Aerogrammes (2 page)

When the raja raised his hand, Gama began, up and down, steady as a piston. His gaze never wavered, fixed on a single point of concentration in the air before him, as if his competitors and critics had all dissolved into the heat. At some point, Imam wanted to sit in the shade, but his uncle refused to move, too busy staring at Gama, as if with every
bethak
, the boy was transforming into something winged and brilliant. When Imam complained about the sun, his uncle said, “Look at your
bhaiya
. Does he complain?”

Imam looked at his brother: serene and focused, impervious to pain—everything Imam was not. There was a gravity about Gama in his youth, as if he had been schooled from the womb in the ways of the
pehlwan
, to avoid extremes of emotion like rage and lust, to reserve his energies for the pit. Their father had begun Gama’s training at age five and died three years later, before Imam could prove himself worthy of the same attention.

The
bethak
contest lasted four hours, and by the end, only fifteen men remained standing. Raja Singh yanked Gama’s hand into the air, declaring him the youngest by far and, thus, the winner. Greased in sweat, Gama wore a funny, dreamy expression, listing slightly before his knees buckled. Seeing him this way—limp, waxy, the crescent whites of his eyes between his lashes—made something jerk in Imam’s chest. He could not move. At that moment, Imam began to hate his uncle. He hated the raja for coming up with this contest, and he hated every person who herded around his brother and blocked out the sun, claiming him as if he were theirs.

•

The bell clangs, and the match with Roller begins. Gama slaps his thighs, beats his chest, charges. He plunges at Doc’s leg. Doc evades him the first time, but not the second. With a smooth back heel, Gama fells him and finishes him off with a half nelson and a body roll. One minute and forty seconds.

The second fall happens in but a blur—Doc laid out on his belly, sweat-slick and wincing at the spectators in the front row, who lean forward with their elbows on their knees. Roller gives in, and then: bedlam. The emcee yanks Gama’s hand into the air; men mob the mat like sparrows to a piece of bread. Mr. Benjamin wrings Imam’s hand, then shoulders his way through the crowd. Imam hangs back, Gama’s robe in his arms, craning his neck to see over all the hats and heads between him and his brother.

Over the next few days, Gama defeats two more challengers, sends them staggering to the mat like drunken giants. The newspapers have begun to take notice. Sometimes, while warming up, Gama and Imam spot a reporter watching from the road, the brim of his hat shadowing his eyes as he scribbles something in his notebook. Imam doesn’t like being ogled while doing his
dands
, but Mr. Benjamin has told them not to shoo the scribblers away. Press, he says, breeds more press.

Mr. Benjamin is right. These days, he brings more clippings than ever before, and Gama wants to digest every word, his appetite inexhaustible. Imam would rather play chess, the only game at which he consistently beats his brother. The journalists rarely, if ever, mention him.

“Gama the Great,” writes Percy Woodmore in
Health & Strength
, “has so handily defeated all his European challengers
that one can only wonder whether the Oriental strong man possesses some genetic advantage over his Occidental counterpart.” Imam can recognize barely half the words in this sentence, but he understands the next: “Will the Hindoos ever lose?”

“Do you know,” Gama interjects, “these sahibs have so few counters—only
one
to the cross-buttock hold.” Gama shakes his head in bemusement, and just when Imam thinks he cannot stand him a minute longer, Gama adds, “Wait till they see you in the ring.”

Imam is beginning to wonder if that day will ever arrive. He feels the distinct weight of malaise, same as he used to suffer in school. When they were children, Gama got to train at the
akhara
with Madho Singh, while Imam had to recite English poems about English flowers. After Gama’s triumph at Jodhpur, people talked as if the boy could upend mountains, greater than all the
pehlwan
ancestors who had preceded him.

Sometimes, if Imam was sitting alone, sullenly reciting his multiplication tables, Gama took pity on him. “Come on,
chotu
,” he’d say, taking Imam outside to show him a new hold. Gama was the only one who called him
chotu
, a word that raised his spirits when nothing else would.

By age twelve, Imam was fed up. He began cutting school and hovering around the
akhara
, where the only language that mattered was the heave and grunt of bodies in constant motion, whether climbing the rope hanging from the neem tree, or hoeing the wrestling pit, or swinging a giant
jori
in each arm, spiky clubs that surpassed him in height. Moving, always moving. The
akhara
seemed a splendid hive unto itself, sealed off from mundane concerns like school and exams and the sting of the teacher’s switch. Here was his classroom. Here, among the living, was where he belonged.

•

Finally Mr. Benjamin arranges a match for Imam. He is to take on the Swede Jon Lemm, who has won belts from both the Alhambra and Hengler’s tournaments.

They meet at the Alhambra once again, to a sold-out arena. Imam has the advantage of height but feels gangly next to Lemm, who is a stout tangle of muscle, and pale, with eyes of a clear, celestial blue.

The referee summons them to the center of the mat. Lemm gives a cordial nod and locks Imam in a hard handshake before releasing him to his corner. Imam can feel the spectators watching him, murmuring. One fellow openly points at Gama, who seems not to notice, sitting beside Mr. Benjamin with an air of equanimity. There is a proverb that their forefathers minded for centuries:
Make your mind as still as the bottom of a well, your body as hard as its walls
.

Imam touches the mat, then his heart.

The bell clangs, and Lemm hurls himself at Imam; his back heel topples Imam onto his back. Imam slips free, darts around Lemm, quick as the crack of a whip. He does not see Lemm in terms of ankle and knee and leg. Instead he tracks Lemm’s movements, listening for one false note—the falter, the doubt, the dread.

At one point Lemm stalls, a fatal mistake. Imam lunges, lifts him up, and hurls him to the mat. He flips the bucking Swede and pins him. Three minutes and one second.

Not long into the second bout, Lemm is sprawled out on the mat, Imam on his back. Imam can feel Lemm struggling beneath him, trembling down to his deepest tissues until, with a savage groan, he deflates. One minute and eight seconds.

Imam gets to his feet, heaving. Something bounces lightly
off his back. He whirls around to find a beheaded flower at his feet. Someone else tosses him a silver pocket watch. Imam turns from one side to the other; the men are roaring. It takes him a dizzying moment to realize they are roaring for him.

Of the fight with Lemm, a reporter from
Health & Strength
goes into rapture: “That really was a wonderful combat—a combat in which both men wrestled like masters of the art.… Let us have a few more big matches like unto that, and I tell you straight that the grappling game will soon become the greatest game of all.”

In the two weeks that follow, Gama and Imam defeat every wrestler who will accept the challenge. Though Gama the Great commands the most public attention, a dedicated sect of Imam devotees takes shape. They mint him with a new name: the Panther of the Punjab. They contend that the Panther is really the superior of the two, citing the blur of his bare brown feet, so nimble they make an elephant of every opponent. Gama may be stronger, but Imam has the broader arsenal of holds and locks and throws, as seen in his victories over Deriaz and Cherpillod, the latter Frenchman so frustrated that he stomped off to his dressing room midway through the match and refused to come out. Within a year or two, they claim, Imam will surpass Gama.

Gama listens in silence when Imam relays such passages. He betrays no emotion, though his fingers tend to tap against his glass of yogurt milk.

Baron Helmuth von Baumgarten is the only critic to speak in political terms, a realm unfamiliar to both Gama and Imam. “If the Indian wrestlers continue to win,” the baron writes, with typical inflammatory flair, “their victories will spur on
those dusky subjects who continue to menace the integrity of the British Empire.”

And where most articles include a photo of Gama or Imam, this one displays a photo of a young Indian man in an English suit, with sculpted curls around a center part as straight as a blade. This is Madan Lal Dhingra, the baron explains, a student who, several months earlier, walked into an open street, revolver in hand, and shot a British government official seven times in the face. Before Dhingra could turn the revolver on himself, he was subdued, arrested, tried, and hanged.

Imam looks over Gama’s shoulder at the article. They stare in silence at the soft-skinned boy with the starched white collar choking his throat. He looks much like the interpreters who sometimes tag along with the English journalists, a few stitches of hair across their upper lips, still boys to the mothers they must have left behind.

Gama folds the paper roughly, muttering, “Half of it is nonsense, what they write.” He tosses the newspaper on the coffee table and goes upstairs. This clipping they will not take back home.

Imam remains in the sitting room, waiting until he can hear the floorboards creaking overhead. From his kurta pocket, he removes the pocket watch he has been keeping on his person ever since it landed at his feet. The silver disk, better than any medal, warms his palm. He draws a fingertip over the engraved lines, each as fine as a feline whisker.

As word spreads of the Lion and the Panther of the Punjab, all the European wrestlers fall silent but one—Stanislaus Zbyszko, the winner of the Greco-Roman world championship tournament at the Casino de Paris four years ago, ranked
number one in the world before his more recent scandal with Yousuf the Terrible. This time, Zbyszko is looking to rebuild his name and promises a match with no foul play. He and Gama will face off at the John Bull Tournament in early July.

“This is it,” Mr. Benjamin says to Gama. “You pin him, you’ll be world champion.
You
—” Here he jabs a finger at Gama’s chest.
“Rustom! E! Zamana!”
Mr. Benjamin’s pronunciation brings a smile to Gama’s face.

Imam is less amused. He detects a growing whiff of greed about Mr. Benjamin in the way he goads Gama toward desire and impatience, the very emotions they have been taught to hold at bay. Just as troubling is his refusal to offer a clear figure of ticket sales, though he promises to give them their earnings in one bulk sum at the end.

Out of habit and innocence, Gama puts his faith in Mr. Benjamin. Through him, Gama dispatches a single message in
Sporting Life:
he will throw the Pole three times in the space of an hour.

Imam has seen pictures of Zbyszko: the fused boulders of muscle, the bald head like the mean end of a battering ram. Even hanging by his sides, his arms are a threat. Gama has seen the pictures too, but they never speak of Zbyszko, or his size, or his titles. They refer only to the match.

News of the bout spreads to India. Mr. Mishra, their Bengali patron, writes Gama a rousing letter, imploring him to prove to the world that “India is not only a land of soft-bodied coolies and clerks.” Mishra rhapsodizes over Bharat Mata and her hard-bodied sons, comparing Gama to the Hindu warrior Bhim. Regarding Europeans, Mr. Mishra has only one opinion: “All they know is croquet and crumpets.”

Imam isn’t sure if Mr. Mishra knows that Zbyszko is a
Pole. He considers writing back, then recalls the article with Dhingra’s picture, the words “traitor” and “treason” captioning it. Once, a journalist asked Gama and Imam about their political leanings, whether they considered themselves “moderate” or “radical.” Imam turned to Gama, each searching the other for the correct answer, before Gama, bewildered, said, “We are
pehlwan
.”

Those words return to Imam later, as he sets a lit match to the letter. They do not want trouble. He holds the burning letter over the sink and then rinses the ash down the drain.

A week remains until the John Bull Tournament. Life narrows its borders, contains only wrestling and meditation,
bethak
and
dand, yakhi
and ghee and almonds. Food is fuel, nothing more. They wake at three in the morning and retire at eight in the evening, their backs to the sunset slicing through the crack between the curtains.

For all their time together, Imam has never felt further from his brother. He can detect some deep tidal turn within Gama, a gravity at his core, pulling him inward and inward again into a wordless coil of concentration. He declines all interviews. His gaze is a wall.

Lying in bed, Imam imagines entering the ring with Zbyszko. He pictures himself executing an artful series of moves never witnessed on these shores, the Flying Cobra perhaps, an overhead lift, a twirl and a toss. The papers would remember him all over again. Twitching with energy, he can hardly sleep.

One day, he upends Gama with the Flying Cobra. Imam knows he should withdraw, but something snaps in him, and it happens in a blink: Imam dives and pins his brother.

Imam lies there, wide-eyed, panting. Beneath him is Gama
the Great,
Rustom-e-Hind
, Boy Hero of
Bethaks
with his cheek against the mat. No one has ever pinned him, until now. “Get up,” Gama says.

Imam springs to his feet, embarrassed. He knows better than to offer his brother a hand. Somehow he wants Gama to strike out at him, to rear up in anger or indignation.

Gama sits for a moment, catching his breath, before he hoists himself up and shifts his jaw right and left, back into place.

“Again,” Gama says, tugging at his
langot
. “Again.”

July arrives and, on a damp evening, the John Bull Tournament. Gama and Imam enter a music hall with cut-out cartoons of clowns between the windows, and a painted lady in a twirling skirt, her knees exposed. Imam does his best to ignore these ivory knees. White lights reading
HOLBORN EMPIRE
silver the cobbled street below, the stones shining like fish scales.