The Legend of Pradeep Mathew (22 page)

‘Didn’t one of your cricketers get to play for Sri Lanka?’

‘Why not? Granville. Karnain. Von Hagt.’

I note that none of these players lasted over a season, but I keep schtum.

‘Not Mathew?’

Finally Newton looks me in the face. ‘Pradeepan, I met at Soysapura. But I never promoted him.’

‘Then?’

‘I taught him everything he knew.’

‘When he played softball?’

‘No. When he played for Thurstan.’

My sister brings food and gossip. Loku’s youngest daughter has an Australian boyfriend. Bala has been planting teak trees on Maddhu’s land. Her son is joining IBM in Chicago.

I ask for pastries, but I am allowed only fruit and crackers. After an appetite-less life, I crave food now that I am denied it. I yearn for a karola badun floating in crisp onion, a roast leg of lamb wrapped in crunchy crackling, or a burgundy katta sambal on kiribath mixed with umbalakada.

But none as much as I crave a shot.

I let my sister say a prayer over me. It is so lengthy that I doze off, waking to her kissing my forehead and stroking my head. ‘God bless you, Sudu.’

Brian and Renga drop in that same day. They inform me that the SwarnaVision lawsuit over the documentary that no one saw is finally over. ITL, which had been closed due to bankruptcy, won unprecedented damages and soon returned to air.

‘That Rakwana is countersuing. The dumb buffalo,’ says Brian with relish.

They bring good news. Mr Sulaiman from ITL agreed to pay my script fees when he heard of my health problems. It is a blessing. The saline does not pay for itself.

‘You saw Ranatunga’s innings vs Zimbabwe?’ booms Renga, swaying on his chair. ‘Best innings by a Sri Lankan in Africa.’

Brian complains about the TIC and FLC, who appear to be monopolising the cricket commentary scene. ‘Bunch of clowns. They throw parties for all the Chappells and the Bothams and the Greigs and get the job.’

I thank Brian for the ITL money with the lie that he is a better commentator than both of them and he will one day make the cut.

The doctor says I should be able to go home by the end of the week.

I ask him about the mathematics of my last days. He gives them to me straight.

1 sip = Death.

‘I thought Lucky Nanayakkara was the Thurstan coach.’

‘Ah. You met that fool,’ says Newton, scratching his moustache. ‘Fellow was only master-in-charge. Didn’t know balls about coaching. All he does is smoke his pipe. I only coached U-15 from ’76 onwards.’

‘How did you get a school coaching job without any experience?’

‘How did you get Ceylon Sportswriter of the Year without any talent?’

‘Twice, remember? Imagine the talent that takes.’

Newton smiles. It was his inability to rile me that always riled him. ‘I was an old boy of Thurstan. I had a knack for coaching. And a knack for finding talent.’

He claims to have coached Mathew from the time he was eleven. Even then the boy would squander his abilities.

‘First few matches fellow would bowl his heart out. By the end of season he would be in the reserves. Hardly came for practice.’

‘When did he become a left-arm spinner?’

‘I only advised him. After the Royal–Thomian match.’

‘I heard some things about that match.’

‘Do not ask me, because I will not tell you.’

When I tell him I have spoken to Gokulanath and Sir Nihal Pieris, he is taken aback. I ask him if he knows anything about the former’s death.

‘Never heard of him.’

‘He coached at Soysapura as well.’

‘That was that fielding coach, no? I heard he got sacked for stealing from the Royal Sports Fund. Must have drunk himself to death.’

I tell him he was stabbed.

‘That area is full of thugs. He must’ve owed money. Typical Jaffna crook. Too many pretend coaches in this country.’

Newton tells me that he advised Pradeep not to play the Royal–Thomian and that it was not the first or last time Mathew refused to heed his advice.

‘He could copy every action reasonably well. But when he mimicked Malik Malalasekera, the left-arm spinner, there was magic.’

Newton did not encounter Mathew till two years later, at the Soysapura Softball Tournament. When Newton asked him to bowl for the Cooray Park 6-a-side, the gangly, shaggy-haired youngster not only asked ‘Fast or spin?’, but also ‘Left or right?’

‘The fellow dropped out of university in the UK to try out for the Sri Lanka team. Must’ve been around ’84. I told him he was a fool and advised him to bowl left-arm chinaman.’

Newton also organised that Mathew board with a family in Dehiwela when the Sivanathan family fights reached unbearability. And asked him to cut his hair and stop slouching.

‘What a bowler he was. Bowled out Val Adi Sarath. Dismissed Paulpillai. Had both Japamany twins stumped. Cooray Park won the tournament.’

Newton then introduced the boy to the Bloomfield Cricket Club. And in 1985, the bowler formerly known as Sivanathan was taken to Australia for the World Series and then selected to play the first test vs India at the SSC.

The rest, as they say, is history. Or should have been.

On my fifth day in Nawasiri, Garfield calls. He tells me he does not want to fight. That he and his wife are settling in Zurich. That he has regular work with a band called Purple Green. ‘Is it green or is it purple?’

‘Both. Kind of.’

‘Why are you speaking in that accent, men?’

‘I have to learn German to apply for citizenship.’

First Japanese. Now German. Is he training to be a World War II spy?

This is what I think. What I say is, ‘How is your wife?’

‘Adriana is good. You’d like her. Big football fan. How are you,

Thaathi?’

‘Have to give up booze. Otherwise, fine.’

‘I’ll try and come there for Sinhala New Year.’

Since when did Garfield Karunasena care about Sinhala New Year, I think. As if your Swiss German wife will eat kavum and ride onchilla, I think.

What I say is, ‘OK. Take care.’

Sheila is very proud of me.

Who sends a driver with a cellulite phone to visit a sick man? An idiot cricketer who has just got rich on tea and margarine commercials, that’s who. The man is dressed in ministerly white and hands me the phone, as if it were a message from God. It is a much sleeker model than Ari’s brick. The man on the other end is pretending to pant.

‘Hello, Uncle. Sorry … have training, otherwise I would’ve come.’

‘No problem, Charith. Thanks for calling.’

‘Uncle is OK?’

‘Liver problems, but if I stop …’

‘Super. Super. When will Uncle be back at home?’

‘Tomorrow …’

‘Superb. I will call. I have a small job.’

I wince, but say nothing. I know what the job will be. That morning’s
Daily News
had the squad for the 1998 tour to South Africa. Charith wasn’t on it. He would need a PR article saying how fit and talented he was. There was a time I would have whored myself for this kind of project.

Like when I wrote a scathing piece for a government rag about the ‘cricket uncles’ who exploit the outstation pool of cricketing talent and hold clubs and the Cricket Board to ransom. I was called by the Sports Ministry and told what to write and they paid me. But that is not why Newton Rodrigo did not talk to me for fifteen years.

‘What happened to you, Wije?’

Newton is getting ready to leave.

‘I’m sorry I wrote that piece about “cricket uncles”. I needed the money. And you had …’

His head falls back, his nose elevates a fraction. ‘Forget it. Look at you. Ceylon Sportswriter of the Year turned Cricket Board stooge. You had the talent, not me. What happened?’

He asks these unanswerables while stroking the keys of his Benz.

‘Some of us don’t judge our lives by the money we can steal.’

‘For your information, I never took money from Mathew.’

At that moment Ari walks in with his camera. Newton rises in disgust.

After a few minutes of name-calling I manage to calm proceedings. My gaze falls on a red apple my sister brought. The type that Eve ate, the type that killed Snow White, the type that I cannot stomach. I recognise the huge scar on Newton’s left hand. The one Ari had spotted at Bloomfield. It does not look like he got it from the mat slides in Sathutu Uyana.

‘I don’t remember you having six fingers.’

‘That’s because you were drunk all the time. And I used to hide it. I was embarrassed.’

‘But he doesn’t have six fingers,’ says Ari.

‘I got it removed when I could afford to,’ says Newton, looking at me. ‘It only helped me when I coached left-arm spinners. And I stopped doing that years ago.’

I pick up the apple. ‘Show us.’ I extend my hand awkwardly, like a granny using a remote control.

Ari gazes with contempt at the scar between thumb and index finger.

Newton scowls. ‘What?’

‘Show us.’

‘But I don’t have the finger any more.’

‘Why don’t you use both your hands?’

‘How?’

I place my right index in the webbing between my left hand index and thumb.

‘Mine wasn’t that long,’ smirks Newton. ‘More like this.’

Newton inserts his pinkie on the webbing at a strange angle. He cradles the apple on it and rolls it around his four free fingers, his gaze shifting from Ari to me.

‘Something like this.’

And then, with a rosy red apple and two cupped hands, he shows us in minute detail every ball he claims to have helped invent from 1985 to 1994.

Jabir is my sixth visitor. He brings nothing but his cheerful self and that is more than enough. I could have done without the gaudy green shirt, though.

He swoons over the batting of new boy Jayawardena vs Zimbabwe and says we have a good chance of keeping the World Cup if we win in South Africa. Ari and I hold our comments.

He tells us again that we should talk to Uncle Neiris at the SSC.

‘I am the fixing his wiring. I know the electrical.’

This time Ari cannot be restrained.

‘I am the person fixing his wiring. I am an electrician. That dwarf is mad. I told you before.’

‘Don’t correct Jabir’s English. And he’s a midget, not a dwarf.’

‘If Jabir is going to speak English, he should speak properly.’

‘I understood what he said. That was proper Sri Lankan English.’

‘There is no such thing as Sri Lankan English. Even if there was, it wouldn’t be proper.’

Jabir keeps smiling, but reverts to Sinhala.

‘He has recordings of old matches. I have to rewire the full scoreboard. At least come and look.’

Ari says he is too busy. I say nothing, knowing that lying plugged into a drip-feed gives me more than enough excuses.

‘You know Sobers had a sixth finger on both hands that were removed at birth?’

Newton rests the apple on his extra finger and lets the ball roll across his palm, each finger traversing its seam, blessing it with variation.

‘Pradeepan had strong fingers. He could rotate his wrist to almost 360 degrees and deliver the ball with any of his fingers.’

The last finger to touch the ball determined the nature of the spin. The index and middle fingers made it a chinaman, the ring a top-spinner and the pinky, a googly. It was all in the fingertips.

In the 1986 Pakistan home series, the SLBCC had given players and umpires the directive that rules were to be bent. Against Newton’s advice, Mathew refused to obey and subsequently lost his place.

Mathew spent the next few seasons honing his craft and made his mark for Bloomfield, with the help of his old Thurstan coach who he visited on occasion. Newton lays claim to the undercutter, my favourite Mathew delivery.

‘That was my idea, a back-spinner that stays low,’ says Newton, twirling the ball with both hands, mimicking the digit he lost. They fell out again for two years, just after the 1987 Asgiriya Test.

‘Why did you have it removed?’

‘I hated it all through my childhood.’ As Newton raises his hand to display his scar, his gold watch slips under his sleeve. He pulls it out and tightens it back to visibility.

I ask Newton why they fell out and Newton asks if Ari knows why he and I did not speak for fifteen years. I shake my head. ‘Because it’s none of his business,’ he says. ‘And this is none of yours.’

I ask him if he thinks Mathew might be dead. He tells me it is possible. ‘He moved with some shady characters. Didn’t help his career.’

I tell him about Sabi Amirthalingam and the death notice. He tells me never to believe anything the Sivanathan family says. I ask him why; he tells me it is none of my business.

On my final day, just before Newton’s arrival, I get a call from Graham Snow.

‘How are you, WeeJay? Heard you were feeling poorly.’

He apologises for being a stranger and I accept.

‘Those documentaries turned out good. Who the hell is Rakwana …’

‘Long story. Do you want to speak to Ari?’

‘I will not speak to that time-serving crybaby,’ yells Ari. It is loud enough for the next two rooms and for Graham Snow, half a world away. Ari exits the room, while Sheila packs up my things.