The Legend of Pradeep Mathew (11 page)

It is now night and Manouri and two of the Byrd girls bring dinner. Manouri smiles at me, the two girls are too busy arguing over some nonsense to notice us. One is tall, the other is plump and I remember neither of their names.

As we tear into the paratha and prawn curry, I keep grilling our guest.

‘Come on, Mr Gokul… surely the opposition can tell if you’re playing an unregistered player.’

Gokul coughs rice back into his spoon. ‘We had so-called Closed Pavilion Policy. Sir Nihal’s idea, what else? Outsiders can’t speak with team. Only master-in-charge, head coach and Sir Nihal could enter dressing room. Sir Nihal said it was for the preparing of the mental. urrg… I knew fishy things were going on.’

‘Surely, Mr Gokul… in a Royal–Thomian? The players know each other. They will notice if Gihan Dandeniya is suddenly someone else.’

The question is mine. Ari, the sceptic, is strangely silent. He has been like this all through dinner. I poke him. ‘Oi. Mr Silent Partner. How?’

‘That’s what it was.’ Ari looks me square in the face. ‘They all looked alike. Now I know why. Sunscreen. Bloody sunscreen. Every one of those jokers was covered in that crap…’

On the eve of the Royal–Thomian Big Match, six of Royal’s nine coloursmen had injuries. Several all-rounders could only play as batsmen. Some bowlers could hardly play at all. What follows is conjecture, as even Mr Gokulanath was left out of the Closed Pavilion Policy.

The policy was raising a few eyebrows. The Royalists even asked for a separate entrance to the SSC so as not to fraternise outside of the closed circle.

‘There were thirteen players, which included our man Mathew. Then the coach, the manager and Sir Nihal. Everyone thought it was arrogant, but no one questioned. Royal was winning, no?’

‘No one else had access to the players?’

Gokul shakes his head.

Night descends on de Saram Road and plates are cleared. Gokul is hunched forward and asleep. Every part of him is asleep, except for his mouth. He is muttering.

‘Don’t think… bowl. You don’t think… you bowl.’

‘Can you bowl the double bounce ball, Mr Gokul?’

Mr Gokul is not fit to bowl anything. He keeps muttering. I shake my head at Ari. ‘If you believe this story, you’re a bigger fool than you look.’

The hand that holds the glass looks positively deformed, as does its owner. His knuckles are twisted at improbable angles. He tries to convince us that Mathew took the field under various guises. Before lunch, he was the fast bowler, after lunch he bowled spin, in the last session he bowled medium pace. And while he did this, three Royal players rested in the closed confines of the dressing room.

He tells us that in the first innings, Pradeep took 3 wickets. ‘2 as the pacey, 1 as the spinner.’ But he cannot claim all the credit.

‘The Royal fielding… sha! Like eleven Gus Logies, diving, throwing, catching,’ recalls Ari. ‘Plus the Thora batsmen played like mutts.’

Trailing by 160, the Thomians turned on their grit and dug in. By the end of the second day they were 104–4 needing to bat an entire day.

Mathew did not feature in that session.

‘The third day was pathetic,’ says Ari. ‘They bowled like emperors, those pacemen, that all-rounder, that left-arm spinner…’

‘Same person, same same,’ snorts Gokul. He is beginning to nod off again, though his mouth is still working. ‘All Pradeepan… That whole match I knew. Team arrive. Straight to dressing room. Straight to field. Straight to dressing room. For three days… And they win the game.’

He tells us that when Sarinda Jurangpathy, the left-arm spinner, came on to bowl, he knew beyond doubt. The action was immaculate, but the bowler’s arms were four shades lighter than his face.

‘That’s why they never took off the blue and yellow caps. Bloody Royal cheaters,’ says Ari.

By Gokul’s count, Pradeep finished the game with a match bag of 13 wickets, though credit was shared by the legitimate Royal bowlers.

Ari is staring into space and for the first time in years, I’m smoking a cigarette outside of my writing table. Mr Gokulanath says he and all the Royal staff involved in cricket received a Rs 5,000 bonus for delivering the first Royal victory in sixteen years. He starts rocking forward with his eyes closed and mutters. ‘We did nothing… said nothing… and that is why… they pay us.’

Then he leans over his chair, wiry limbs flailing, and vomits prawn curry and arrack into Manouri’s anthurium plant. Ari runs out swearing and returns with a garden hose and a schoolteacher expression.

My bonus to Gokul is not as generous as Rs 5,000, but factoring in the free food and the bottle of Old, he hasn’t done too shabbily. Gokul hisses to Ari about contacting the Thomian Old Boys Association with this information. Ari hisses back.

That weekend, after being sent by Sheila to buy new flowerpots for Manouri, I call every person connected to the 1983 Royal–Thomian I can find. Coaches, teachers, spectators, Royalists, Thomians.

Administrators at Royal College inform me that Mr Satyakumar Gokulanath was dismissed after twenty-nine years of service for misconduct and disgraceful behaviour. Six hundred rupees and much coaxing later, I find the incident involved stolen money from the school sports coffers.

My attempts at contacting Sir Nihal and the head coach are blocked when I foolishly mention that I want to interview them about the 1983 Big Match. I speak to old boys who played in that game, including the vice captain Sarinda Jurangpathy and first reserve Heshan Unamboowe. Both vehemently deny any conspiracy in the ’83 match, and then look at their wrists and excuse themselves a minute after the question is posed.

The only people to verify that Royal used questionable methods are the Thomians I speak with. But none mention sunscreen or a bowler of a thousand actions. Seven claim food poisoning, nine claim ball tampering and four claim that the umpires were bribed with arrack and prostitutes.

Consider these stats:

Bowling is all about how many wickets you take. Your strike rate is how many balls you need to get them. Your average is how many runs each cost. P.S. Mathew’s average was abysmal. He conceded many runs en route to his 91 international wickets.

He once told Charith Silva, when they were sharing a room on tour, ‘An over is six bullets in a gun. I don’t mind firing some into the sky if one hits the target.’

But when it came to the taking of wickets, he was unmatched. Let me illustrate by using one of Ariyaratne’s invented stats. Wickets per match. Number of wickets divided by number of matches. Not rocket science.

My Jinadasa comes equipped with a darker setting. There is a reason that figure is in bold. Here are the greatest all-rounders of the 1980s. Perhaps even some of the greatest cricketers to walk the earth. Here are their wickets per match in tests:

The greatest bowlers of yester-decade, no one within spitting distance of 6.71 wickets per match. This, you will find, is the tip of a chunk of ice at least twice as big as that which sank the
Titanic.

At first, she is suspicious. She walks around my room, glancing at my cricket books while tightly clutching her bag and umbrella.

‘Please take a seat, Mrs Sabi,’ says Ari, with a bow and a sweeping hand.

‘Who are y’all?’ she asks, not sitting down.

‘We are great admirers of your brother.’

‘Y’all are with that fellow Kuga?’

‘Who?’

‘Kuga. Are you with him?’

‘Who is Kuga?’

Ari raises his eyebrows and I watch her watch us. She does so for some time.

Sabeetha Amirthalingam nee Sivanathan looks very much a woman who wears the shalwar pants and controls the remote. She is plump, with gold rings on her painted toes. Her hair seems permanently wet, her wrists imprison bangles, and her square glasses hang like picture frames from her red pottu.

She surveys my shelves, my Samyo radio and the stacks of newspaper clippings on my desk. She picks up my article titled ‘Pradeep Mathew. Unsung Hero’. The one with the grainy picture and the purple prose. She still does not sit.

‘My brother passed away last year.’

My heart sinks to my stomach and my stomach sinks to my bowels. I glance at Ari and catch Mrs Sabi glaring at me.

‘How did he…?’

She stares at the picture. The one with the short-lived headband. ‘I hated this long hair. He nicely cut it once. Last time I saw him, he was bald.’

‘When was that?’

‘Five years ago.’

I try to pick the resemblance. Pradeep had a pinocchio nose; she has an eggplant honk. He had tiny squints; she has bulging eyes. He was skinny, dark; she is russet-coloured, chubby.

‘Are you sure your brother is dead?’

She nods. Not without sadness. Then, finally, she sits. A few sips of Sheila’s ginger tea softens her leather handbag exterior. Her speech gathers speed. ‘Don’t know much about Pradeepan’s cricket. Tell you frankly, I didn’t have much contact with our family those days.’

Mrs Sabi gives us the Wuthering Heights of it all. Aided by a loan from Sampath National Bank, the very firm that would later employ his son, Muhundan Sivanathan became part owner of Malinda Bakers in Moratuwa and was able to move the Sivanathan family from the Soysapura Flats to a respectable part of Angulana.

‘Appa said, “Hard work never killed anyone.” In the end it killed him. Pradeepan was a very quiet child, used to cry for the slightest thing.’

Overbearing Sinhala mother and workaholic Tamil father raised two children who did not know what race they were. That was till 1983.

‘Our bus went past the flats. Fridges and TVs being thrown from the windows. Vehicles burning. Tamils being beaten on the street. We were terrified.’

The men with clubs and knives stormed the bus and asked passengers to speak Sinhala, to say words that Tamils found tricky to pronounce, like baaldiya. Irangani and Sabi passed the test, an elderly gentleman in front did not. He was dragged out and set on fire.

Mrs Sabi curls her lips and shakes her head. She pushes her glasses along her nose and looks at the wall that I stare at and the numerous pieces of paper bearing her brother’s name.

Pradeep was rescued from Thurstan by the driver of Muhundan’s silent partner, Bharatha Malinda Dasanayake. Muhundan had wisely let the local mudalali put his name on the bakery he ran. The mob, who feared Dasanayake, kept their kerosene cans away from the Sivanathan home, but proceeded to burn down three houses on Daham Road.

Had Malinda Bakers been named Sivanathan Bakeries, the owner-operator and the baker’s assistants would have been hurled into the ovens. Had Muhundan not been delivering steady profits, Dasanayake would not have sent his driver to pick up young Pradeep.

‘Pradeepan wouldn’t tell us what he saw on the drive from Thurstan, but I know it affected him. Appa was worried he’d become political, so they sent him away, for studies.’

Remembering his Thurstan mentor’s advice, Pradeepan Mathew Sivanathan dropped his surname when enrolling at the University of Hampshire in the UK in 1984. He then dropped his studies a year later to join the touring Sri Lankan cricket team. Both events caused a storm at home and for a while Pradeep was
persona non grata.