The Legend of Pradeep Mathew

by Shehan Karunatilaka

  The Second Note

  Jonny was right. It was the keeping busy that silenced the creature. I had replaced the classified ad in the Sunday Observer. I had classified all Mathew’s balls from Ari’s notebooks. I had written about Neiris, Shirali and the show that no one saw. The monkey on my back stayed quiet, the chip on my shoulder felt less heavy.

  I notice a man standing outside Jonny’s, smoking a cigarette. At first I think he is a spy for Jonny’s prosecutors. I make up my mind to warn Jonny and ask him exactly how much trouble he is in. But I forget. Then I see the man again on the bus, reading a copy of the Sunday Observer. I realise that (a) the man is familiar, and (b) it is Friday.

  I return home ready to build a cathedral with words. Unafraid of the gargoyles that tell me it won’t play, disobedient to the creature that haunts my thirst, drowning in tea, steaming in cigarette smoke. Sheila brings in a letter and sniffs at the air.

  ‘I didn’t drink. I’m not going to drink. So let me smoke.’

  ‘I didn’t say anything.’ I hear her voice break and I want to hug her and say I’m sorry and that I’ll try and be better, but of course I don’t. I tear the envelope and recognise the computer font.

  We enjoyed the documentary.

  We would like to speak with you.

  When can we pick you up?

  It takes us a while to locate the first note in my mess of a room. Ari finds a siri-siri bag with the word Cargills crossed out and labelled ‘Exhibit A’ in black felt pen beneath my pile of Cricketer magazines. We compare. It is a match.

  I call up Harini Diyabalanage and ask her what Shirali looked like. She describes straightened hair, short skirts and a shapely rear. I agree with Ari that it describes Danila Guneratne. And one-third of Colombo’s female population.

  The phone rings as soon as I replace it. Perhaps Harini can oblige with a strawberry-shaped birthmark. On an inner thigh perhaps. Now I am fantasising. How completely undignified.

  ‘My boys will pick you up at Vihara Maha Devi Park tomorrow afternoon.’

  The voice is gruff, hurried and familiar.

  ‘Who are your boys?’

  ‘You’ve met them. Come alone. Don’t bring the schoolteacher or the homo.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Pradeep Sivanathan made me a lot of money in the 1992 test. You know the one I’m talking about.’

  I cannot think of anything to say.

  ‘2.30 tomorrow. Come alone.’

  Click.

  America’s Favourite Pastime

  Hard to believe, but in the mid-nineteenth century, cricket was America’s favourite team sport. Cricket clubs flourished in over twenty-two states and the sport’s first international game took place not between England and Australia in 1877, but between Canada and the US in 1844. True fact.

  Around the 1880s, sporting goods maker A.G. Spalding spread the myth of baseball being invented by US civil war heroes. Baseball was positioned as an honest game for rugged Americans, regardless of the game’s true origins, five centuries earlier, at the hands of medieval French monks. Cricket, by default, became the dull sport of English snobs and retreated from the American imagination. Meanwhile Spalding, a spin doctor long before the term was invented, sold a lot of baseball equipment.

  Baseball, with its innings, its outs, its home runs and its pichers, is to cricket what Christianity is to Catholicism, or what Islam is to Judaism. Similar to the naked eye, and when put under a microscope, really not all that dissimilar. Despite violent cries, on both sides, to the contrary.

  Innocent Emmanuel

  Blindfolded, in the back seat of the white van, I ask for a cigarette. Not unlike a man facing a firing squad. There are mutterings in crude Tamil, the voice nearest to me places a hand on my shoulder. ‘Come up front, Uncle. These windows don’t work.’

  My blindfold is an airline sleep mask and it sits over my eyebrows. I can dislodge it at any time, but I am urged not to. A lit cigarette is placed between my lips, I am nudged forward and pressed against the breeze. I hear no birds, no horns, no chatter, no traffic, just the rumble of our tyres navigating a bumpy road.

  You are about to meet I.E. Kugarajah aka Emmanuel aka Kuga, the man you will not believe exists. Are you excited? Or are you, as I was, uncomfortable?

  My feet hurt from hobbling across Vihara Maha Devi Park, my tongue is numb from sucking on an ice palam. I had spent the morning surveying the merry-go-rounds and the pony rides, trying to spot policemen wearing cloaks and carrying daggers. Named after one of Sri Lankan history’s many matriarchs, the park has a golden Buddha statue at the entrance that turns its back on the scattered games of rubber ball cricket and the couples touching each other under flowering trees.

  My glasses tint in the sun so I can observe the park without it observing me. I see balls being hit across pathways and breasts being fondled under umbrellas. Like our reefs and our forests, the sun is another blessing we take for granted in this ungrateful country. One day, it too may be gone. I expect men in uniform to point a gun at my kidneys and usher me into a jeep. Instead I get two sarong johnnies in cream shirts, both of whom are familiar. ‘Come with us, Uncle.’ As if they are prefects leading me to a sports meet.

  I hesitate at the step of the Delica van. If threatened, I could hit them with my cane. The driver, dark and bearded, resembles the cop who stopped me yesterday. The passenger wears a T-shirt and gold chains.

  The passenger speaks. ‘Don’t worry, Uncle. You can get in.’

  I am helped into the last of three rows of weathered seating. All the back windows are tinted. I am handed an airline mask.

  ‘Why must I wear this?’

  ‘Everyone wears it,’ says the passenger. ‘Those are the rules. Uncle doesn’t know me?’

  ‘You stole my bag.’

  ‘That’s all? I have delivered letters to you. I have taken your bets. You have lit my cigarette at the Kaanuwa.’

  Kalu Daniel looks different without his hair or his handlebar moustache.

  ‘When did you take my bets?’

  ‘When I ran the Neptune. You used to come there a lot. Please put on the mask.’

  ‘Who are these boys?’ I ask as I cover my vision with soft polyester.

  ‘These are my boys. This is Sudu. That is Chooti.’

  I peek through my blindfold. Chooti is a giant, Sudu is as black as a crow’s rectum.

  ‘Keep your mask on.’

  ‘Sorry. Why does it smell of kerosene in here?’

  There are sniggers.

  ‘Don’t misunderstand, Uncle. Have you had lunch?’

  The tone is cordial, though I suppose I should feel threatened.

  ‘Who did I talk to on the phone?’

  ‘Boss called you personally.’

  As I finish my cigarette, I can feel the road smoothing out, but still no background noise. My unreliable sense of time tells us we have been travelling for twenty minutes. Not enough time for us to exit Colombo on a Saturday afternoon.

  The van takes some turns. The radio is switched on and I hear film music, though I cannot discern the language. With Sinhala and Tamil cinema aping Bollywood, everything sounds like a copy of a copy.

  ‘Uncle is fully recovered?’

  ‘From?’

  ‘You were in hospital, no?’

  ‘Ah. Yes. Much better. Thank you.’

  ‘That is good.’

  The van stops, the sliding door jerks open, I am led out crouching and my blindfold is lifted. They push me inside a doorway while my eyes get accustomed to the sun. The stairs are coated in red polish and the windows are grilled. The hall is all pot plants and paintings. I am shown into a room, a large room where light falls through an open balcony.

  In the centre of the room, I see a padded swivel chair facing a wall and the top of a man’s head. The room has a polished desk and a framed picture of Ms 2ndGeneration, present ruler of the land. A large plasma screen TV is playing my documentary on Pradeep Mathew.

  Brian’s voic
e: ‘Mathew’s best international bowling performance took place at Asgiriya in 1987 …’

  The chair swivels around and a chubby man in shorts with a moustache as dark as his skin, stares me down. On his lap is my satchel.

  ‘Sit.’

  I take the cane chair by the doorway and get a glimpse out of the window. The house opposite is a similar colonial-style cottage, all trellises and verandas and araliya trees.

  ‘It’s hard to believe this is Colombo, no?’ says the man in the chair. ‘Danny, ask Selva to make some lime juice. You stopped drinking, no, Uncle?’

  I nod. Everything in the room is an antique, aside from the laptop on the desk and the screen showing Rakwana Somawardena talking to the camera.

  ‘Hope you don’t mind if I put a shot.’

  ‘How did you get this documentary?’

  ‘I taped it. I taped all of your films.’

  ‘It was on a powercut night.’

  Like Jonny, he throws his head back when he laughs.

  ‘This street isn’t affected by powercuts.’

  I raise myself with my stick and look out onto the balcony. The road outside snakes into a series of dead ends like the arms of an octopus.

  ‘This is Malabe?’

  ‘Sit, Karunasena.’ He points his remote at the plasma screen. ‘Who paid for this?’

  ‘We did.’

  ‘You and Byrd?’

  ‘And Graham Snow.’

  ‘Not SwarnaVision?’

  ‘Initially it was the SLBCC and ITL, then we funded, then SwarnaVision …’

  ‘You spent your life savings on this?’

  ‘We had some lucky investments.’

  ‘I heard. The Neptune, no? That was a badly run place.’

  ‘Was it?’

  A man dressed like a waiter brings in drinks on a trolley. The man called Daniel pours me lime juice from a flask and fixes two Scotches.

  ‘Danny. Have you recovered the losses?’

  ‘Not yet, boss, shipment getting delayed …’

  ‘Don’t fuck around, ah? Minister is coming on Monday. You better have it sorted.’

  I look at both of them. ‘You work for the government?’

  ‘Doesn’t everyone?’ says my host taking a sip. Daniel smiles.

  ‘I have never seen a Johnny Walker Silver Label.’

  ‘This is not Scotch, ah? Johnny Walker does an exclusive line of white arrack. Not available in Sri Lanka. Not available anywhere. In vain you gave up. Shall I add a bite to your lime?’

  I shake my head and sip. The lime juice is filled with crushed ice and sugar syrup and is perhaps the finest non-alcoholic beverage I’ve ever tasted. Daniel scurries away to the balcony. The man in the chair watches me sip.

  ‘Selva does the best lime juice in Asia. I picked him up in Chennai, then known as Madras.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘My name is Innocent Emmanuel Kugarajah. I am quite positive you have never heard of me. That, Mr Karunasena,’ he smiles, ‘is the last question you will ask today.’

  He closes my satchel. His voice has deepened.

  ‘I repeat. Who commissioned and funded a documentary on Pradeep Sivanathan?’

  ‘No one. I decided to do it. Ari and Brian agreed to help me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why did they help me?’

  ‘Why did you do it?’

  ‘Are you finished with my bag?’

  Dilup Makalande’s soundtrack to the show that no one saw invades the silence. The stocky man shakes awake.

  ‘Of course, here.’ He leans forward and places it on the low antique table between us. To call it a coffee table would be to describe a Stradivarius as a banjo.

  ‘It was very interesting. I even understood some of those diagrams. You and your friend are cricket fanatics, no?’

  I drain my glass.

  ‘Do you work for the Cricket Board?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Do you?’

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘I would like to know why you’re putting ads, making documentary films and writing in notebooks about my friend who was apparently killed three years ago?’

  ‘Because I saw him taking 10 wickets for 51 runs at Asgiriya in 1987.’

  His beady eyes pop out of his chubby head. He leans forward.

  ‘You saw that?’

  I certainly did.

  The Asgiriya Test

  The first test of the 1987 New Zealand tour was known as the Kuruppu test, due to the aforementioned wicketkeeper-batsman spending every minute of it on the field. The match was as dreary as Kuruppu’s unbeaten 201, the first double century by a Sri Lankan, quite possibly the dullest innings ever. Stretched over 778 soggy minutes, it remains the slowest double century in history.

  Kuruppu was dropped on 31, 70, 165 and 181 and scooped most of his runs from pushing into the covers with his bottom hand. Then the Kiwis got in on the action with Hadlee and Jeff Crowe adding two equally yawn-worthy centuries as the match lurched to a non-climax. Days later, a car bomb at the Colombo central bus station killed 113 and wounded 300. The LTTE had struck at the heart of Colombo for neither the first nor the last time, as New Zealand cricket would find out again five years later.

  In 1992, the exploding motorbike that disposed of Navy chief Clancy Kobbekaduwa in front of the touring team’s hotel, landed body parts quite literally at the feet of the horrified Kiwis. Gavin Larsen, another medium pacer who could bat a bit, almost trod on a severed hand. That tragedy splintered the New Zealand team, with five players and manager Wally Lees returning home and Sri Lanka trouncing a weakened Kiwi outfit.

  1987’s bomb had no such compromise. As soon as the death count of Colombo’s then biggest tragedy hit the headlines, the New Zealanders had their bags packed. It was the coaxing of the Minister that convinced them to play a second test in Asgiriya.

  Three reasons: the Minister was instrumental in the construction of this stadium in the hills and guaranteed a closed event with tight security; the Minister was also instrumental in NZ dairy exporter Anchor’s near monopoly of the local milk powder market; the Minister had a beguiling smile that was difficult to refuse.

  The second test was closed to the public and only selected members of the press were invited. I then worked for the Sun, a short-lived tabloid that made up in free tickets what it lacked in print quality. I received an invitation to cover the match and I took Ari along as my photographer.

  We were body-searched and stripped of our alcohol. Our stand was populated by the press and the players’ guests. The pavilion was filled with politicians and VIPs, the stands around the players’ dressing rooms were empty, and the rest of the stadium was bare.

  These were the days before multiple cricket channels. Even school games and club matches attracted half-full stadiums. To see a test match in a cricket-starved nation played before an empty stadium was farcical. As was the notion that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam would want to assassinate curly-haired medium pacers from Waipukarau.

  The Asgiriya pitch was not expecting call-up for international duties that year and had been hosting U-13 matting encounters between Trinity and St Anthony’s. The surface had only three days’ preparation, a fact kept from the already nervous New Zealanders.

  The press box had a lone fax machine, a few typewriters and three dust-ridden overhead fans. There was a bar that served warm beer and a bird’s eye view of the pitch. The commentary boxes upstairs sent rumbles across the ceiling. The usual suspects spread themselves across empty chairs and absorbed the action.

  As members of the press, we were informed that this test was a goodwill game between the SLBCC and the NZCB and was yet to be officially recognised by the ICC. That due to the prevalent situation in the country, our match reports would have to be approved by the government censor.

  ‘Cricket in Czechoslovakia must be like this,’ said Ari as we took our assigned seats with a who’s who of NZ sportswriting called this not for their fame or infamy, bu
t because neither Ari nor I knew who was who.

  New Zealand played an unchanged XI, while Sri Lanka replaced spinner Anurasiri and paceman Kurupparachchi with spinner Mathew and paceman Ramanayake. The first session proved a fascinating contest. Accurate bowling by the two Ratnayakes matched by cautious defence by Franklin and Jones. Pradeep Mathew came on just before lunch and made Jones jump in the way of a darter. He then dispensed of Horne with a googly.

  The tourists went to lunch at 73–2 and we were informed that the ICC had officially bestowed test match status on this game. Invigorated by the buffet, the Kiwis came out guns blazing. Future rivals Crowe Jr and Turner, the wine and cheese man and the beer and pie man, hit our medium pacers out of the attack and within half an hour the score was 111 for 2. Captain Mendis tossed the ball to Pradeep Mathew, whose figures stood at 2–47.

  What followed was the finest spell of spin bowling or any bowling, on this or any other planet, that I or anyone else could ever have seen.

  Turner taunted the young chinaman bowler by imitating his ungainly action as he tossed the ball back to mid-on. Pradeep, unperturbed, returned to his mark with intent on his face. He adjusted his headband. He rolled up his sleeves as if to commit a long premeditated act of violence. He stumbled in to bowl three perfect googlies which Crowe read and avoided. On the fourth ball, Crowe attempted a cut, only to find the ball reversing onto his stumps.

  With the new batsman, Mathew shifted to orthodox spin. The flight and drift were perfect, the ball curling just out of the batsman’s reach. The trajectory was like a whip in mid-crack. By 1987, Mathew was not a stranger to Ari and me, though we were unaware he had weapons like the boru ball, responsible for Crowe Sr and Evan Gray’s demises.

  New Zealand 113 for 5. Turner knocked Gurusinha for a few boundaries at the other end, but made the fatal error of taking a single on the last ball. He faced Mathew who dished out an unplayable finger spinner, followed by the undercutter, the ball backspinning and staying low. Turner kicked the pitch in annoyance and said something unprintable to the bowler.