The Zoya Factor (38 page)

He turned on me then, his brown eyes gleaming savagely. 'Would you like me so much if I
wasn't
the captain? Would you like me so much if I was a
reserve
player, the sixteenth man? Would you like me so much if I was a Ranji player, huh? Or what if I was a life insurance agent or a...I don't know, a
banker
or something?' He said it really fast and nasty. I couldn't get a word in.

He went on, talking without any intonation or feeling in his voice. 'I see you hug my boys before every match. Every single one of them. And if
I
want something a little more, from
my
girl, before I go in to play, my motives are suspect.'

I tried to reach for him, but he shook me off, shaking his head. 'You know, at
this
point in time' - he gave a bitter laugh - 'all I need is absolutely unconditional support.' Then he looked up at me, his eyes so cold they seemed almost opaque, 'But it was too much for you to give, wasn't it?'

'Nikhil, no - ' I started to say.

But he got up. 'It's cool, Zoya,' he said. 'You keep your distance. Stay away from me. Don't even come for breakfast if you'd rather not. I don't need your bloody blessings to win me a World Cup!'

And with that, he turned around and strode out of the hotel, and out of my life.

***

Things got pretty grim after that.

Oh, of course I kept going for breakfast with the team, but as far as Nikhil was concerned, I might as well not have been alive. He was the first to leave the team table every time, with not even a nod in my direction. So, obviously, I ignored him right back. I laughed and kidded around with the others, but inside I was pretty close to cracking up.

It didn't help that he was in superb form. Jay and Beeru couldn't stop raving about him. Here's a captain that leads from the front, they rhapsodized constantly. Great cricketing mind, cool under pressure, deservedly arrogant, and so on and so forth.

'Vul, with a rampant lion at its head, even a herd of cattle can win a war, my friend,' Beeru had declared just the other day. 'And the Indians are not cows.'

I glowed with pride when they said all that stuff, swore to myself that I'd speak to him the next time we met (he didn't return my calls and after three times, I stopped trying) but then, whenever we'd meet he'd freeze me out with that distant, dismissive look in his eyes and my courage would shrivel up inside me, shrinking down to a size where all it could power me to do was toss my hair and smile a brilliant, radiant smile around the table.

Privately, I had to admit that everything he'd said to me was justified. I did fall for him because he was the captain, so glamorous, so gorgeous, so successful. Would I have felt the same if he worked on Maximilk, pushing layouts to a pharmaceutical company for a living?

I tried to imagine Nikhil Khoda with a small-time, plastic briefcase, his lunch in a steel tiffin carrier, rattling up to AWB in a Maruti 800 wearing a jacket and tie.

But I couldn't visualize it. Because, every time he opened the Maruti door and strode into the conference room, the scene would slide into slow motion and the back of his coat would fly up, all
Matrix
-like. His eyes would narrow into slits and he'd start chucking Junior Maximilk layouts up in the air and catching them again without looking at them, his eyes boring into the eyes of the cowering clients across the board room table, just like in the Boost ads. 'Buy these, you morons,' he'd say. 'Buy them, or die...'

Basically, I really had it bad.

Meanwhile, 'my bloody luckiness' seemed to be working wonders. The boys won the next three matches on the trot. (They'd have won four, but one got rained out.) Apart from my rift with Nikhil, it was a crazy, heady time to be Indian. We whooped and cheered and drank ourselves silly in the stands in different stadiums all over the country. Cries of
Chauka!
Chhakkaa!
Indiyaa!
rose constantly into the surprised Aussie skies.

The sequence of events was more or less the same everywhere. Khoda would saunter in, and win the toss. He'd tell the umpire what he wanted to do and then, he and the boys would just do it. No fuss, no fumbles. One of them would pick up a Man of the Match trophy at the end of day's play and the Indian 'poishun' would be a little more secure.

They were making it look incredibly easy.

The commentators had started calling the season an Indian Summer and were all busy claiming they'd been predicting an Indian victory or at least an Indian side in the finals for, like, forever.

The media had also, ever since that dumb episode with Rawal and the Benito's pizza guy, developed a huge fascination with me.

The Zoya Factor was being debated on every possible channel and forum. Panels full of balding men, of every colour, accent and nationality, held forth on Luck as a Factor in Cricket. An entire half-hour programme had appeared on Channel Seven about me, with lots of footage on me that God only knows how, they'd managed to get hold of. They'd started with my baby pictures, interviews with Zoravar's old colony friends, that wretched retired colonel again. They'd included the old footage of Zahid and Khoda that had run in India too and there was even an interview with Jogpal Lohia's Lingnath Baba. I prayed he would say nothing about my propitiousness being directly proportional to my purity, and luckily he didn't. Instead, much to my horror, he pulled out my janam-patri!

They'd done full 3-D graphics on it, so all these planets revolved most majestically as he pointed them out one by one, saying how my Mangal and Shani and Braspati were super-shubh and that if I'd been born even a nano second here or there I would've been no use to the team.
'
When an individual longs for something with his whole soul, the entire universe conspires to make sure he gets it,' Lingnath said, lisping slightly and making large mystic gestures with his hands.
'
And we are talking not of an individual here, but of an entire nation. The very cosmos bowed to the prayers of a united Bharat and wrought mighty changes in the arrangement in the paths of the planets that day in June 1983. Owing to which an entirely propitious girl child, an avtar of Durga-ma herself, was born.'

It was unadulterated crap from start to finish, but the goras seemed to love it. Either that, or they were running out of things to discuss on all those panel discussions. They even had a debate on whether I should be allowed to sit at the table with the boys, because I was giving them an unfair advantage.

Of course it was all very heady and I did lap it up a bit. But it was just so very fragile, dependent totally on how the boys performed. Dependent totally on Nikhil actually.

The third point the commentators were kicked about, besides Khoda and me, was how well everybody on the team was playing. 'Indian cricket has always been about individual brilliance,' they said, 'now here's an entire team that's brilliant!'

It was true. Maybe buoyed by the dropping of Rawal or whatever, the boys were playing superbly. In all three matches, different people had come through to take us to victory. It was truly a team effort.

The old Indian hands, however, still looked all dour and pessimistic about India taking the 'spoils of war' home with them next month. All the ususal phrases - 'peaking too early', 'Indians are chokers', 'lack of killer instinct', 'psychological disadvantage' and 'snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory' were trotted out.

'It's just the superstitious fear
ki nazar lag jaayegi,
' Shanta explained to me. 'As in, "Let's not get too excited or our boys' splendid performances will attract the"' - she made a graphic, jabbing gesture with her index and little finger - '"Evil Eye"!'

But you could smell the hope in the air.

It dripped out of everybody's pores even when they were being all balanced and careful, scented the air with a heady mix of spring-fever and monsoon madness and hung above us everywhere we went, sparkling tantalizingly.

'It's the manic
dhak-dhak
-ing of a billion brown hearts, Zo,' Vishaal told me one morning by the poolside of some hotel in Perth. 'Hesitant
and
insistent! Isn't it driving you crazy?'

It was actually.

Because every time I sensed the pressure (which was constantly), I was eaten up with guilt over the last thing Nikhil had said to me.
At this point in time, all I need is absolutely unconditional support
.

And I'd been unable to give it to him.

***

The next match was in Brisbane again. We got there a full day before the match and stayed at the same hotel we'd stayed at before.

'C'mon,' Monita said to me in the evening when I was moping about in my room. 'Let's go out for a fancy dinner.'

'Haan,
Zoya,' Rinku Chachi said, 'last time you didn't come with us to the casino! You have to come today!'

I'd been sitting hunched up by the windows looking out at the river and thinking about how I'd overheard Nikhil talking to somebody on the phone a couple of days ago. He'd been saying,
I miss us too,
in this very half-exasperated, half-caressing manner. For a single ecstatic moment I'd thought he was talking to
me,
till I'd seen the headphone clipped to his ear....

'I don't know, Chachi,' I said vaguely.

'Zooooya? Are you coming? Come
na
, we can share a red pizza.' I looked down to see Armaan hugging my knees insistently. I sighed and shoved Nikhil Khoda back into my subconscious where he seemed to have taken up permanent residence. 'Okay, dude,' I said, smiling brightly, 'but only if you'll be my date for the night!'

He nodded. 'I want to wear my suit,' he said solemnly.

'Of course you must wear your suit,' I said, planting a smacking kiss on his cheek, 'and I'll wear a "suit" too!'

So Armaan wore the black, two-piece tuxedo Mon had got for him in Sydney along with wrap-around sunglasses and gelled hair, while I wore a sleeveless rose-pink salwar kameez with a floaty pink-and-white dupatta.

Armaan and I strutted down to the lobby, arm and arm, Mon and Rinku Chachi clattering behind us, wafting expensive perfume.

'There's a very nice Indian restaurant close by, ma'am,' the concierge said, taking in my outfit. 'Shall I book you a table?'

I looked questioningly at my three chaperones (not that I needed them any more, I thought sadly; Zahid was so cosy with Ritu now and Khoda, of course, had given up on me forever) and they all nodded. 'Book it,' I said.

It was just a short drive away, in South Bank, and it wasn't till we reached the entrance and I looked up and saw the neon sign glowing The Sultry South above that warning bells went off inside my head. By then, of course, it was too late.

Maybe she won't be there,
I told myself as a pretty dark girl in a
pavada
choli came up noiselessly to show us our table.
Maybe
he
won't be there!

But no sooner had our tamarind-tomato savouries arrived that Armaan stood up and chirped, 'Look, look Nikhil Bhaiya!'

I promptly dropped my soup spoon and then dived under the table to retrieve it.

I heard Nikhil's deep voice going, 'Hi monster,' and winced.

'
Arrey
, Nikhil!' Rinku Chachi was saying, sounding very pleased with herself. 'How are you, beta
?'

'Great performances!' That was Mon.

'Sit with us! Sit with us!' Armaan shrieked. I could see his feet jumping up and down.

'Chup,
Armaan, he's with somebody
,'
Monita remonstrated and then, with a sinking heart I heard her say pleasantly, 'Hello, I'm Monita.'

And this really husky, exquisitely pitched voice answered, 'I'm Reita, hope you're having a good time.'

Everybody chorused in agreement and then I heard Khoda say casually, 'Is it just the three of you, tonight?'

Okay, I couldn't lurk under the table forever, could I, so I decided this was the time to make my entry. I shook back my hair, squared my shoulders and emerged, slightly red-faced, with my spoon held out before me like a talisman. 'I dropped this,' I said idiotically, and then, 'Oh
hi,'
to Nikhil and Reita Sing.

She was super hot, half Mallu half Singaporean, I think. With a sinking heart I took in her long, black, luxuriantly curling hair.

'Zoya!' Reita gushed warmly. 'What an honour to have
you
in my restaurant!'