t true of the Poddars, who had two bars-at-law in the generation preceding this one, and a social reformer in the lineage, and also a white four-storeyed mansion on a property near Salt Lake where they used to have garden parties. Anjali had married Gautam Poddar very soon after taking her M.A. in history from Calcutta University.
As they passed a petrol pump, Mr. Mitra wondered what view traditional theology took of this matter, and how the rites accommodated an event such as this — she had jumped from a third-floor balcony — which couldn’t, after all, be altogether uncommon. Perhaps there was no ceremony. In his mind’s eye, when he tried to imagine the priest, or the long rows of tables at which people were fed, he saw a blank. But Abdul couldn’t identify the lane.
“Bhai, is this Rai Bahadur R.C. Mullick Road?” he asked a loiterer somewhat contemptuously.
The man leaned into a window and looked with interest at the couple in the back, as if unwilling to forgo this opportunity to view Mr. and Mrs. Mitra. Then, examining the driver’s face again, he pointed to a lane before them, going off to the right, next to a sari shop that was closed.
“That one there.”
They went down for about five minutes, past two-storeyed houses with small but spacious courtyards, each quite unlike the others, till they had to stop again and ask an adolescent standing by a gate where Nishant Apartments was. The boy scratched his arm and claimed there was no such place over here. As they looked at him disbelievingly, he said, “It may be on that side,” pointing to the direction they’d just come from.