Selection Day

Eleven years after Selection Day

His eyes were growing smaller each year. He was certain of this when he examined his face on his birthday. Full of all those changes that are supposed to happen to women with age: the nose becomes big, and the eyes …

He was twenty-seven years old today.

Sitting astride a bench in the toilet of the Cricket Club of India, he was reading the newspaper. In his pocket was a white envelope with his severance cheque in it.

A man called Karan from SwadeshSymphony, the public relations firm that ran the Celebrity Cricket League in partnership with the Cricket Board, had given him the envelope, and the good news.

Two months. And they had a new job for him, starting right away.

Humming a film song, Manjunath turned the pages of the newspaper until something made him smile:

12 May

The Prime Minister’s Office has stated that a person by name of V.V. Cherrinathan frequenting Mumbai under the pretext of being ‘the prime minister’s special adviser on marine biology’ is not employed by the PMO in this capacity, or in any other. He is not an accredited expert on marine biology, meteorology, plate tectonics, political theory or personal finance. If approached by this person for money, the public is urged to report the matter to the police. (Press Trust of India)

Tearing the article out of the newspaper, he added it to the white envelope in his pocket. This was the kind of thing he liked to bring Radha from the outside world — it would be good for a laugh, and would defer the moment when he had to give his brother the bad news.

He looked around, and realized he was alone in the men’s toilet.

So he bent over and licked his forearms like a cat, again and again. What if someone came in? Let them come in and scream. Call security, and throw me out. This would be the last time he was in the Cricket Club. No more wearing the armour — the pads, chest-guard, arm guard, the ‘box’ tucked in, thigh pads, forearm guards — no more of that second body of foam and plastic covering his own. He was free.

what happen?

His phone beeped six times in a row with the same message.

what happen?

Of course it was his father.

What happened is they dropped me, he texted back.

On the way out, two schoolboys in cricket whites stood pressed together, watching something on their cell phone. One of the boys glanced up: and said, at once, ‘Can I have your autograph?’ He held a little notepad towards Manju. ‘And a selfie?’

‘Do you know who I am?’ Manju asked.

The boy smiled.

‘Cricketer.’

Must have been a lean day for the two autograph hunters.

Manju, still only five foot four inches, observed that the two schoolboys were nearly as tall as he was. But he knew that for a cricketer, shortness of stature only adds to his mystique.

With an ironic smile, exactly like he’d seen Ravi Shastri affect for female admirers, he asked: ‘What’s my name?’

The boys looked at each other.

Manju said, ‘I played for India Under-19, and for Mumbai, three seasons in the Ranji. Maybe you saw me in the Celebrity Superstar Cricket League? I was one of the non-celebrities, the real batsmen. I batted with Sanjay Khanna once: the actor? I have the record for the longest six hit by a non-celebrity in the history of the Celebrity Cricket League. Do you know how many metres the ball went?’

He seized the autograph book, before the boy could change his mind, and wrote his name on it.

Manjunath Kumar

Batter

He could read the question forming in the boy’s eyes.

You really hit the biggest six in the Celebrity League?

You?

No one ever believed it.

‘Yes, it was me,’ he said, even before the boy asked.

Outside the club, he pushed past the grimy white clothes of cricket-playing teenagers and the immaculate white uniforms of their adult servants (chauffeurs, delivery men, peons). Manju looked quickly at his own T-shirt: he was wearing, appropriately enough, beige.

The two teenagers had followed him, perhaps for another autograph, but the moment they saw him sit down on Marine Drive, they turned back. No boy wants to see a cricketer enjoying solitude: it is not how he imagines his heroes.

A clear summer’s evening. Looking to the south, Manju could see the skyscrapers of Nariman Point give way to a line of nearly identical low-rise buildings, Navy Nagar, and beyond them, and before the Arabian Sea, a final twinkling, a dot … the lighthouse at the end of Mumbai.

To his right, a pair of little slippers, each studded with glass gemstones, lay next to two warm black shoes; from somewhere down below, among the concrete rocks that buffered the city from the ocean, he heard a woman’s laughter. When he looked at the slippers again, the sunlight shining in the cheap glass stones was suddenly too much to bear.

Twilight had set in by the time he got off the train at Santa Cruz station and walked through a congested market to a place called the Mafia Bar, which he visited each year on his birthday.

No connection whatsoever between name and decor (but then, this is Mumbai). The low wooden ceiling of the bar was ribbed like a Buddhist cave in Ajanta, and the red velvet covering the eight empty tables was so ancient that its decomposition could be smelled on the air-conditioned air, and after a few hours, would coat the tongue and render everything slightly acrid.

A black beam divided the bar; four tables on this side, four on that. Someone was sitting right behind the beam.

That was the spot Radha always chose, because whoever sat behind the black beam had an interrupted view of the small television fixed into a corner of the ceiling. Radha said he did not want cricket to poison even his drink.

Leaning around the black beam to smile at his brother, Radha held up a glass of rum: ‘You’re on TV. Turn around.’ And though Manju knew this was just mischief — almost malice, on this of all days — he turned, in real hope, to the TV screen.

Of course he wasn’t on TV. It was Ashvin Trivedi batting in a one-day match. Maybe from the recent India versus Namibia series? No: it was a replay of an older series against Puerto Rico. ‘Legendary Encounters in Indian Cricket.’ So Ashvin Trivedi, who had joined the Mumbai team after Manju had been dropped from it, was already a modern legend.

When the waiter came, Manju ordered a Coca-Cola.

‘It’s your birthday,’ said his brother. ‘Experiment.’

Radha had the fastidious good looks of the perennially unemployed rake: his long black hair was gelled and brushed back until it curled up around his neck, he wore a silver ring in his left ear, and looked like a prince out of Sanskrit Romance. His beautiful irises, those ‘film-star eyes’, were now battered in by drink, but Manju could still see their colour.

‘Alright, stick to your Coke. But happy birthday.’

Manju raised a glass of water to his brother’s rum.

Still noticeably shorter than Radha, though better built, his hirsute forearms striped with veins, Manju’s close-cropped hair was already turning grey, and he was starting to look the older of the two.

In the manner of such little bars, a door opened, three men came in, and then three more, and now the place was packed.

Mafia Bar was one of what Manju referred to as the Quarter Bars that filled the eastern side of the Santa Cruz station: as a stencilled logo on the wall indicated (‘Quater System Available Here’), patrons were served liquor in nothing smaller than 180 ml ‘quarters’ (although 60 ml refills were permitted) while they gazed blankly at a TV screen showing cricket, either Indian or international, classic or instant, live or canned: quarter men, quarter sport.

They had started coming here three years ago, on Sofia’s suggestion. (‘Why don’t you two meet on your birthdays like normal people?’)

Behind the manager’s desk stood a grandfather clock, with a dully moving pendulum. A lampshade hanging from a long cord glowed down on the bespectacled manager, who was hard at his accounts, like a Victorian allegory of Diligence in a den of vice. He had a silver pen in his shirt pocket.

‘Look, Papa just walked in.’

‘Papa’ was an old man who visited the bar every night. Along with his whisky he ordered a plate of French fries which he ate one at a time. He had been doing this for nine years at this bar, according to Radha, and before that for eighteen years at the bar that had previously stood here.

‘The waiters say he came in for a drink even during the Babri Masjid riots, Manju. But I see you’re looking at your people again, aren’t you?’

His people. Five middle-aged gay men, whom Manju remembered from the previous year, sat at a table in a corner, discussing the new Shah Rukh Khan film. First all five delivered their verdict together, ‘Fantastic!’ ‘Amazing!’ and then, after clearing his throat, and pronouncing his individual verdict to be ‘very different’, each man at the table analysed the film in turn, concluding that it was in fact either ‘Fantastic’, or ‘Amazing’.

Now one of them said:

‘Enough about films. This is my topic of discussion for today. Have you noticed how every young boy in Mumbai is now called Aryan?’

‘So what’s your worry?’

‘My worry is, these boys called Aryan will go abroad to study, and the Americans will think all Indians are now Nazis.’

Laughter.

‘Aren’t we all Nazis now?’

Much more laughter.

The lights went out in the bar: at once, total silence. Radha and Manju felt themselves caught out — five dark silhouettes, turning in tandem, looked over at the brothers.

The lights returned, and everyone was happy and heterosexual again. The TV came back to life on a different channel: a chameleon was unrolling its tongue in slow motion. ‘Papa’, who had been eating French fries and gazing at the TV all through the blackout, did not seem to mind.

Radha ordered another quarter bottle of rum.

‘Javed was in the papers today,’ he said.

‘I don’t want to know.’

‘Why not?’ Radha asked.

Manju said: ‘I haven’t seen Javed in eleven years. I don’t want to know.’

But Radha insisted on telling him why Javed had been in the papers, and Manju looked at the floor of the bar and bit his lip.

‘You need to find a job, brother. A steady pay cheque. My contract was terminated today,’ Manju said, abruptly, to get even with Radha. ‘They said it was nothing personal. My form hasn’t been bad. They just have too many other dropouts from the IPL who want a job in the Celebrity League.’

His brother reached over and took the white envelope out of Manju’s pocket.

‘How many months did you get?’

‘Two.’

‘Congratulations,’ Radha said, as he patted the white envelope, which was now in his pocket. ‘So it really is your birthday. No more cricket. You should have left years ago, before they kicked you out.’

He nudged his glass towards Manju, who said: ‘No.’

With a grin, Radha whispered: ‘You don’t drink, you don’t fuck. You’re a monster, you know that? Go to that table and introduce yourself to those men. Show them your forearms, little brother.’

‘Give me back the envelope,’ Manju said.

But it was only to take out the newspaper clipping about the scientist. Reading it along with sips of rum, Radha burst out laughing, spraying Manju with liquor.

‘V.V. Cherrinathan: what a name — what a fraud. Telling women he’s the prime minister’s scientist, asking them for cash. A bit like you, Manju, eh? I have a gift for you, too,’ Radha said, reaching into his trouser pocket. ‘Birthday gift. A man gave it to me in Versova two nights ago.’

Manju looked at an actor’s résumé, which featured a black-and-white snapshot of a brooding chubby-faced man with 1990s hair:

ASIF K. JAMAL

Cintaa (Life member)

Actor by Birth: Thespien by Nature: International by Choice

D.O.B: 23-10-1982

Age of: 28 Yrs

Height of: 5’2

Languages: Hindi, English, Bhojpuri, Urdu, Marathi (plus all known Southern and also Sri Lanka)

Most recent role: Eunch character in latest Shah Rukh Khan film Dance Baby Dance!

Notices and Mentions: Times of India, Mumbai Times,

Mumbai Sun, Hollywood Reporter of US

KINDLY NOTE: I have done 18 very challaging roles including

Female

Mentally Challenged

Epileptic Patient

Gay

Eununch

Zombie

Blind Man

Blind and Handicapped Man

Dumb-Deaf-Blind-Handicap (All in one Character)

Hunchback Notre Dame Type whose body is deformed in

nine unique parts (first time in India)

Fustratred Impotant Man

‘Why the fuck did he give this to you?’

‘He asked me to “push” his career along.’

Manju got all his revenge with a look and a word. He glanced at his brother’s leg, and said: ‘You?’

‘Yes, me. Because I told him I had a brother who was a professional cricketer.’

Touché. Manju studied the résumé.

‘He must be from a village. I-m-p-o-t-a-n-t. Like you, Manju. Just like you.’ Radha winked. ‘Sofia would marry you in two minutes. You treated her badly, but you know she’d leave her husband for you. How much money has she given you by now? She’s your new sponsor. You should be nice to her, jump up and down for her, the way you did for the old sponsor. And she’s not the only one, is she? You don’t screw them, but they just keep doing whatever you want.’

Before Manju could say ‘Shut up’, a glass broke.

A waiter brought a broom and swept the shards towards the black beam. ‘We don’t want all that glass here,’ Manju protested.

Suddenly smoke filled the bar. The manager, performing a ritual that was either religious or fumigational, circulated a black pot filled with burning coals around his table, and then proceeded to walk with the smoking pot from table to table, starting with Manju and Radha’s. Once a Quarter Bar decided to be obnoxious to its patrons, there was no end to it.

The western side of Santa Cruz railway station led towards good residential areas in well-planned blocks; the eastern side was a sea of people.

Coming out of the bar, and re-entering the sea, the brothers were confronted by a beggar. A woman without legs sat on a wooden platform; she began pleading for money, but stopped when she saw how Radha was walking, and sighed.

After all these years, Manju could not get used to the sight of his handsome brother limping, his grotesque left foot in its custom-made shoe. As they left the bar, he turned his eyes away from Radha and pretended to look at the skywalk. The pedestrian bridge, which stood on giant columns down the centre of the road, had a glossy metal frame covered by a glowing blue canopy, and looked like a giant UFO, stretched, partly dismantled, and abandoned over Santa Cruz. The lights of the traffic illuminated the underside of the bridge, and Manju could read the posters stuck to the columns: ‘One call can change your life. Phone Rita Mam or Sanjay Sir. Rs 25,000–40,000 per month. Guaranteed.’ At least half of the posters were upside down.

Making their way through beggars, drunks, commuters and vendors, the brothers turned towards the Milan Subway, one of the underpasses that led into the western side of Santa Cruz.

Now they passed by an open blacksmith’s workshop, the men in masks cutting metal with oxyacetylene flames, raw sparks flying out at passers-by. Manju seized his brother to shield him from the sparks. He was only five foot four inches tall, but he still had the strongest forearms in all of Bombay. He wanted to protect Radha from all of it: the pavements filled with craters, the cars driven by drunks, the cars without headlights, the unpruned tree with the sharp branches ready to fall, the maiming carelessness of life in Mumbai … but the sparks flew too thick. The autorickshaw driver had been on his cell phone, eight years ago, as he turned his vehicle over Radha Krishna’s left foot.

‘Manju.’

‘What?’

Radha thumped him on the back with his fist.

‘Scientist. My little scientist.’

Manju winced: he knew what was coming next. Radha would tease him for still being a virgin.

‘Little brother, have you ever tried … group sex? Just wondering.’

‘Yes, big brother,’ Manju replied. ‘I once used both hands.’

Radha Krishna Kumar resisted; but then gave up, and howled with laughter.

‘Everything was wasted, Manju. Your balls and your brains.’

They walked and limped as one body, Manju with his arm around Radha, beige holding on to blue.

They were now right beside the Western Expressway. The cars sped up a ramp towards the airport, giving the brothers the impression that they, in contrast, were descending into a nether-city. Honest work continued around them: shops that sold gravestones engraved in Urdu and Arabic emitted the high-pitched noise of drilling and a fine marble mist that enveloped the brothers. Manju knew that Radha lived somewhere nearby, because he had once asked for a loan to start his own marble-cutting shop. Radha had not met their father in a decade.

When they came out of the Milan Subway, an old man in a suit and tie shouted at them from the other side of the road.

‘You!’ he said. ‘You two — Egypt shall slobber about like a drunk with vomit on his shirt. It is written.’

Radha had apparently seen the old man before.

‘He’s a Telugu Christian from Dharavi. He preaches near the pipeline in Vakola, even when there’s no one there. Maybe he wants to convert the petrol.’

Manju frowned.

‘Who is Egypt?’

‘Egypt,’ said Radha, who had gone to a church for a year after his accident, ‘means someone rich and powerful.’

‘So why is he yelling at us?’

The old man kept shouting; a passing bike-rider slowed and said something to him; then a breeze wafted the smell of shit everywhere: the uninterpretable madness of the urban night surrounded the brothers Kumar.

Listening to the crazy preacher across the road, Manju began to laugh. ‘Though I am not at home in the world,’ he thought, ‘I am at home in the street.’ A proverb — a new one. He felt he could walk through Mumbai like this forever.

But when he turned he saw Radha biting his fingernails.

Suddenly he found he couldn’t bear Radha’s company — he wished he hadn’t come.

‘I am not normal people.’ He should just tell Sofia that the next time she asked him to meet Radha. ‘I want to be alone on my birthday, as I want to be alone every single day.’ His excellence, his uniqueness, was not in cricket, not in batting, he had discovered — but in withdrawing. He could pull back from human beings like the ocean. That was his contract with God: Manjunath Kumar would never have to compromise with another person — man or woman — would never again have to do for him or her the things he had done for his father. Never. If the whole world vanished tomorrow, Manjunath Kumar would barely notice. Didn’t Sofia know all this already? Hadn’t she said, more than once — ‘You are the Einstein of being alone?’ So let me retain my one excellence: let me be alone!

But when he looked up at the sky, he saw a white moon, as bright and powerful as a man’s fist, over Mumbai.

It took his breath away: a sight to remind one of a poet.

‘Kattale,’ Manju said, and held his palm over his right eye, as if to block the sound and smell of his city. Yet behind his mask, he began smiling, thinking of the surprise he had in store for Radha.

Lowering and raising his palm, Manju teased his brother, as if they were playing a children’s game, and now Radha permitted himself a smile; for in each of the Kumars had been renewed, by this rare proximity to the other’s body, the belief that their shared destiny had not yet been stolen from them.

‘This is what I brought you to see,’ Manju told his brother.

Behind a ten-foot-tall steel-ringed fence, a floodlit asphalt courtyard was criss-crossed with yellow lines, the kind of place where you saw American children playing basketball in the movies, except here, under the white lights, boys were practising cricket. Dozens of teenagers, padded and helmeted: either sitting on the benches, or standing in the nets while grown men pitched tennis balls at them.

Radha and Manju pressed their faces to the steel-ringed fence.

‘This is what I’m going to do from now on. It’s part of the severance package.’

‘Looks like a cricket factory.’

‘They’ve just opened it. SwadeshSymphony owns it. You come here after school, and train for the IPL. It’s open till eleven. You pay this much for three months, then you work with coaches on your batting or bowling.’ Manju put his fingers through the steel rings and tried to shake the fence. ‘They’re paying me eighty-five thousand, and bonuses for finding new talent.’

Manju’s eyes reacted with excitement, as always, to the white glare and dark shadows of floodlights: he wanted to get out there and hold a bat. And hit a six, the biggest ever hit in history.

Radha turned to his brother.

‘You’re going to become a coach? You’re going to end up as Tommy Sir?’

‘Don’t mock him,’ Manju said. ‘He’s dead.’

But Radha was no longer mocking anyone; there was emotion in his voice. He put his fingers through the metal rings of the fence.

‘Why don’t you get married?’ he said.

Radha saw that furrow on Manju’s brow, the flame-like mark that inclined left, and which indicated that his younger brother was either angry or ashamed or (once upon a time) thinking.

‘No,’ Manju said. ‘Whatever I am, I’m not a fraud.’

‘What the fuck are you then? Are you sure you don’t like women? You’ll die and go to heaven and even God won’t know if you were a homo or not. When we’re walking, do you know that if you see any two people holding hands you stare? If two donkeys are happy together you stop and watch. I don’t know what you really want, but I know it all seems a big mystery to you: two things of any kind being together. It’s not a mystery, it’s very simple. Get married. There are always women chasing you. Why, I don’t know. Even better: you know what you should do? Catch a train right now and go to Navi Mumbai. That’s what you’d do, if you ever got drunk, and that’s why you don’t have the guts to drink.’

There was a loud sound of wood cracking: one of the boys at the practice nets had broken his bat.

‘You really sound like him now,’ Manju said.

‘He still talks?’ Radha asked. ‘I thought he was a vegetable.’

‘He’s stronger as a vegetable than you and I are as men. He still tries to hit me sometimes, would you believe? Texted me ten times today. “How much did they give you as severance, how much?” Ten times, though he can barely move his hand now.’

A son’s true opinion of his parents is written on the back of his teeth. Radha, who had gnashed his just thinking about Mohan Kumar so often that his upper incisors had moved from the pressure, opening up a gap between them and ruining his once perfect smile (one more thing he blamed his father for), bit his teeth.

‘Why are you here, then?’ he shouted at Manju, when he could again talk. ‘Why do you meet me once a year? Stay with the vegetable on your birthday.’

Radha could see there was no hope for his brother, who seemed to desire men at one moment and women at another, and lived in between his two desires, like a hunted animal — an animal which had finally run to their father for protection.

‘Why are you here?’ Radha asked again. ‘Why?’

‘I’m not here,’ Manju said, gripping the fence. ‘You’re not here.’

But he thought of what his brother had said a few minutes ago: take the train and go to Navi Mumbai and meet Javed. Was it still that simple?

Repression may be a red-hot distortion of the truth, but what follows it, acceptance, when a man finally examines his heart and says, ‘This is what I must have been, partly or in whole,’ is hardly liberation. Nothing much changes because you have stopped lying to yourself. A moment of relief, yes, the sense of shedding some terrible weight — but it passes. Manju had long ago accepted — it had occurred to him one evening in the changing room of the Wankhede stadium, after a particularly fine innings — that what he had known for Javed must have been what the film songs called love, and that his fear of this fact had driven him away from Navi Mumbai and back to cricket. After he wet his hair in front of the mirror and combed it with his fingers, Manju stretched his neck first to the right and then to the left, and accepted that he had been, and was still, attracted to men as much as to women: but knowing and accepting all of this had meant, in the end, not much. The fire of denial had set into the ice of acknowledgement. For himself, for his lies and cowardice, Manju had scorn — (although what else could he have done back then?) — but he had much more scorn for a world that had never shown him a clear path to love or to security.

This was enough, he sometimes felt, this anger was enough. A man could feed on it for the rest of his life.

Except that sometimes he saw the moon, and sometimes he heard this laughter in his head: U-ha. U-ha. Even now, he remembered that first morning when he really noticed Javed — was it a morning, or an afternoon? — sitting in that circle of stupid cricketers, the only one unenslaved and unmastered, with his beak nose and his black-panther limbs and the sickle-shaped dimples emerging when he grinned, like the most gorgeous thing created.

O thou Tiger-King!

Manju controlled his breathing. He steadied his pulse. He did all the things he had learnt to do as a professional sportsman, and yet his heart beat fast. Still, with every step he took he was more in control of himself — he remembered that Javed was in the newspaper again — and now it seemed eleven more years might easily flow before they met. If they ever met again.

Standing by his side, Radha tried to read his brother’s mind. Why did this fellow leave Javed to return to cricket — did he imagine he would save everyone by coming back? Radha remembered what his father used to say: a snake would have to rescue his family from Javed Ansari. But the snake that bit Manjunath had come from within his own heart. He was meant to be the hero of the story, and look what he has become.

Coward!

A whistle blew from the court: cricket practice was over for the day. The boys in white were already leaving with their gear, and workers went about the field, picking up rubbish. One carried a plastic bucket with him, and he splashed the asphalt floor with water.

‘I told you to throw your wicket on Selection Day.’ Radha raised his voice. ‘I told you. If you had done that, I wouldn’t have got mad, I wouldn’t have hit Deennawaz, and they would have given me a second chance to play cricket. And you could have become an engineer, a scientist, you could have gone to America by now. You could have sent me money from there, instead of—’

He threw Manju’s envelope to the ground.

‘You’re drunk, Radha. Eleven years ago, I had no choice. How many times have I told you?’

‘Then have children. And make sure they have a choice. You know I can’t.’

Children? While Radha bent down unsteadily to pick up the envelope, Manju saw in his mind’s eye, as he had so many times over the years, an old image from science television: a strand of red-and-blue human DNA, turning nonstop, like a strip of unwinding plastic, the twisted strip of DNA that we inherit from our fathers. And on this red-and-blue helix was inscribed the message from Mohan Kumar to his sons and their sons: that life, if it is to be lived, is to be lived but badly; is to be, if it is to be anything, but an agreement with hell; and can have for fire and light, if it is to have either, but rage and remorse. Joining a thumb and index finger through a steel ring of the fence, Manju caught the strand of DNA in his fingers and stopped it from turning: no more cricketers.

‘No.’

‘Tommy Sir.’ Radha laughed. ‘Have some self-respect, little brother. Do anything else. Beg. But don’t go back into cricket. Don’t become Tommy Sir.’

Manju took a deep breath.

‘I told you, don’t mock him. He’s gone. Tommy Sir had his stroke right after they picked me for Mumbai. He was hiking in the mountains, they say, and when they carried him to hospital he kept saying, I have to live till I see that boy bat for Mumbai. That would have been my one satisfaction: for him to watch me fail with his own eyes.

Stepping back from the metal fence, Manju cupped his palms, as if he were holding an invisible bowl. He looked straight down into it.

Radha still held on to the fence.

‘But he was not the one, Manju. Not Tommy Sir. He was never the one to blame.’

Manju stood frozen in his strange gesture. Radha guessed that his younger brother, excited by the sound and smell of live cricket, was imagining himself holding a cricket helmet again. Radha ground his teeth. The boy had just been fired — and here he was dreaming of getting back into the game. Every man must martyr himself to something: but we have martyred ourselves to this mediocrity.

Freeing one hand from the metal rings, Radha pinched Manju in the right shoulder and said:

‘I want to fight you again. Till one of us falls. Right here.’

‘No.’

Radha pinched harder.

‘No.’

And harder and harder: until Manju, at last, shouted — ‘Yes!’