The Zoya Factor (29 page)

'Zoya,' he said, in a shut-up-and-let-me-talk voice.

I piped down and took a sip from my glass.

His hand reached for mine across the table. 'I'm really sorry for saying what I did that day in the room, okay
?
'

I nodded, feeling miserable. 'And I'm really sorry for what I said to you too.'

His face got this odd shuttered look and he said, shrugging a little, 'Well, what you said was true...'

My snide little comment hung in the air, almost like I'd said it again and I wished I hadn't reminded him of it.

I said earnestly, 'I'm sure you're the best captain ever, Nikhil. This is
your
World Cup.'

But he just shrugged again, smiled and said, 'Shall we order?'

It was a magical evening, in a tantalizing, indescribable sort of way. We talked but nothing really got said, you know? I never asked him why he'd got me a bracelet when he seemed to have such a bevy of admiring girlfriends. I never asked him why he hadn't kept in touch over the last two months. I never asked him what his scene was with the restaurateur babe.

And he, well, he told me a lot about his school days and his first cricket camp but we didn't discuss the World Cup, or my Lucky Charm status or the obscene amount of pressure on him.

I did tell him all about my bungee jump though. He refused to believe I'd done it, so I told him I'd show him the video and he said that I was a tech-savvy advertising girl and that I would doctor the footage. But he was just kidding. I could tell he was impressed.

'Is this a very expensive restaurant?' I asked him after the old lady had taken our order.

'Depends on what you consider expensive,' he said with a grin. 'It costs more than two plates of aalu tikki, definitely.'

I must have looked uncomfortable, because he leaned in and said, very kindly, 'Probably doesn't taste half as good though.'

Which made me laugh. Which made him say, as he got up and pulled me to my feet, 'You really are a cheap date, Zoya.'

He put one large warm hand in the small of my back and propelled me on to the dance floor. The music was slow, incomprehensible, of course, but nice. Almost without realizing it, I slid my hands into the pockets of his jacket, snuggled up against his soft white tee shirt, and, remembering how I'd rated his torso 'gorgeously biteable' at the Men in Blue shoot, giggled to myself.

'What's so funny?' he asked lazily.

I kept my head down, certain he'd be able to read my mind if I looked up, and just shook my head.

He pulled me a little closer and buried his nose into my hair. 'Gun smoke,' he said, taking a deep breath in this very corny way. 'Definitely.'

We drove back to my hotel, well within time and parked in the portico. The valet service guys kept shooting us dirty looks so we had to keep the conversation short.

He held my hand and said, 'I'm not sure when we'll be able to do this again.'

Huh? What was that?

He pushed his hair back from his forehead and said, looking out through the window as he spoke: 'I can't - none of us can - afford any distractions just now. There's too much at stake. After all, I've spent my entire life preparing for this...'

He turned to look at me searchingly then, his brown eyes intense.

I somehow managed to suppress the urge to say
it's just cricket, you know
and nodded understandingly.

'I get it,' I said. 'I understand.'

'I knew you would.' He smiled, looking relieved. 'See you then.'

I nodded, as cheerfully as I could. 'See you.'

Shaapper-own No. 1 was snoring lightly when I tiptoed back into the hotel room. In the next room, shaapper-own No.3 was in Spiderman pajamas, almost asleep, with a video game in his hands. And shaapper-own No.2 was sitting bolt upright on the sofa, waiting for me like her life depended upon it.

'Zoya,' she squealed, the moment I walked in. 'Give... gimmeee! Spill!'

I collapsed on the sofa next to her, closed my eyes, sighed and said, 'Mon, please, let me just juice it all on my own a little?'

'No way!' she said, scrambling closer. 'Don't be selfish!' She touched my shawl, 'Love what you're wearing, by the way. You look so good! That pink pashmina is a touch of genius!'

I opened my eyes. 'Really?'

'Sure,' she said, 'Khoda finally called, did he? I thought you were going to do yourself an injury or something last night.'

'I called him actually,' I said, propping my elbows on a bolster and looking dreamily at my bracelet.

Mon shook a hand dismissively. 'Details!' she said. 'Who cares who called whom, the point is you guys spoke! You could've knocked me over with a feather when Armaan and I got back from the Red Rooster and Rinku calmly said you'd gone out with him. I acted really casual, don't you worry,' she added hastily, seeing the start I gave. She tweaked a curl on my head and said, 'Now spill.'

I just held up my wrist.

Mon gasped. 'He gave you that!' She zoomed in to the intialled golden sheep unerringly, and then said, 'Oh my God! Nikhil-Zoya!' she shrieked, happily articulating for the whole hotel to hear what I'd been unable to the entire evening.

I gagged her with both hands, and we collapsed giggling on the sofa. 'Nikhil
-Zoya,'
Mon said happily to herself. '
Nikhil
-Zoya.'

Rinku Chachi snored on, but Armaan did stir sleepily and mutter
, 'Nikhil
-
Zoya dat gaya, Zimbabwe ka phat gaya
.'

***

14

I slept in late the next morning, and woke up only when my phone beeped. I reached for it sleepily, held it up and read, much to my horror,
Not good, Gaalu, you're in the TOI hugging a nanga Pathan. Baap livid. Think up something good.

My instant reaction was to switch my phone off.

I didn't want to talk to my dad till I'd seen the damn picture, and maybe not even then.

Then I leapt out of bed, and cupping the receiver tight so Rinku Chachi wouldn't hear, asked the hotel staff to bring me all of yesterday's papers.

Lots of mad shuffling later, I found it. It was about the size of a 100 cc ad, not too big, not too small. It had been taken in the theme park. I was clutching on to Zahid, laughing, my hair totally wild. He had his arms around my waist and was looking down at me, smiling very fondly. We looked totally connected. And, of course, he was shirtless and looking really hot, in a rather washboard ab-ed, boy-band way.

I started frantically wondering how was I going to explain this to my dad. If I was lucky, he would take the broad view and it would all blow over by the time I got home. And if I wasn't lucky, he'd be calling on Rinku Chachi's phone any time now, ordering me to come home immediately. I scrunched the paper into a ball, chucked it into the bin and ducked into the loo.

It was a two-hour flight to Sydney. The fifteen-member World Cup squad and all their coaches and managers had left on the early morning flight. So when we boarded the plane there were no familiar Indian faces on board. There were, however, some South African ones.

'Look,' Mon nudged me, as she buckled on her seat belt, 'that's their captain.'

I turned to look at him curiously. So
this
was the guy everyone was sure would take the World Cup home. He seemed okay, a little rumpled and sleepy actually, and was asking the stewardess for a blanket. He had a long, lumpy kind of face, short, sticky straw-coloured hair and slightly boiled-looking big blue eyes. The guy sitting next to him was pretty cute though. I asked Mon if he was in the team too.

'
Sacchi,
Zoya,' she whispered, totally exasperated, 'don't you know anything? He's their star batsman, and the wicketkeeper too.'

Of course, we were talking in Hindi, but they must have caught the essence of what we were saying because the good-looking dude flashed us a quick grin before he went back to talking to the captain.

Feeling mortified about being such an ignoramus, I asked for a sports magazine when the stewardess came around, and settled down to increase my cricket GK.

I found this big article with a picture of the cricket World Cup trophy splashed across it, a big round silver ball held up by three silver stumps, at least that's what I thought they were.

The headline read, 'The Spoils of War':

The cricket World Cup trophy, a solid silver sculpture, is currently displayed in a glass showcase in the Melbourne Cricket Club. It's been resting serenely there for the last four years, gathering a little dust, waiting in the silent darkness for the sixteen strong contingents that it knows will arrive one day from over the seas, storm its citadel with pennants flying high, engage in pitched battle for forty-odd days till a victor emerges, bloody but unbowed and bears the spoils of war away triumphantly to the land he calls home...

Wow, the prose was pretty purple, huh? This guy was obviously into military metaphors with a vengeance. He'd actually compared all the different captains to different generals or conquerors through history. The art director had done this really bad Photoshop job, superimposing the costumes and helmets of Alexander, Nelson, Chengez Khan, Julius Caesar et al., on the mugs of the Aussie, English, Pakistani and South African captains respectively. Khoda, I was hugely amused to see, was Che Guevara. They'd put this really dumb cut-pasted beret on his head and given him a goatee, long romantic black hair, and a cigar in one hand. According to the writer, Khoda was destined to crash and burn and not even make the Super 8. His money was on the South African captain - the dude with the boiled-looking eyes - whom they had rigged out in sandals and a long, white, revealing toga with a laurel wreath on his head. No wonder he was sleeping through a day flight and not looking anyone in the eye. But the writer didn't rule out the Aussie captain (portrayed as Alexander) or the West Indian (portrayed as Saladdin) either.

Nikhil Khoda leads a young, more-or-less untested side of fiery revolutionaries. Gone are the days of the diffident Indian, this side's body language is cocky, their eyes full of an uncalm confidence. But while the team's youth is its strong point, it is also its Achilles heel. Quick tempers and rivalries abound, some of which are reportedly fuelled by Robin Rawal, the southpaw who was elbowed out of the captaincy some months ago, but who has still arrived in Australia as a bonafide member of the sixteen-men World Cup squad. This squad looked good at the ICC Champion's trophy, two months ago in Dhaka, scoring two big wins over England and Australia, before collapsing utterly against a confused but grateful Bermudan side...

Thankfully, the article didn't mention me, I was a more recent phenomenon, and anyway, he didn't sound like the kind of guy who did too much research. I flipped the pages to another cricket article, written by Shanta Kalra, where she said that people could say whatever they liked about South Africa finally coming into its own, but her money was on the Indian subcontinent
. '
It's going to be one of these three sides definitely. The cup is coming home to the subcontinent and about time too!' She went on to say that Pakistan had just done a forty-day test tour of Australia and that the pitches there held no surprises for them, that India were an extremely talented and young team united under a strong and savvy captain, and that the suspect bowling action of both the star Sri Lankan speedsters had finally been okayed and their batsmen were amongst the world's best.

Mon was asleep and Rinku Chachi and Armaan were engrossed in cartoons behind me, so I just sipped my drink and mulled over this information. I hadn't known that Robin Rawal, the shoe-stealer, had been hoping to be made skipper. But then, I didn't know anything anyway. But why had Khoda - who was both 'strong and savvy', according to Shanta - picked out such a troublemaker to be part of his World Cup squad?

I put this to Mon when she woke up and she said, 'Your boyfriend isn't all powerful, you know,' impatiently finger-combing her hair and rummaging through her bag in search of a lipstick. 'There's something called a Board of Selectors. They have a say too, and sometimes, if the captain or the coach doesn't like it, he just has to lump it. Nikhil was selected as captain after a major slugfest last year, and Rawal's been around a while, he's cosy with a lot of the selectors. In fact, if Jogpal Lohia had been IBCC chief then, he'd probably have picked Rawal, not Khoda.'

Oh great, it was nice to know dumb-ass Rawal and I were a cosy little club of Lohia proteges.

As the plane circled over Sydney and Rinku Chachi and Monita oohed and aahed at their first sight of the Opera House, I brooded over whether I'd been foisted on Khoda, and if he resented this at some level.