The Zoya Factor (54 page)

Zoravar and I listened to the sounds of the crowd with horrid fascination.

'Hey look,' he said, pointing out one particular 'devotee' on the surveillance monitor. 'Keep your eye on that one, I think he's maybe going to immolate himself!'

'Are you serious?' I gasped, morbidly bloodthirsty. 'Where, where, which one?'

'That one.' He pointed with the fly-swatter-cum-back-scratcher. 'Look! He's all worked up, he's in a religious frenzy, he's turned away from everybody, he's whipping out a bottle of kerosene...'

We watched the would-be immolator excitedly in silence.

'He's whipping out his
pecker
...' I said in a flat voice. 'And he's pissing into the madhumalati.'

Zoravar sighed. 'They don't make devotees like they used to,' he said sadly, and tottered off to go harrass Eppa for something to eat.

***

The cops showed up a little while later and tear-gassed the mob to disperse it. Then they stood around with their paunches out and told me reproachfully, 'Why don't you just go back to Australia ji? It is not fair that because of your bargaining and haggling we are all endangering our lives...'

Rinku Chachi had to hold me back so I didn't hit them.

'We
need
them,' she whispered urgently, 'Be
nice,
Zoya. Make them some
tea.'

They slurped up the tea and biscuits but left quickly. I don't think they liked the way the Black Cats, who regarded them as the lowest thing in the men-in-uniform pecking order, were smirking at them.

At least Nikhil hadn't called off the Black Cats, I thought with a pang, maybe that's a sign that he believes in me....

***

The morning of the Final dawned eerily silent. New Rohtak Road was quiet. The truckers had obviously shacked up at some dhaba to catch the match. I was still fully on Aussie time so I woke up at around six a.m., which was okay, because the matches started around seven India time. When I emerged into the courtyard, rubbing my eyes, calling for tea and basically trying to act like my life wasn't in ruins, I found Eppa supervising four Black Cats who were carting our big old TV into the courtyard. 'Kair-phul, kair-phul,' she was yelling bossily. 'Sambhal ke!'

'What's up?' I asked, trying to smile and look bubbly.

'They also vants to vatch the match, Zoya,' Eppa said, jerking her head at the Black Cats who smiled at me bashfully. 'So your daddy has said, phull house vill votch phynal match, here in the aangan only.'

She packed the Black Cats off to go carry the sofas in, and scurried off to stir a massive cauldron of suji ka halwa.

'Indian brakefast, today!' She beamed at me as I followed her into the kitchen. 'Halwa puri. Okay?'

I nodded and hitched myself onto the kitchen counter, trying not to think about the breakfast huddle that would be happening right about this time at the Conrad in Melbourne.

Zoravar emerged just then, and hopping up from behind Eppa, shoved his great horny fist straight into the sizzling halwa cauldron. Eppa shrieked that he would burn himself and so of course he gave us a long lecture on how a soldier's hands were lethal weapons, weathered and toughened, and how he could strangle people with one steely fist anytime he liked. He dropped one hand onto the back of Eppa's scrawny neck, massaged it gently and asked her if she wanted to test that statement. She reminded him dourly that he used to kick and scream for all his single-finger-prick blood tests when he was a kid and that he shouldn't talk so much.

The family trooped in then, Mohindar and Anita in their tracksuits from the Ajmal Khan Park; Rinku Chachi, in her RINKU 10 tee shirt, and G. Singh straight from their bedroom looking deliciously bonded; and Yogu and my dad from the roof where they'd been hanging out with the Black Cats.

'Most of the crowd has left to watch the match,' Dad reported.

'They must have figured that even if you flew there in your own celestial chariot now, you'd never make it in time for breakfast, Zoya,' Yogu added, rolling up a puri and taking a large bite.

'They'll be back if we look like we're losing,' Zoravar warned, grabbing the squishiest sofa and manoeuvring his leg onto a little stool. The Black Cats murmured in agreement as Gajju flicked on the TV.

I felt totally nauseous when I heard the roar of the home crowd. The stadium was a riot of green and gold. Then the camera zoomed to a close-up of Beeru's familiar face under a jaunty light-blue turban, talking to a trio of groundsmen. He turned to the camera, grinned brightly and said, 'Well, the bears here have produced a Goldilocks of a pitch, Jay! It's neither too bouncy nor too dead. Neither too grassy nor too worn, neither too damp nor too dry. In fact, they've been assuring me, that it is' - he held the mike to the three grinning groundsmen and they chorused into the mike - 'jusssst right!'

Beeru asked, 'Still, what would you do if you won the toss?'

The oldest groundsman lost his grin, pulled at his earlobe, thought about it for a while and then said dourly, 'I'd bat first, mate.'

Beeru started to ask him something further, but suddenly, we lost them. A bewildering flurry of logos flooded the screen in quick succession accompanied by a rushed announcement: 'This-pitch-report-was-bought-to-you-by-
Zing!
- this is the young nation baby; Navratan hair oil - thanda-thanda-cool-cool; Vodafone - you-and-I-in-a-beautiful-world; Fair-and-Lovely - a-fairer-complexion-in-fourteen-days; Nero Tasha - desh-ki-dhadkan; Videocon - the-official-appliance-provider-to-the-World-Cup; and Samsung - we-are-in-the-team-too!'

Sony Entertainment Television was obviously raking in the moolah big time. When the ad break finally got over, some
seven
minutes later, they cut back to the match where the cameras were focused on Miss
Toinnngg
clad, not in her trademark Panghat sari-choli, but in a pink spaghetti top, sporting oversized dark glasses, a sleek ponytail and lashings of lip gloss.

'And that ravishing lovely lady, Jay, unless I'm very much mistaken, is the skipper's sweetheart.'

'Well, yes, Beeru, and while everybody says there's nothing official about the relationship, we
have
been hearing that there's a wedding on the cards soon. Let's hope her presence here doesn't distract him today.'

'Are these people commentators or gossip columnists?' Dad grumbled, shuffling around in his seat, while Rinku Chachi looked at me with large stricken eyes. He glared at the TV and shouted testily, 'Cut to the toss!'

Very obediently, the cameras cut to Nikhil and the chubby-faced little Aussie captain shaking hands at the pitch, their tee shirts fluttering a little in the breeze. When the umpire asked them formally what they had selected, Nikhil crossed his arms across his chest, looked frowningly down at the grass for a bit, then said, 'I'll take heads.'

The Aussie captain shrugged. 'Tails,' he said.

The portly umpire tossed, the coin flipped high up in the air and landed.

'Tails
it is,' announced the umpire and my heart sank. The Aussie captain grinned happily and said he'd put the Indians in to field first. Nikhil nodded, his lips tightening a little. Once off the field, the commentator started quizzing him about losing the toss and whether he anticipated more bad luck during the match.

Nikhil told him dismissively that this wretched debate had gone on for far too long. 'We're focused, we're talented. We're hungry to win. If there's an "X-factor" operating today, it's just a burning need to prove that our side has been winning consistently not because of luck but because of ability.'

The commentator nodded vigorously and they cut to an ad break. I could feel the whole family looking at me out of the corner of their eyes. I couldn't take it any more.

I got up abruptly and said, 'I'm going to my room. Call me when it's over.'

My phone beeped as I lay in bed, head buried under the pillow.

Are you watching
?

It was Nikhil.

I rolled over on to my stomach and wondered what to write back, my heart slamming madly against my ribs. I wanted to write,
Do you really think I'm a materialistic bitch?
I wanted to write,
Why'd you tell Goyal about us?
I wanted to write,
I love you! I love you! I love you!

So of course I wrote,
Oh hi, aren't you going out to play?

No
, he wrote back.

No? I wondered looking at the phone screen blankly. What did
that
mean?

And then, another message flashed:

I'm going out to win.

He
hates
me, I decided then and there. He thinks I'm some money-minded
cow
who deserted the team at the penultimate hour. God knows what the
snake
Jogpal had gone back and told him.

I sat in my room and brooded. Every time the family cheered or groaned, I felt physically sick. I did emerge to watch bits and pieces of the Aussie batting. I watched horrible Vikram Goyal shuffling down the pitch and Zahid, loping about like a large cat, getting a couple of wickets. Laakhi was as cheerful as ever, clapping his gloved hands together, 'adjusting' himself, cheering them all loudly even as Nikhil chewed gum and basically stood around at second slip looking like the grimmest, most intense Boost ad ever.

I'm going out to win,
he'd said to me and he looked like he meant it. In my crazy, screwed-up state I almost wanted him to lose.

'I'm-going-out-to-win,' I repeated in a squeaky mocking little voice. What an uncool, over-the-top, filmi thing to say....

The Aussies efficiently put together an impossible total and then they broke for lunch. The extended Solanki family had a working lunch of puri aloo and sat down to watch India
ki
batting with their hearts in their mouths. The atmosphere was electric, worse than in any of the matches I'd seen in Oz, and I don't think it was all because it was, you know, the defanged Raktdantini's family home. I mean, by the kind of ads that were rolling out on the TV you would think the country was going to war or something. So much breast-beating, sloganeering, chanting, chest-thumping, teary-eyed praying and supplicating...the manic
dhak-dhakking
of a billion brown hearts was completely deafening. It was jingoism at its naked over-the-top-and-wallowing-in-it best.

The day before yesterday, some megalomaniac billionaire had run an ad saying that if the team brought home the World Cup, he'd give all eleven of them five lakhs each and the man of the match fifteen lakhs. It was so stupid. Did he think the boys weren't trying their best already? This morning he'd run another ad, upping the five to ten, and the fifteen to thirty. Well, it was one way of not feeling too bad if India lost...at least he'd save 140 lakhs!

The stock market had totally lost the plot. Stocks were booming at crazy unrealistic prices. There were news flashes crawling along the bottom of the screen predicting a stock market crash if the team lost.

Then another news flash crawled along the bottom of the screen to say that the Vidyut Board office in Navi Mumbai had been trashed by an irate mob because the light had gone
three
times
during the first half of the match. The Vidyut Board was pleading with the public to remain calm, that the electricity would come back soon. How they expected people to read the crawlie on TV if they had no electricity was beyond me.

And some hardcore fan who'd gone on a no-food-no-water fast the day India made the Super 8s and vowed to break it only after we won the final had just been admitted into hospital because of an irregular heartbeat and a generally weakened condition.

Anyway, the reason I was reading all the crawlies was, of course, that I was way too tense to watch the batting. It wasn't going too well.

Jay and Beeru kept adding their irritating comments. Beeru especially kept harping on the fact that I wasn't there today and how badly the Aussies had behaved, and that it was disgraceful the way they'd gained a psychological advantage over the Indians because of their nagging and their cries from the stands. He sounded fully hysterical, actually. I wondered if he'd bet money on the outcome of the match.

Jogpal-the-choot was watching the match too. Sitting next to Rawal-the-creep who had his arm in a sling. He kept shaking his head and sucking in his breath and wincing in a I-would've-handled-that-better kind of way. Just looking at them made me feel all murderously, bloodthirstily, tooth-grindingly Raktdantini again.