Opening the legal textbook again, he turned to the last page once more and wrote: ‘Thoughts are like politicians that get between our bodies.’
Did that make sense? Catching himself about to burp, Javed stuck his hand into his jacket to rub his chest. Nasty stuff, this Coca-Cola. It must be fucking with his brain. Maybe it was also making his hair fall out, he thought, and ran his fingers over his forehead.
Stretching his arms over his head, he glanced up at the ceiling, wondering whether to call Manju — or whether instead to call Ranjith and talk to him about starting a rock band. Let’s wait another five minutes for Manju to turn up.
Stirring the Coca-Cola can with his right hand, he kept turning the pages of the lawbook until he reached ‘Section 377. “Unnatural offences.”’
‘Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.’
Picking up his pen, Javed drew a giant penis over the page, before embellishing it with appropriately sized balls and pubic hair.
•
Fear: how it enters your world again, like the cool, dark, delicious current that ripples beneath the sun-warmed surface of a mountain stream.
Are you sure you’re done with cricket, Manju? Don’t you remember your innings against Fatima School, and that even better one against Ambani School … are you absolutely sure you want to leave cricket and stay here in Navi Mumbai?
Rather than meet Javed at the mall after leaving Mr Ansari, Manju had returned to the flat, opened the door with his spare key, and gone to the bedroom with its golden bed. After a long time, he was thinking about cricket, and at first he pretended that this was the result of Mr Ansari’s speech to him. But deep down, he knew it was not cricket that was making his heart thump: no, not cricket. It was the other thing.
Fear.
Opening the wardrobe, Manju ran his fingers through the pile of Javed’s shirts, and drew his nose closer to them. Sniffing through the cool beautiful shirts, his mouth filling up with saliva, he found a blue-bordered handkerchief doused with the scent of citrus, and put it across his face.
All that was warm in Javed’s heart touched his own heart and chilled it. Now that he had come to Javed’s home and slept on his golden bed, Radha would call him a gay. All the boys would call him that. Sofia would smile and say, ‘I’ll protect you, my friend. My gay friend.’
Then the phone began ringing, startling him.
Recognizing the number as Sofia’s, he did not answer.
It kept ringing. It kept ringing.
Manju kept hunting through Javed’s wardrobe. He looked over the bright shirts, and then at the rows of size-twelve shoes and sneakers and rubber chappals that were even larger than size twelve, until he saw, nearly buried under the footwear, an old blue cricket helmet, embossed with golden initials that said ‘J.A.’ Raising the helmet with both hands he brought it closer and closer, until the initials touched his forehead. Manju shivered from the cold touch of the grille that protected the batsman’s mouth.
With the helmet pressed against his forehead, he sat down on the floor.
Leave Javed? No, he could not just leave Javed now. If he went back to cricket, Javed would follow. He would write poems for him. The other boys would talk.
Getting out of Navi Mumbai, he thought, as he put the helmet back into the wardrobe, would take just as much preparation as getting in.
The phone began ringing again.
Hiding behind the curtain, Manju stood at the window, turning every now and then to the glowing phone on the bed. Down below on the street, a teenager on a canary-yellow bike zipped through the busy road. Behind the curtain, Manjunath Kumar watched: the silliest thing on a scooter was freer than he would ever be.
•
City bread is not served in the villages around the Western Ghats; nor is raita, pulao, biryani, basmati rice, or whatever else you’ve been fed in the city. Sit on the floor and be served raagi mudde like everyone else. Once a week you’ll get chicken, and once a week you’ll get mutton.
Eat, son.
Radha Kumar had still not grown used to the dark violet ball of raagi, which sat amidst a dark brown soup of sliced onion and cabbage.
He dreamed of white rice.
He talked to himself.
From eight in the morning, he had been sweeping the fields where wheat was being winnowed, cursing and mumbling and delivering long, bitter soliloquies that amused his cousins. He did not have to work in the fields. His uncle had made that clear, for they remembered their cricket hero Radha, and for people in this village he would always have a film-star’s eyes. But Radha wanted to work: and did not want to chit-chat or play cards or go to the movies.
He made them work him for eight, eight and a half, nine hours a day.
In the evening he washed himself with cold water and went to the dining hall, where his cousins, sitting cross-legged on the dining room floor, were eating their raagi mudde while his uncle Revanna talked on the cell phone, fixing the price of wheat or corn or something else that grew on fertilizer.
‘Phone for you.’
His uncle Revanna rubbed the Nokia against his shirt, and held it out to him.
‘Phone for you. From Mumbai. He called in the morning as well.’
Radha leapt up and grabbed the cell phone, and without pausing to confirm there was someone at the other end of the line, shouted:
‘Manju. Manju. Why does the boiling water turn into ice first?’
There was a long pause, and Radha brought his right thumb towards his teeth; but he heard his brother’s voice break into a laugh, the way it did in the bedroom, in the dark, when he made a joke about their father.
‘Manju. Manju,’ he said, pressing the phone so hard to his body that his earlobe grew hot. ‘How is Navi Mumbai, tell me everything. Tell me, tell me.’
Closing his eyes, Radha sensed from the words, from their tentativeness, that Manju was looking around to make sure Javed was not listening in.
‘Manju, you’re mad. Don’t think about doing it. Don’t think about going back to that man in Chembur. Stay with Javed in Navi Mumbai. Stay there for two or three years. Listen to your older brother for once.’
Silence on the other end of the phone; down on the floor, Radha’s cousins kept licking raagi from their fingers. Blocking them out, Radha concentrated on what he had to tell his brother.
‘Manju, I’ve been thinking about you every day, every day. Manju, I know what your problem is. Manju: you always liked pain and thought you had to bear it for our sake. Remember when you broke your thumb and kept batting? Don’t do it again.’
He was aware that Manju was now talking about their father, about his health, so Radha shouted:
‘His health? I hope his balls fall off, I hope his fingers fall off, I hope he goes blind, I hope he has cancer on his tongue, I hope he is sent to some mental hospital where they beat him once a day.’
Radha was aware that on the other end of the line, his brother was asking him if he had gone mad, and so he shouted again: