Manju got all his revenge with a look and a word. He glanced at his brother’s leg, and said: ‘You?’
‘Yes, me. Because I told him I had a brother who was a professional cricketer.’
Touché. Manju studied the résumé.
‘He must be from a village. I-m-p-o-t-a-n-t. Like you, Manju. Just like you.’ Radha winked. ‘Sofia would marry you in two minutes. You treated her badly, but you know she’d leave her husband for you. How much money has she given you by now? She’s your new sponsor. You should be nice to her, jump up and down for her, the way you did for the old sponsor. And she’s not the only one, is she? You don’t screw them, but they just keep doing whatever you want.’
Before Manju could say ‘Shut up’, a glass broke.
A waiter brought a broom and swept the shards towards the black beam. ‘We don’t want all that glass here,’ Manju protested.
Suddenly smoke filled the bar. The manager, performing a ritual that was either religious or fumigational, circulated a black pot filled with burning coals around his table, and then proceeded to walk with the smoking pot from table to table, starting with Manju and Radha’s. Once a Quarter Bar decided to be obnoxious to its patrons, there was no end to it.
The western side of Santa Cruz railway station led towards good residential areas in well-planned blocks; the eastern side was a sea of people.
Coming out of the bar, and re-entering the sea, the brothers were confronted by a beggar. A woman without legs sat on a wooden platform; she began pleading for money, but stopped when she saw how Radha was walking, and sighed.
After all these years, Manju could not get used to the sight of his handsome brother limping, his grotesque left foot in its custom-made shoe. As they left the bar, he turned his eyes away from Radha and pretended to look at the skywalk. The pedestrian bridge, which stood on giant columns down the centre of the road, had a glossy metal frame covered by a glowing blue canopy, and looked like a giant UFO, stretched, partly dismantled, and abandoned over Santa Cruz. The lights of the traffic illuminated the underside of the bridge, and Manju could read the posters stuck to the columns: ‘One call can change your life. Phone Rita Mam or Sanjay Sir. Rs 25,000–40,000 per month. Guaranteed.’ At least half of the posters were upside down.
Making their way through beggars, drunks, commuters and vendors, the brothers turned towards the Milan Subway, one of the underpasses that led into the western side of Santa Cruz.
Now they passed by an open blacksmith’s workshop, the men in masks cutting metal with oxyacetylene flames, raw sparks flying out at passers-by. Manju seized his brother to shield him from the sparks. He was only five foot four inches tall, but he still had the strongest forearms in all of Bombay. He wanted to protect Radha from all of it: the pavements filled with craters, the cars driven by drunks, the cars without headlights, the unpruned tree with the sharp branches ready to fall, the maiming carelessness of life in Mumbai … but the sparks flew too thick. The autorickshaw driver had been on his cell phone, eight years ago, as he turned his vehicle over Radha Krishna’s left foot.
‘Manju.’
‘What?’
Radha thumped him on the back with his fist.
‘Scientist. My little scientist.’
Manju winced: he knew what was coming next. Radha would tease him for still being a virgin.
‘Little brother, have you ever tried … group sex? Just wondering.’
‘Yes, big brother,’ Manju replied. ‘I once used both hands.’
Radha Krishna Kumar resisted; but then gave up, and howled with laughter.
‘Everything was wasted, Manju. Your balls and your brains.’
They walked and limped as one body, Manju with his arm around Radha, beige holding on to blue.
They were now right beside the Western Expressway. The cars sped up a ramp towards the airport, giving the brothers the impression that they, in contrast, were descending into a nether-city. Honest work continued around them: shops that sold gravestones engraved in Urdu and Arabic emitted the high-pitched noise of drilling and a fine marble mist that enveloped the brothers. Manju knew that Radha lived somewhere nearby, because he had once asked for a loan to start his own marble-cutting shop. Radha had not met their father in a decade.
When they came out of the Milan Subway, an old man in a suit and tie shouted at them from the other side of the road.
‘You!’ he said. ‘You two — Egypt shall slobber about like a drunk with vomit on his shirt. It is written.’
Radha had apparently seen the old man before.
‘He’s a Telugu Christian from Dharavi. He preaches near the pipeline in Vakola, even when there’s no one there. Maybe he wants to convert the petrol.’
Manju frowned.
‘Who is Egypt?’
‘Egypt,’ said Radha, who had gone to a church for a year after his accident, ‘means someone rich and powerful.’
‘So why is he yelling at us?’
The old man kept shouting; a passing bike-rider slowed and said something to him; then a breeze wafted the smell of shit everywhere: the uninterpretable madness of the urban night surrounded the brothers Kumar.
Listening to the crazy preacher across the road, Manju began to laugh. ‘Though I am not at home in the world,’ he thought, ‘I am at home in the street.’ A proverb — a new one. He felt he could walk through Mumbai like this forever.
But when he turned he saw Radha biting his fingernails.
Suddenly he found he couldn’t bear Radha’s company — he wished he hadn’t come.
‘I am not normal people.’ He should just tell Sofia that the next time she asked him to meet Radha. ‘I want to be alone on my birthday, as I want to be alone every single day.’ His excellence, his uniqueness, was not in cricket, not in batting, he had discovered — but in withdrawing. He could pull back from human beings like the ocean. That was his contract with God: Manjunath Kumar would never have to compromise with another person — man or woman — would never again have to do for him or her the things he had done for his father. Never. If the whole world vanished tomorrow, Manjunath Kumar would barely notice. Didn’t Sofia know all this already? Hadn’t she said, more than once — ‘You are the Einstein of being alone?’ So let me retain my one excellence: let me be alone!
But when he looked up at the sky, he saw a white moon, as bright and powerful as a man’s fist, over Mumbai.
It took his breath away: a sight to remind one of a poet.
‘Kattale,’ Manju said, and held his palm over his right eye, as if to block the sound and smell of his city. Yet behind his mask, he began smiling, thinking of the surprise he had in store for Radha.
Lowering and raising his palm, Manju teased his brother, as if they were playing a children’s game, and now Radha permitted himself a smile; for in each of the Kumars had been renewed, by this rare proximity to the other’s body, the belief that their shared destiny had not yet been stolen from them.
‘This is what I brought you to see,’ Manju told his brother.
Behind a ten-foot-tall steel-ringed fence, a floodlit asphalt courtyard was criss-crossed with yellow lines, the kind of place where you saw American children playing basketball in the movies, except here, under the white lights, boys were practising cricket. Dozens of teenagers, padded and helmeted: either sitting on the benches, or standing in the nets while grown men pitched tennis balls at them.
Radha and Manju pressed their faces to the steel-ringed fence.
‘This is what I’m going to do from now on. It’s part of the severance package.’