The Legend of Pradeep Mathew (14 page)

‘Are you sure they will pay?’

‘Yes. Yes,’ I insist. ‘Ask Garfield.’

Ari whispers to me as they grill Garfield. ‘Tell me you didn’t do it, Wije.’

I smile at him and put my fingers to my lips. He frowns back.

None of us are to know that chasing a paltry 166 against a non-test playing bowling attack, the Windies would collapse to 93 all out, causing one of the great upsets of the modern game. That Steve Tikolo’s 29 would be the highest score of the game.

Ari does the calculations much, much later. If Garfield’s initial mistake had stood, we would have made 6.7 million. Instead, we end up losing 7.5 lakhs.

On Saturday, Garfield disappears. In the confusion, no one notices we haven’t claimed the bet money. A note is left:

For a while, hysteria reigns. Then Ari’s daughter Melissa spills the beans.

‘He ran off with that girl down the road. Sara.’

‘That’s Marzooq’s daughter …’

There is a crash of metallic rust outside. As if mammoths are battling robots. We look through the window. My gate is still shuddering. There are three bearded men with mosque hats. The oldest one is the biggest; he is wielding a stick and being restrained by the younger two.

‘Bring her now or I will smash this house!’

Ari shouts from the balcony. ‘Mr Marzooq. What is the meaning of this?’

‘Where is my Sara?’

Faces are peeping from behind curtains and trishaw drivers are exiting their vehicles and approaching Ari’s house.

‘We are also missing our boy,’ I say.

‘I will break your boy’s face.’

I run down the stairs. I have been drinking all morning and my run is more a tortoise-like shuffle. ‘Gamini, wait!’ shouts Sheila. Ari comes after me, the snail in hot pursuit of the tortoise. In the three minutes that it takes for us to reach the gate, a crowd has gathered.

‘Come back, Wije! They will turn you into halal meat!’ says Ari.

The Marzooq brothers are attempting to prise the stick from their father. The stick flies off in the scuffle, bounces on the tarred road and lands at my feet. I pick it up and begin swinging. The crowd coos with delight and takes a step back. The Marzooqs advance. ‘Uncle. Don’t try anything.’

‘Where is that bloody son of mine?’ I scream. ‘I will make hal … mincemeat out of him.’

In the distance I hear Sheila wailing. The Muslims stop in their tracks.

‘Come, Marzooq. We’ll find this fool and we’ll thrash him.’

I begin walking to their car. The crowd parts like the Red Sea.

Even though I feel like a lie-down, I keep up my bravado. I lift my baton to hammer the de Saram Road signboard. ‘Let’s go! I will break his head!’

And suddenly there are people restraining me. They drag me into my home and lock the door. I am force-fed cups of tea and asked to sit still.

An hour later Mr Marzooq enters with his sons. We share more tea. Melissa Byrd tells us the rest of the story. My son and Sara Marzooq have been seeing each other for over two years.

‘You knew this?’ bellows her father.

‘No, did you?’ I snarl back.

‘They did.’ Melissa points to the two boys. She had evidently inherited her father’s talent for subtlety.

The eldest boy receives a slap. There is a flood of Tamil exchanged between father and sons. That is when Sheila hands me a letter that has just arrived. She gives me a look that could curdle beer.

The elder Marzooq boy grabs the letter. ‘Come, Vaappa. We will bring her home.’

Sheila runs after them. ‘Mr Marzooq. Don’t you dare hurt my son …’

I rise to go before realising that the entire Byrd family is staring at me.

‘Tell me you didn’t put all of it, Wije?’

‘How much did you put, Gamini?’ asks his wife.

‘What did Uncle Wije do?’ asks nosy Melissa.

I tell them very quickly. In the second that it takes for the truth to sink in, I make a hasty exit, chased to the door by raised voices and fists.

Last week I woke up shivering. This week I wake up sweating. Sheila spies a note from Nawasiri in the post. It is the hospital calling me in for my annual check-up. My body notifies me that the prognosis will not be good.

‘Didn’t you just go for a check-up?’

‘No. That was to make an appointment.’

‘When is your appointment?’

‘Sheila, I have writing to do.’

I lock myself in my room and decide to leave it till after next month’s World Cup.

Just as the Marzooqs begin assembling a SWAT team, young Sara comes home by herself. The sixteen-year-old realises that being a little princess is far more pleasant than being a musician’s wife. The Marzooqs have the marriage annulled. My son calls and I refuse to talk to him.

The Byrds take turns in coming over and blasting me. Brian Gomez rings up and calls me every name under the sun. Everyone insists I pay back the Cricket Board from my personal money, of which I have none. Garfield stays in Dubai and sends a cheque for 5,000 dirhams. I tear it into pieces and post it back to him. A week later, following a blistering arrack-fuelled row, Sheila asks me to leave the house.

I find myself in the same position as the internationals who dared tour apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. I am universally shunned. It would be a few years later that men more famous than me would be banished for committing the very crime that I had. Betting more than they could afford on a game of cricket.

Where were you in 1996? Who did you hug when Ranatunga hammered that 6 off Warne? I hugged a sweaty trishaw driver with a scar running down his cheek. As far as hugs go, it wasn’t bad. Though I, who grew up in a no-hugs-please-we’re-Sinhalese atmosphere, am hardly an expert.

I was at the Kaanuwa in Moratumulla. A place where I was sure no one I cared about or didn’t care for would see me. A place where men in sarongs drink to forget why they drink, smoke cigarettes past the filter and start long-running arguments.

Jonny Gilhooley had invited me to his bungalow in Bolgoda to watch the final. But recent events had put a dampener on my mood. A mood that I only wished to share with strangers.

It is the first time I’ve seen chairs and tables in the Kaanuwa. Till today, it was a transit bar near Moratuwa’s central bus stand that served every type of arrack – Pol, Gal, Blue, White, Old, Old Reserve, Double Distilled, Extra Special – to every type of customer, regardless of how ragged they looked. After today, the furniture and the TV would be a permanent fixture. And it is the first weekend in the Kaanuwa’s thirty-year history that no fights break out and no one is evicted.

The bar is already full when I walk in, and everyone is wearing free Regnis hats. The floor is sodden, with leaflets advertising washing machines and fridges soaked in spilled arrack and fallen stout.

The table next to me is taken by trishaw drivers. The one who sits alongside me is well built, with copper-tinted hair, a mosque hat and a scar on his cheek. He is the only one of them who doesn’t unnerve me. He gives me the first of a million grins as he sits, creating a buffer between me and the barroom beasts.

I recognise a few of them. Comrade Bandara sits under the fan with a bottle of strong beer. He once lamented that countries who play cricket never become communist. Bandara lives in Mount Lavinia, close to my place. His nephew was murdered in the 1989 Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna purge – the government-sponsored mass execution of thousands of suspected university Marxists. ‘I hope this team doesn’t win anything for the next hundred years,’ he once said. Today he is wearing a Sri Lanka T-shirt and hooting.

It had been an eventful two weeks. I had lost seven lakhs, a son and a home. I was staying with my born-again sister and her holy husband in the suburbs of Battaramulla, and my face ached from all the smiling I had to do. The youngest of Akka’s three children had just left for studies and I was taking full advantage of her surplus mothering instincts. While the food was good and the sheets were clean, I was unable to drink and I had to join them for evening prayers.

I need not waste too much ink on the 1996 World Cup final. You all know what happened. Taylor and Ponting posted 137 for 1. Sri Lanka’s spin quartet of Murali, Dharmasena, Jayasuriya and de Silva applied the skids. Our spin quartet were no Chandra–Bedi–Venkat–Prasanna. We had only one genuine spinner of the ball and two part-timers. But coupled with our agile fielding and aggressive spirit, it was enough. 170 for 5. 245 for 7.

245 wasn’t impossible, but it was difficult batting second in a Cup final against the likes of Warne, McGrath, Fleming, Reiffel and the Waugh twins.

By the time the scoreboard read 20, both our openers were in the pavilion, removing their pads and shaking their heads. Amid the perfume of sweat, smoke and distilled spirits, we begin shaking our fists and cursing. Unfit drunks swearing at professional athletes.

Plates of steaming fried rice and devilled beef fly past my face. The bar is filled with sellers of kasippu or illegal liquor from Soysapura, fisherfolk from Lunawa, shopkeepers from Rawatawatte and the sum total of zero women. These are men escaping their obligations. Men who have nowhere to be. Men who lean against the filthy walls, oblivious to the cockroaches crawling across the ceiling wires.

Then Aravinda and Guru steady the ship and, united by a hatred of Glenn McGrath, a brotherhood begins to bind us. Outside on the streets nothing moves. As if even the cats and the crows and the beggars have found TVs to crowd around.

My companion gets chatty. ‘Ade. I can’t believe. We are winning. We are winning.’

I spy a ponytail under his mosque hat, a tattoo under his shirt sleeve and shiny chains on his throat.

‘Shut up, fool,’ growls Kalu Daniel, notorious kasippu distiller and gambler, seated below the TV with his entourage. ‘If we lose I will smash you.’

Mosque Hat lets out a nervous giggle, lights a Gold Leaf and extends his hand. ‘Uncle, fit, no? Fit.’ He is pouring with sweat and 147 minutes away from hugging me.

The Aussies crumble as Aravinda and Arjuna take us home. Intoxicated by hours of drinking and the possibility of the improbable, we begin hitting the tables and chanting. Outside firecrackers pop, first like machine gun pellets, then like dynamite.

‘Uncle! We are the champions!’ shouts my sweat-drenched companion, mid-hug. Colombo explodes into fireworks and men embrace strangers. The party goes on all night and continues for the next three years. Sri Lankans across the world stand taller, believing that now anything is possible. The war would end, the nation would prosper and pigs would take to the air.

We watch the victory lap. Gurusinha is caught wrestling a souvenir stump away from a spectator. Glaring at the man as if to say, ‘Sorry, mister, but I have taken too much crap from too many people for far too long to get to this point. This stump is mine. Go get your own.’

We watch Arjuna, next to Pakistan Premier Benazir Bhutto, thanking Wasim and Azhar for supporting us after Australia and the West Indies refused to play in Sri Lanka, following a bomb blast. My friend, his tongue fully lubricated, lets out a giggle.

‘Ado. Uncle. London, there are more bombs, no? No one boycotts Lord’s. What do you say?’

I nod and smile. ‘Johannesburg, full of AIDS and guns. No problem. Bloody bullshit. They are scared to play us.’

We watch Arjuna hoist the Cup. And we watch rerun after rerun after rerun. Credit and kudos are multiplied and then divided. And our cricketers transform from international punching bags to national gods.

My companion’s name is Jabir and even though he looks and acts like a juvenile, he claims to be a father of four, an electrician and to have driven a trishaw to the SSC over twenty years ago. He tells me how Arjuna Ranatunga used to come by bus in tattered shorts to practices. How two players of yesteryear courted the same woman for over a decade. How Sanath once had a full head of hair.

His scar begins from his ear and reaches his chin. He tells me he got it in a gang fight at a Marians Concert in Panadura. The Moratu Boys vs The Chilaw Gang. ‘We had fists, they had knives, we still won. Marians had to go home.’

I tell him about my friendship with Graham Snow and try not to appear boastful. I ask him about Pradeep Mathew and he says he has never heard of him. I ask him if he can take me to Colpetty; he says he will, but only after one more stout.

*  *  *

Two days before the final, I’d got a call at my sister’s house.

‘It’s some girl,’ said my brother-in-law more loudly than necessary. He and his wife both watched me as I picked up.

‘Mr Wije. How you doing?’ The vatti amma voice and the singsong delivery.

‘Been a bit unwell, Danila.’

‘Take a break from your scriptwriting, Uncle. We are about to win the World Cup.’

I laughed. ‘How sure are you, my dear?’

My sister and her husband registered looks of shock. I ignored them.

‘How can you ask that, Uncle? Kangaroo meat for dinner.’

‘Yum.’

‘I called to say it’s your lucky month. Your friend Mr Snow sent a present for you.’

‘Really?’ Probably a World Cup tie. Useful to strangle my sister’s husband, who was now pretending to read the paper.

‘He’s upset about the mix-up. He wants to donate three and half lakhs to the cause.’

‘Mr Wije. Are you there?’

‘Of his personal money?’

‘Yes. I have the cheque in front of me. Would you like to pick it up after the World Cup?’

‘No,’ I said, and watched my sister pretend to sew.