The Zoya Factor (43 page)

Hairy (
very
hairy, actually, he'd taken a vow not to shave till the World Cup was over) looked at me thoughtfully. 'Bhai, I
toh
don't read them, Zoya,' he said finally, one leg jittering under the table so hard the plates clattered up and down, up and down. 'But Shivee reads them every day.'

'Mein bhi nahi padta
,' Zahid volunteered. 'I never read
anything
they write about me, unless Hardin-sir asks me too. It spoils your concentration.'

'What saala concentration?' said Shivee. (He had shaved his head the day we got into the Super 8; he was eschewing vanity, he'd told me solemnly.) 'If you're a mature, what everybody is saying won't affect your concentration.'

'So what are they saying, this everybody?' Zahid asked him belligerently.

Shivee started to answer but I broke in, 'Let's not go into all that now. I think Nikhil's ready to go.'

***

18

'It's India-Pakistan today!' Mon said dreamily as she threw an orange dupatta over her white kameez and green salwar. 'Drama, Tragedy, Emotion...twin siblings with bleeding umbilical cords, seeking closure, in love and death.... Ahhhh....' She placed a blue bindi on her forehead and added, 'It's like
Deewar,
only better, because there's no Nirupa Roy.'

'
Arrey
, Monita, you are looking very decent,' Rinku Chachi pronounced as she bounced into Mon's room in her RINKU 10 tee shirt. '
Hain na
, Zoya?'

I nodded yes, while Mon looked at Chachi like she couldn't decide whether to be flattered or insulted. 'Thanks, Rinku,' she said finally turning to daub large quantities of orange and white face paint on Armaan's cheeks before clamping a jauntily angled Men in Blue cap on his head. 'Let's go, guys,' she said, standing back to survey her handiwork critically. 'I don't want to miss a moment of this.'

We'd flown back to Melbourne for this match. Security had been beefed up at the MCG and the stadium, which can seat up to one lakh people, was sold out. The members' enclosure was packed. A whole contingent of Indian page-3 celebrities had flown in for this last leg of the World Cup and they'd bagged all the best seats. The air was redolent with their tinkling laughter and expensive perfumes. Mon marched purposefully past some lesser Khans and stopped before a gaggle of Bollywood starlets. 'Do you mind?' she said sweetly. 'These are
Zoya's
seats.'

It was the most embarrassing moment of my life! I wanted the earth to swallow me up. No, I wanted the earth to swallow
her
up, the silly lid.

The starlets got all gushy and excited. 'Hey, look, Zoya!' they yelled to the lesser Khans who rushed up to me in a whirl of stubble and sunglasses and started introducing themselves. The girls moved quite willingly to make place for us. The only person who found this exciting was Armaan who was thrilled to have all this firm cool female flesh pressing against him suddenly. He dropped and picked his Beyblade to his heart's content,
and
got to see the whole match ensconced happily in the godi of a hot little starlet who wanted to show her date how maternal she was, really, in spite of her D&G mini-skirted exterior.

We had all settled down and the commentators had just announced that the captains were coming out for the toss when I got this massive attack of nerves. I was suddenly absolutely sure something awful was going to happen. I just knew it somehow. It was divine retribution for having been nasty to Nikhil. Regardless of what he had said to me that evening, the truth of the matter was that he had reached out to me after an awful day that had ended in defeat and what he had got in return was a whole lot of attitude. It was hardly the unconditional support he'd told me he had been looking for.

I concealed my unease as well as I could as we watched the burly, round-shouldered Paki captain push back his dark green cap, scratch his beard and reckon he'd take heads. Khoda shrugged and the umpire flipped the coin up in the air. It seemed to take forever to land today, and my heart beat so loudly I expected people to turn around and go
shush
at me but they didn't.

'Tails it is,' the umpire announced finally and Nikhil said he'd field first and they both strolled back to the pavilion together.

Mon stole a look at me.

'What?' I asked irritably.

'Nothing,' she said. 'You wanna let go of my arm?'

I uncurled my fingers from her wrist. There were huge red welts right around it. 'Shit, sorry, Mon,' I said.

'Quit worrying, Zoya,' she said, hugging me. 'You can't do anything now, just sit back and enjoy the game.'

I nodded and sat back waiting for the bomb to explode.

The stadium looked like a massive inverted hemisphere of the earth itself, part blue and part green. There were continents of Pakistani supporters in dark green, suspended in a rippling ocean of light blue Indians, all screaming their lungs out.

The crowd was heckling the fielders in the outfield shamelessly, hissing and hooting. Thind was foolish enough to do a couple of side bends and squats to stretch his muscles and had to endure a Mexican wave of dark-green figures copying him one after the other - bending, squatting, bending again, and then letting out a huge farty raspberry at the end of the second squat. The cheering began every time an Indian bowler began his run up, paused reverentially as the batsman thwacked the ball away and rose to a deafening roar as the ball raced across the pitch and anywhere close to the boundary.

'They're cheering singles like they are sixes!' Rinku Chachi yelled to me over the din. 'What will they do when they
really
hit a six?'

We knew soon enough. Their fancy-boy opener hit a mighty six and the crowd combusted. The drumming, the synchronized clapping and war-cry-like chanting felt like we were on a battlefield.

'Amazing how they don't get intimidated,' Mon said, peering out at Nikhil on the field. He was chewing gum and squinting in the sun looking as if he were waiting for a bus.

Must be seeing only thee eye of thee cupboard
, I thought slightly hysterically and got up to get myself a drink, deciding that the only way to get through this match without becoming a gibbering wreck was to get systematically sloshed. So I piled on the Victoria Bitter and totally surrendered to the excitement on the field. I cheered and whooped and screamed like a crazed person. Luckily, I was wearing a body suit over my shorts or I'd have probably ripped off my shirt and whirled it over my head.

At one point Mon had to pull me down and hush me because I'd stood up and started yelling: '
Allah-hoo-Akbar'
at the top of my voice.

'Zoya, what are you
doing
? They'll think you're making
fun
,' she hissed in my ear so I covered my mouth with my hands, slightly bewildered. I'd just been trying to show some sporting spirit. Then I took it upon myself to teach the names of the fielding positions to the starlet closest to me. I pulled out a ball point pen and started drawing a neatly labelled cricket pitch on the bare back of the gay designer dude sitting in front of me. He turned around and gave me a smacking kiss on the mouth and said that he was a huge fan of mine. Obviously, I was not the only drunk person in the stands.

When the umpire rejected Balaji's appeal I leapt to my feet and showed him both my middle fingers and the camera crew caught me doing it and beamed my image on the giant stadium screens....

The Bollywood starlets were looking at me in delicate horror, even as they whipped out their cellphones and started taking videos of Zoya Devi smashed out of her skull.

And that's when a totally mortified Rinku Chachi dragged me out onto the steps and hissed, 'Stop it, Zoya! If you have no shame for yourself, have some shame for your papa's sake!'

That rebuke should've sobered me up, I suppose, but I don't know if it did.

Anyway, I allowed her to take me to the loo where I threw up huge quantities of undigested beer, washed my face and combed out my dishevelled hair. Then she made me drink a whole bottle of Aquafina and led me back to my seat through the row of starlets with a grim smile plastered on her face, muttering under her breath, 'Behave yourself now or I'll break both your legs.'

During all this commotion, Pakistan had been hammering away steadily, their bearded, gargantuan captain leading from the front as usual. They finished at 330 for seven.

Of course I had a raging headache by the time the Indians came out to bat. The cheers were totally deafening now, the so-called classy people in the members' enclosure were behaving no better than the rowdies in Bay 13 of the MCG, which is famous for its disorderly conduct. I pressed a chilled can of
Zing!
to my throbbing forehead and wished I'd stayed at the hotel after all.

The boys seemed to be doing okay, sticking to the required run rate and appearing quite relaxed. The Pakistanis looked tense though; their
poishun
was not very good at the moment. They still had to win two more matches if they wanted to make the semis and they only had three left to play. Their wicketkeeper, a wiry little guy with loads of attitude, kept dancing from foot to foot and goading the bowlers, in a voice that was beginning to sound just a little bit hysterical. And that's when the first little incident happened.

Shivee suddenly turned around and glared at the wicketkeeper murderously.

The crowd was immediately caught up in the action. 'And there seems to be bit of sledging being alleged there if I'm not mistaken,' the commentator said. 'Shivnath's looking upset...'

'I don't really think that could've happened, Beeru,' Jay said confidently. 'The mikes would've picked it up.'

Whatever it was, it got smoothed over quickly and play resumed. The commentators remarked that this was probably one rare occasion when the ICC had appointed both non-Hindi/Urdu-speaking umpires in an India-Pakistan match.

'Umpire Patil is of Indian origin, but he's born and brought up in England,' Beeru informed us. 'He claims to be Hindi-speaking but honestly, his Hindi is no better than yours, Jay.'

I took this to mean that the wicketkeeper could keep spouting mother-sister
ke
abuses to the batsmen and the dudes in the Fly Emirates shirts would never know.

The openers gave us a good start nonetheless and when Laakhi and Khoda finally came on we were 133 for two in seventeen overs, which wasn't bad at all. I finally allowed myself to relax; even my headache eased a bit.

It helped that the starlet next to me was a sighing sticky little bundle, seriously in lust with Khoda. She grabbed my arm the moment he strolled out, swinging his bat and squinting in the sunshine, acknowledging the roar of the crowd with a quick grin.

'He is so hot!' she sighed, squeezing my arm hard. 'He looks like a gladiator, like a king, like God.'

Mon gave her an old-fashioned look. 'Only God looks like God,' she said mildly.

'Oh, I know,' gushed the starlet. 'But he's totally the hottest guy on the team, don't you think?'

'Oh, d'you think so?' I burped politely. 'Zahid's pretty hot.'

The starlet dismissed Zahid with a wave of her hand. 'Zahid's just a boy,' she said, like she chewed and spat out boys like him for brunch. 'Nikhil's a
man.
See how strong his jaw is? And he looks so intense - like he'd let you flirt with other guys all evening and then' - she sighed - 'and then take you home and make violent, passionate love to you and show you who the boss is.'

Mon and I stared at each other, absolutely gobsmacked. We were both reeling under this vision of Nikhil as a bodice-ripping, sari-utaaro demon lover. 'Uh,' Mon coughed. 'Yes... he does look like...a...er
man.
What do you think, Zoya?'

The starlet turned to look at me eagerly. 'Don't you think he's a VPL type? You know, a Violent Passionate Lover?'

'Oh, I don't know,' I said, rather viciously, I must admit. 'Doesn't VPL stand for Visible Panty Line? I think I can see
his
through those horrible blue track pants, actually.'

The starlet let out a half-outraged scream of laughter at this. And right away Mon giggled as Nikhil ran down the pitch with his bat out, 'A VPL with a big
bat.
'

This got everybody giggling and then the bare-backed designer dude cleared his throat authoritatively. 'Sorry to break your hearts, dearies,' he said cosily, 'but I happen to know for a fact that most cricketers don't
have
willies. All they've got is
willows
.'