Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga [170]
“No,” the boy agreed. “We didn’t have any water.”
Stepping down from the escalator, he said: “Let’s go and get the ten rupees back, Tinku.”
“For ten rupees? All the way up?”
The two got on the other escalator and went back up to the food court.
“It’s the principle. A man must stand up for his rights in this world. Your grandfather taught me that.”
Tinku, who was starting to yawn, turned in surprise: his unmusical father was humming a famous Beatles song and slapping the escalator with the back of his hand.
23 DECEMBER
On any evening Juhu Beach is overwhelmed with cricket matches of poor style and great vigour; on a Sunday, perhaps a hundred matches are in progress along the length of the sand. All face a fatal constraint: the ocean. Anyone who hits the ball directly into the water is declared out—a uniform rule across the beach. A good, honest pull-shot to a bad ball, and a batsman has just dismissed himself. To survive, you must abandon classical form. What is squirming, quicksilver, heterodox thrives.
“A million people are batting along this beach. Play with some style. Stand out,” Mrs. Rego shouted.
She stood in her grey coat at the wicket, an umpire-commentator-coach of the match in progress.
Timothy, Mary’s son, was batting at the stick-wicket; Kumar, tallest of the regulars at the Tamil temple, ran in to bowl.
Mary, sitting on the sand, the game’s only spectator and cheerleader, turned for a moment to look at the water’s edge.
It was low tide, and the sea had receded far from the normal shoreline, leaving a glassy, marshy in-between zone. Reflected in the wet sand, two nearly naked boys ran about the marsh; they jumped into the waves and splashed each other. The sunlight made their dark bodies shine blackly, as if coated in a slick of oil; in some private ecstasy, they began rolling in and out of the water, barely in this world at all.
Mary now saw a familiar figure walking along the surf. The bottoms of his trousers were rolled up, and he carried his shoes over his shoulder, where they stained his shirt.
She waved.
“Mr. Ajwani.”
“Mary! How nice to see you.”
He sat by her side.
“Did you come to watch your son playing cricket?”
“Yes, sir. I don’t like to see him wasting time on cricket, but Madam—I mean Mrs. Rego—insisted he be here.”
Ajwani nodded.
“How is your place by the nullah? More threats of demolition?”
“No, sir. My home stands. I found work in one of the buildings by the train station. An Ultimex building. The pay is better than at Vishram, sir. And they give me a nice blue uniform to wear.”
The two of them ducked. The red ball had shot two inches past Ajwani’s nose—it soared over the glassy sand and detonated in the ocean.
“Timothy is out!” Mrs. Rego cried.
She saw Ajwani sitting alongside Mary.
He saw the hostility in her eyes—they had not spoken once since that night—and he knew at once, “she too was in it.”
“Let me stay, Mrs. Rego,” he said. “It is one of the rules of Juhu Beach: you can’t say no to any stranger who wants to watch you play.”
Mrs. Rego sighed, and looked for the ball.
The two boys who had been rolling about in the water now rushed towards the ball; it came back, in a high red arc, as the cricketers cheered. Up in the sky, a plane cut across the ball’s trajectory—and the cricketers let out a second cheer, a sustained one.
The plane had caught the angle of the setting light, and looked radiant and intimate before it went over the ocean.
The game continued. Mrs. Rego kept offering the boys “tips” on batting “with style.” Ajwani and Mary cheered impartially for all the batsmen.
The setting sun brought more people. The smell of humans overwhelmed the smell of the sea. Vendors waved green and yellow fluorescent wires in the darkening air to catch the attention of children. Particoloured fans were arranged on long wooden frames to whirl in the sea breeze, green plastic soldiers crawled over the sand, and mechanical frogs moved with a croaking noise. Small men stood