The Zoya Factor (11 page)

He made a little impatient gesture with his hand and I had a sudden flash of insight into his twisted mind. 'You thought we'd lose today, didn't you?' I demanded. 'Are you
allowed
to think like that?'

He shrugged. 'I'm a realist.' Then he looked me right in the eye and said, 'But we won. A fact I'm proud of. And it wasn't because of you.'

God, what an insecure guy he was. Running up here and going
Mine! Mine! Mine!
The victory is only
mine.
And to think I'd liked him! 'So it was because of
you
?' I asked as neutrally as I could.

He nodded doggedly, 'Yes. And because of Zahid, and because we won the toss and everybody kept their heads.'

Well, that was fair enough, really. They'd played a fantastic match. Every man had done his bit. Only a fatalistic, uneducated, superstitious person would think their fabulous performance had anything to do with
me.

Then Khoda said, clearly proving he thought I was all of the above, 'So I don't want you to start believing
you
had anything to do with it, okay?'

I nodded, keeping calm, just about. 'Okay.'

'Because there's no way you're going to get any mileage out of it!'

That's when I saw red. I'd been holding myself in, thinking about my job and how much I loved it, about how he was such a
famous
guy, and a
captain
and everything, but now I couldn't help myself. 'Mileage?' I said, in what I'd intended to be a mature, dry voice, but what may have just come out sounding like an outraged squeak. '
Mileage?
That is so uncool! You know, not to be rude or anything, but I don't even
like
cricket! The last thing in the world I would want to do is become some kind of glorified cricket-groupie!'

That surprised him. I guess his trio of Bollyood starlets didn't talk back to him like that. But then he came back at me with a really nasty one. 'Really? You seemed to be enjoying yourself so much this morning. A gracious kiss on the cheek, that got us a world record? What have you got planned to win us the World Cup, Zoya? How far are you willing to go for your country?'

I felt my cheeks go red hot with embarrassment at what he was implying. But I played it pretty cool. 'Oh, I might just have to go all the way...' I said musingly. 'It's probably the only thing that could win us the World Cup with a clown like you in charge.'

His eyes blazed. 'You're pretty cocky for a Lucky Charm who's only three matches old!'

'And you're pretty cocky for a skipper who's lost every final he's ever played,' I said and shut the door in his face, already appalled at the mess I was in.

***

6

Of course I missed the Shah Rukh shoot. But I did manage to have a long, lazy weekend at home, licking my wounds and being coddled by Eppa and Dad, with no calls from office at all. They were all excited because my horrible brother Zoravar was back for a break after some kind of commando training course, looking completely hideous. He'd been catching and eating snakes cooked in hollowed-out bamboo stems, was tanned deep purple and had these really wiry muscles everywhere. Of course Eppa thought he looked really great. 'Just like soldier shud luk,' she said fondly, as she ladled a third serving of her Balls curry (as she insists on calling her famous, cooked-only-on-special-occasions mutton kofta curry) onto his plate at dinner time.

He wolfed it all down, gnawed on a particularly chewy bit of mutton and grinned at me manically. 'So how are you, Gaalu?' he asked. 'Sunk the company's fortunes yet?'

Basically, Zoravar's thing in life is to make fun of me.

His face is shaped like a cashew nut, all long with a protruding chin, and he has the gall to think
my
cheeks are a hideous deformity. When I was little he was always letting out this loud scream and going, 'Ma! Ma! Zoya
got stung by a bee
!' And when my mother came running, he'd go, 'Oh no, sorry, her face is like that only.'

The other really painful thing about growing up with Zoravar is that ever since he was like five months old or something, he knew he wanted to join the army. He never wavered. Any time an auntie at a party asked him, 'Beta, vot you wantu be ven you grow up,
hain
?' He'd chirp, 'I'm-going-to-be-a-soldier-and-fight-for-India!' And then everybody would go all moist-eyed and sigh,
'So cute.'
While I spent my childhood andadolescence dithering over lawyer/banker/ fashion designer/nurse, he remained committed to playing with his tanks and singing
Chal chal re naujavan
.

No wonder he thinks my job is a joke. Even after three-and-a-half years, he finds it hugely funny that people are paying me money to work for them. So then my dad told him: 'No, Zoravar, Zoya is doing well, she was even sent abroad on company work.'

'Dhaka isn't really abroad,' Zoravar said snidely but did ask me, in quite a civilized way, how the experience had been.

I gave him a carefully edited version of events, sans any mention of my brawl with Khoda. Even thinking about it now, three whole days later, the aftershock was huge. Because, of course, the moment I'd said it, I had been appalled. What had I been
thinking?
How could I have been so
rude
to somebody so
important
? I kept imagining he'd get me sacked or blackballed from advertising or just command the universe to stop liking me or something....

Both Zoravar and Dad were disgusted to learn that I had gone all the way to Dhaka and watched the matches in my hotel room. 'Oh well,' Dad sighed. 'When has she ever been interested in sports? Zoya, I hope they will pay you more from this April. You are working so hard - these people take you for granted - at least they should give you overtime.'

'Dad, I'm not a
driver,'
I said, rolling my eyes at him. 'They don't give overtime in management jobs...and anyway they pay me enough to get you guys presents from Dhaka!'

I'd got shirts for him and Zoravar and a pale pink-and-white Dhakai sari for Eppa, which had softened her face and given a halo-like glow to her iron-grey curls. 'Too much money you spent, Zoya Moya,' she'd grumbled happily. 'You shud hav got presents for your Chachis, not me.' (Yeah right, like she would have let me
live
if I'd come back from Abroad without a present for her.)

And then my dad said, 'Run along upstairs, the two of you. Rinku Chachi wants a couple of guinea pigs. She's bought a new grill and is testing it out making pizzas.'

Awe
some! Rinku Chachi's pizzas were legendary. They were loaded with tandoori chicken, achaari paneer, Amul cheese and hara dhaniya and no Italian would ever recognize them, but they rocked. So both of us got into our pajamas and trooped up the rather steep and narrow staircase, Meeku at our heels, tail held jauntily high.

Rinku Chachi had opened the door even before we banged on it. There was a yummy wafting smell of masalas and her hearty, happy voice going: '
Arrey
, Zoya! Zoravar! G. Singh, the children are here!'

Gajju Chacha was inside, pottering about his study. We chorused a formal, 'Namaste, Chacha' and happily ignored him after that. He is one
strange
little man and safest left alone. He's some kind of fancy educationist and looks like a peaceable old turtle with his bald, egg-shaped head and skinny neck. But once, when he was fourteen, he'd grabbed a heavy copper ladle out of the daal ka donga and hurled it across the table at his brother Yogu with such ferocity that it had embedded itself into his scalp, standing upright for forty-five seconds before teetering and falling off. Yogu Chacha got seventeen stitches, and was permanently brain-damaged as a result, according to my dad.

Rinku Chachi is a little lonely now because Gajju has dispatched both his kids (our cousins Monya and Montu) to boarding school in Ajmer. Which is why she loves having Zoravar and me around.

Zoravar started on the pizza with ecstatic moans, all the while grossing Rinku Chachi out by flashing the pus-encrusted blisters he'd got at the commando course, his appetite amazingly unaffected by the three kilos of Balls curry he'd polished off downstairs.

Then Gajju sidled up to me: 'So how was your cricket experience, Zoya?'

'Uh, good, Chacha, 'I said, realizing with a sinking heart that he must want to talk cricket. The last thing I wanted to do was chat with him.

'Did you have the opportunity,' Gajju asked in hushed, awed tones, 'of meeting Mr Jogpal Lohia?'

'Um...who's he, Chacha?' I asked. 'I don't think I've ever heard of him.'

Gajju smiled enigmatically. 'He's the president of the IBCC, child,' he told me. 'A most powerful man, a
good
man. Discerning. Intuitive.'

'Uh, no,' I said. 'I just met the Indian team, really.'

'The new captain's not bad,' Gajju conceded grudgingly. 'Not bad at all. Not in the same league as earlier skippers, of course.'

'Oh?' I said. 'But I thought, statistically speaking, that Nikhil Khoda is the most successful Twenty20 captain of his age, and has already led India to more One-day tournament finals than any other skipper and also has thirteen ODI centuries in international cricket to his credit?'

Gajju just nodded tolerantly in a little-knowledge-is-a-dangerous-thing way, but Zoravar's jaw dropped. '
Arrey
, not bad, Gaalu! Never thought I'd hear
you
spouting cricket stats!'

I went pink. Okay, so I'd been, as Monita would say 'ogling and Googling' Nikhil Khoda a bit. I'd checked out all his stats on the Net, proving myself to be a masochistic loser who obsessed about people who were super rude to them.

'Tell me,' Gajju asked in his pedantic voice, 'do you think they could win this tournament?'

I said I didn't know enough about cricket to comment, but Zoravar looked up and said, with his mouth full of pizza, 'What win-shin, Chacha? Don't you know what happened today?'

Gajju's face went all self-righteously pious. 'How can I know? Yogu cut my cable wire, it had only been repaired half an hour ago...' he said in a martyred voice.

There was a full story in there but I didn't want to know it. Hurriedly I turned to face my brother. 'Zoravar, what happened today?'

'We lost,' he replied resignedly. 'Dad and I watched the whole match while you were sleeping off your' - he made sarcastic little inverted commas in the air - '"transcontinental" jetlag.'

'Not to - ?'

'Bermuda!' Zoravar nodded.

'That's impossible,' I said weakly, reaching for the remote.

'Nothing is impossible for India,' said Gajju quietly and shuffled away to his study, a broken man.

I couldn't believe it! A match whose outcome had seemed so totally obvious had turned the Champions Trophy around! The Aussie-tamer India was out and the minnow Bermuda was in.

I reached for a slice of pizza in a stunned kind of way.

'It was a complete rout, Gaalu,' Zoravar said, nicking it away from under my nose sombrely. 'Painful to watch. The entire team, scurrying around like headless chickens, calling wildly, getting each other out. Total disaster. And the umpire was a jerk. Okayed some very dicey appeals.'

'But they're still in the reckoning, right?' I asked. 'Isn't there a point system or something?'

'It's a knock-out tournament,' Zoravar shook his head, digging little meat bits out of his teeth morosely. 'Not league. You lose one match, you have to go home.'

Still not wanting to believe him, telling myself it was some twisted joke he was playing on me, I sat back and switched on the TV. Sure enough, the news was showing the Indians coming back, blazers on, pushing their trolleys through Calcutta Customs. It was a strange feeling, watching them all on Rinku Chachi's twenty-one inch telly in Tera Numbar. It gave me some perspective on what big stars those boys really were.

Of course, my mind was in a whirl. A smug little part of me was going '
Hah!
Serve the Khoda-thing right. He was so full of himself that night.'
But my heart beat for India enough for me to feel bad about yetanother crappy end to our cricketing dream.

I sat there, staring at the TV, watching Nikhil Khoda have microphones thrust into his face, and thought about what he'd told me. That I could do a lot of damage to all the hard work he'd done, if the guys started to
believe
I was lucky. 'I can't have them putting their faith in
you
instead of
themselves
,' he'd said. At that point I'd thought he was just being insecure. I'd thought he'd meant: 'I can't have them putting their faith in
you
instead of in
me
.'