‘No.’
‘Tommy Sir.’ Radha laughed. ‘Have some self-respect, little brother. Do anything else. Beg. But don’t go back into cricket. Don’t become Tommy Sir.’
Manju took a deep breath.
‘I told you, don’t mock him. He’s gone. Tommy Sir had his stroke right after they picked me for Mumbai. He was hiking in the mountains, they say, and when they carried him to hospital he kept saying, I have to live till I see that boy bat for Mumbai. That would have been my one satisfaction: for him to watch me fail with his own eyes.
Stepping back from the metal fence, Manju cupped his palms, as if he were holding an invisible bowl. He looked straight down into it.
Radha still held on to the fence.
‘But he was not the one, Manju. Not Tommy Sir. He was never the one to blame.’
Manju stood frozen in his strange gesture. Radha guessed that his younger brother, excited by the sound and smell of live cricket, was imagining himself holding a cricket helmet again. Radha ground his teeth. The boy had just been fired — and here he was dreaming of getting back into the game. Every man must martyr himself to something: but we have martyred ourselves to this mediocrity.
Freeing one hand from the metal rings, Radha pinched Manju in the right shoulder and said:
‘I want to fight you again. Till one of us falls. Right here.’
‘No.’
Radha pinched harder.
‘No.’
And harder and harder: until Manju, at last, shouted — ‘Yes!’
Acknowledgements
Over a period of five years, my friend Ramin Bahrani read and edited several drafts of this novel. In the jungle of my life, he has been the white tiger — the only one who ever believed.
Makarand Waingankar, the dean of Bombay cricket writers, shared his knowledge of the game with me over several months in 2011 and 2012. Thank you, Mac.
Ramachandra Guha, Jason Zweig, Malcolm Knox and Jeremy Kirk read early versions of this book and encouraged me to persist with it, as did my editors, Ravi Mirchandani, V.K. Karthika and Andrea Canobbio, and my wonderful agent, Karolina Sutton. I am grateful to each one of them — but above all to Dr Guha, who always found the time to write back.
Girish Shahane, Naresh Fernandes and Jehangir Sorabjee (in Mumbai), Vikas Swarup and Sudeep Paul (in New Delhi), Shalini Perera and James Payten (in Sydney) have helped me more than I deserved to be helped.
Over the oceans that separate us, I send my thanks to an old friend, Mark Greif — and to a new one: two-year-old Simone Greif, who will surely grow up to be every bit as compassionate and intelligent as her father. Some families, I am forced to conclude, work.
When I finished Selection Day, I knew for whom I had written it — my mother, Usha Mohan Rau, who died on 20 January 1990.
About the Book
A PAGE — TURNER OF A NOVEL SET IN THE WORLD OF CRICKET IN MUMBAI
Manjunath Kumar is fourteen. He knows he is good at cricket — if not as good as his elder brother Radha. He knows that he fears and resents his domineering and cricket-obsessed father, admires his brilliantly talented sibling and is fascinated by the world of CSI and by curious and interesting scientific facts. But there are many things — about himself and about the world — that he doesn’t know. Sometimes it seems as though everyone around him has a clear idea of who Manju should be, except Manju himself.
When Manju begins to get to know Radha’s great rival, a boy as privileged and confident as he is not, everything in his world begins to change, and he is faced with decisions that will challenge both his sense of self and of the world around him.
About the Author
Aravind Adiga was born in 1974 in Madras and grew up in Mangalore. He was educated at Columbia University in New York and Magdalen College, University of Oxford. His articles have appeared in publications such as the New Yorker, Sunday Times, Financial Times and Times of India. His first novel, The White Tiger, won the Man Booker Prize in 2008. A second novel, Last Man in Tower, was published in 2011.