The Zoya Factor (4 page)

Well, I guess it
was
pretty cool. Unfortunately, I know next to nothing about cricket and knew I wouldn't be able to make any intelligent conversation with the sports-celeb types we were sure to meet. Anyway, we were going to be there only for two days. I figured we'd just herd the cricketers together and get our shots and grab the next plane out - I to Bombay for the Shah Rukh shoot and the boys to Delhi, to develop all the stuff we'd got. Posters and shop signage had to roll out within the week. The only catch was, in case our team made the final, we three would have to careen back to Dhaka to shoot them with the trophy, slap on the rah rah song we'd already recorded, and send it out via satellite just before the awards ceremony on TV.

Uh, that's
if
they won the final.

Not much chance of that happening, I thought, though Vishaal and Neelo felt this was the best India team we'd had after a long, long time.

We walked into the Coffee Shoppee and I took in the decor bemusedly. It was a peculiar blend of Mediterranean and Shantiniketan.

'That dude's cool,' Vishaal declared, still thinking of Khoda as we pored over the menu. 'He's only been captain for six months but he's the best this country has ever seen.'

'How can you say that, Vishaal?' I asked. 'We lost the last four finals we played! The papers say this team can snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory any time, anywhere! Your Nikhil Khoda's hoardings were smeared with gobar from Rajkot to Calcutta!' (This is a sacred Indian ritual. People gather in hoards to chant bitter breast-beating slogans and smear fresh, still-warm cow droppings on the faces of cricket players on advertising billboards all over the country. It happens every time the headline 'INDIAN CHALLENGE ENDS' appears in the sports page, which is often.)

Vishaal shook his head in a sage manner I found really irritating. 'Keep the faith, Zoya,' he said. 'It's a team in transition. Khoda has made it shed all its baggage, like a snake sheds its skin. Now,' he said, cupping both hands and waving them in front of me, Sridevi-style, 'he's going to strike like a cobra!'

I am so surrounded by weirdos.

'The Board seems to be behind him,' Neelo said matter-of-factly. 'Or else they're giving him a long rope hoping he'll hang himself.'

Vishaal snorted: 'He won't. He's too damn smart. I'm telling you,
agar
Khoda can't bring home the World Cup, no one can!'

I didn't say anything.

I still bear the scars of One Who Has Done Cricket-Based Advertising. And I know it can completely backfire on you. You spend like half your annual advertising budget on a cricket campaign and then they go in there and play abysmally and the public says it's because they do too many ads and they start hating your product. It happens without fail after every major tournament. Even after our
best
performance in recent times, when our team managed to make it to the finals (and then lost miserably, but why go there?), this chain sms did the rounds saying:
On this shameful day,
w
e hereby promise to boycott every product the team endorses,
Jai Hind
. It doesn't help that the channel guys seem to get a sadistic pleasure out of running a player's ad right after he gets out for a duck. One moment he's
out,
and the next he's
in
the ad break, receiving phone calls from his mother telling him,
Beta, karlo duniya mutthi mein....
That's why I say, give me movie stars any time. I mean, a lot of people say Shah Rukh can't act but at least he's never given a performance
so
bad that it incited people to climb up ladders and put gobar on his hoardings.

I put down my Sonargaon Super Club Sandwich. 'So what's the plan for the shoot, guys?'

'We'll be all set up by eight a.m.,' said Vishaal who's pretty put together in spite of the moron-on-marijuana image he projects. 'I booked the banquet hall when we checked in.'

'I'll take them through the shots as we've visualized them, once they arrive,' said Neelo, putting down his (already?) empty glass. 'All you have to do is make sure they reach on time, Zoya.'

'Okay,' I said, trying to look unconcerned, though I groaned inwardly at the thought of waking up a bunch of starry-type cricketers and getting them to the banquet hall by eight in the morning. Still, I couldn't let these two veterans think I was nervous. So I nodded all confidently as I got up to go to my room and said: 'I'll call Lokendar and coordinate...'

But it wasn't just Lokendar Chugh I had to call. His company, Entel Sports, handle just Hharviindar (Harry) Singh, Shivnath, Zahid Pathan, and Nikhil Khoda. Another firm called Telstar handled the rest of the guys. The Telstar guys are all very young and sporty-looking themselves - sharp dressers with fancy phones and haircuts straight out of the latest Farhan Akhtar film. They always carry books like
The Seven Habits of
Highly Effective People
with Business-Class boarding pass stubs as bookmarks.

There's nothing so spiffy about Lokendar Chugh's Entel Sports through. Lokey's the main man there. Chubby, fair, balding, sporting a million rings on his stubby fingers, he prefers to fly Economy unless someone else is paying. He says 'thee' instead of 'the', calls me 'Joya' instead of 'Zoya' and is constantly eating pistas, scattering the shells around like some kind of organic confetti.

The agents answered their phones at the first ring (they always do). Both lots promised me their boys would be in the banquet hall by eight o'clock sharp. I put down the phone, raided the minibar, and stepped out on my balcony to see if I could spot any sportstars.

Right below my balcony was a cobbled courtyard, pretty deserted to begin with, but after about ten minutes a couple of the Coffee Shoppee guys shuffled out and, much to my delight, started setting up a fireworks display.

I'm a fireworks freak. Rockets, shooting stars, flowerpots, one-million-ladi-bombs, and even the wimpy phuljhadi
-
I love them all. As a child nothing thrilled me more than strutting down to the brightly decorated fireworks stalls on Ajmal Khan Road, all my Diwali money balled up in my hot little fist, to discuss the merits of Cock brand versus Lantern brand with the old kohl-eyed men who sold them. It used to be delicious agony deciding what to buy - the humongous gold-and-silver cascade rocket with the skimpily dressed babe on the box, or the pink-paper-covered earthen flowerpot anaars? The dotted, silvery pencils or the jazzy, diagonally striped, large-as-your-face chakrees? To say nothing of the tantalizing, red-and-gold-foil-covered, latest-latest, imported-from-China 'Laughing Dragon' bombs, which promised three minutes of non-stop pyrotechnics and the admiration of the entire neighbourhood. They cost a lot of money, sure, but think how much bang I'd be getting for my buck!

The old men would give me some sweet crumbly batashas to suck on and let me put together my arsenal at leisure. And then, of course, I'd have a huge blow-up in the evening, capering amongst the sparks as chakris and bombs swirled and spat around me, feeling reckless and hugely powerful somehow.

My brother Zoravar calls my pataka obsession 'unladylike and unnatural'. But, hello, he's just sore because I've lit the fuse of bombs he's been too scared to even approach.

Anyway, I ran downstairs, out onto the cobbled courtyard, to see the Sonargaon arsenal up-close. It was pretty impressive and fully made-in-China. The smiling guy from the Coffee Shoppee asked me if I'd like to set off the first cylinder packed with 'Golden Dragon Fire Breath' and I grabbed the fancy fuselighter from him before he could change his mind, asking him what the occasion was.

'We're celebrating Bangladesh's win over New Zealand today,' he told me.

'Congratulations!' I said, bending down to light the cylinder he placed in the centre of the courtyard. The fuse spluttered and caught and I stepped back nimbly as the tongue of flame raced towards the open mouth of the dragon on the cylinder. The whole cylinder glowed a deep red and then with a confident
wfffooooft
sort of accompanying sound, rockets started shooting out of the dragon's mouth in a steady stream.
Wfffooooft! Wfffooooft! Wfffooooft!

It was awesome.

I craned my neck back to see them rise high up and bloom into spectacular golden starbursts in the inky blue sky. Then, with a sort of a
chimmerin
g sound, they died out, some of their spent sparks floating down to fall benignly all around us.

I inhaled the gun smoke deeply and turned to smile ingratiatingly at the Coffee Shoppee guys. 'Can I light some more, please?'

***

I arrived at the banquet hall at seven-thirty the next morning, to find it had been transformed into a huge, green, limbo background overnight. Vishaal's crew was setting up their lights, working smoothly and noiselessly, all of them grooving to different music on their iPods.

They looked a little startled to see me and I didn't blame them. I was having a big-hair day. I could, of course, have tied it up neatly but then, hello, my cheeks would have looked huge. Still, I'd darkened my kajal, worn sensible cargos and a dark grey ganji and the many mirrors in the banquet hall reflected an image that was pretty much as good as I could get in work clothes.

Anyway, the crew kept shooting me dirty looks, like I was in their way or something, so I found this giant Plaster of Paris
Zing!
Cola can, one of the props from Neelo's shots, and sat down on it to wait. The boys had to arrive within the next fifteen minutes or we'd never wrap this shoot today. And then of course Sankar Menon would have our blood. Neelo and Vishaal were already looking a little worried, huddled in a far corner, squinting down at their reference layouts spread out on the floor. It was half past eight.

Suddenly, there they were. A boisterous, back-slapping gaggle of strapping young men, all scruffy and unshaven (Neelo wanted them rugged and stubbly for the shoot), dressed casually in tee shirts and track bottoms. They looked around the transformed, lit-up banquet hall curiously, and - I was reassured to see - a little apprehensively. Their eyes swept past the camera crew, past Neelo and Vishaal conferring in their corner puffing on their fags, and then settled on me on my
Zing!
Cola can.

There was a little silence.

Heart beating fast, I reminded myself that this was a bunch of total
losers
and I hopped off the can as elegantly as I could and walked over to them. 'Hi,' I said brightly, sticking my hand out at the one closest to me. He had a Sanjay-Dutt-in-
Saajan
hairdo and a gold earring. 'I'm Zoya from AWB.'

'I'm Harry,' he said, brandy-brown eyes smiling down at me obligingly. He pronounced it 'Hairy', and being at eye level with his chest, I agreed wholeheartedly. 'Where's Ishaan?'

'His father's unwell,' I said. 'So they sent me instead.'

'Oh, no, what happened?' Hairy said with what sounded like genuine concern. He tucked one bleached lock of hair behind his earringed ear and said earnestly, 'Please message me his number, I'll call him...'

Wow, he was a nice guy then, this Hairy, I thought, and was pulling out my phone when Lokendar bustled up, expansive as always, and introduced me to everybody. They all shook hands politely enough and then shuffled off to the make-up area to change into their
Zing!
India tee shirts and I sat down to chat with Lokey. He told me that this was the youngest team India had ever had. 'Only three of them - Nikhil, Laakhi and Robin - are above twenty-four. The youngest of them - our newest signing, Zahid, is only nineteen.'

It made me feel pretty old.

I sneaked a look at the boys as they were changing. Not very fit looking, considering they were supposed to be sportsmen. A couple of them were very skinny and one of them, Balaji, was positively roly-poly. None of them rated anywhere close to Shah Rukh in the vital stripped-down-to-the-waist-and-looking-biteable test. Actually, Laakhi and Robin were just very Uncleji-looking, and the younger lot, well, they were too
cocky-
looking - hairy and zitty and in-your-face. But this was just my first impression.

The younger bunch were all single and, according to Lokey, very, very ready to mingle. 'Don't let thee bhola faces fool you, Joyaji!' Lokey said, splitting open pistas and popping them into his mouth while shells fell all around him. 'They are a bunch of haramis.'

The spiffy banker-like guy from Telstar looked appalled at Lokey's language. He opened his book and started leafing through it, his back very straight. Lokey continued shelling pistas unconcernedly. '
Arrey
, most of them come from very humble backgrounds and then' - he waved a pudgy arm at the green-swathed banquet hall like it was the height of debauched living - 'this! Their
Standing
goes up so much in thee
Society
, it turns their heads. Thee kind of messes they get into...you will not believe....' He looked at me expectantly, all puffed with importance.