Rishabh didn’t see the Vikas keeper wheel away, screaming wildly, and get mobbed by his mates as if he had a part to play in the miskick. He didn’t see Tejas crumble to the ground. He didn’t hear the wail that went up from his teammates. All he heard was silence and all he saw was the brown earth and their tournament buried under it.
August 2006
RISHABH BALA STOOD in front of the mirror. He tilted his face down, arched his eyebrows, checked his right profile and then his left. Cool, he thought to himself. He brushed back his hair for the 117th time and yanked and tugged at a strand until it twirled gracefully over his forehead. Next, he picked up a can of deodorant and pressed down on the nozzle for a few minutes as he waved it all over himself. Grabbing his bag and umbrella, he dashed out of the house, yelling, ‘Mummy, I’m going!’
Mrs Bala waved goodbye to the cloud of deodorant that blew out the house.
The reason Rishabh looked so spiffy was because he was going to Oswal’s. It was only at this coaching class that he got an opportunity to be in the same room as Tamanna. He hadn’t spoken to her yet but was certain that he was making her fall in love with him owing to his dashing sense of style. It was a day after the defeat, but he was confident about going a step further in impressing her today.
He entered the long, narrow classroom of batch A, trooped to the last bench on the left side and set his bag down. Tamanna and her gaggle usually occupied the last two rows on the right. Soon they entered the room, preceded, as usual, by laughter. They were always laughing and, for some inexplicable reason, Rishabh always thought they were laughing at him.
When they had settled down, Rishabh glanced at his watch; there were five minutes to the lecture. Enough time. He ran a clammy palm over his forehead, cleared his throat and, in a bold voice, said, ‘Hey, Kunal! How are you, man?’
That was the sign.
Kunal Bedi, who sat only two benches away, replied with an equally loud ‘Arre, Rishabh! I’m good, re. How are you?’
‘I’m fine, yaar,’ yelled Rishabh. ‘Just recently played a football tournament. Nothing much.’
‘Oh, right! The school football tournament, where you represented the school in football. How did it go?’
Rishabh darted his eyes to see if Tamanna was listening. She was in the middle of a chirpy conversation with Krupa, so he increased his volume some more.
‘It was good, yaar! I scored the first goal—and we won!’
‘We won because you scored the goal, no?’
‘You could say that!’
‘How did you score the goal?’
‘Oh, it’s a long story . . .’
‘Okay, so tell me after class,’ said Kunal.
Rishabh’s eyes widened and his nostrils flared. He had carefully written the script himself and had spent the entire evening going over it with Kunal. Now the ass was forgetting his cues! ‘Now! Now! Ask me the story NOW!’ he mouthed.
Kunal blinked. He squinted his eyes. ‘Wha-at?’ he mumbled.
Rishabh went on. ‘I can tell you now also if you want . . .’ He vigorously nodded his head until Kunal hesitantly said, ‘Yes, yes, I want to know now only.’
Rishabh glanced to the right. Tamanna was now thoroughly immersed in taking out a notebook from her bag. Krupa, on the other hand, was staring straight at him. It frightened him to see her goggle eyes boring into him. She smiled and nodded her head expectantly.
‘Yeah, so I’ll tell you, no, Kunal. See, I was surrounded by defenders. All around me. Fully covered. And Rahul passes the ball to me. I get hold of the ball, then I block it from one defender, then I run ahead. The second defender comes forward. I do a step-over and go inside the D. Then their captain tries to tackle me, but I chip the ball and leap over him. Now it’s just me and the keeper, okay? It’s a battle of nerves. He’s got both the left and right post covered. He thinks I can’t score. But I just kick the ball up and head it over him . . . and I scoooored!’
‘Wooo!’ cheered Krupa, clapping. ‘Now tell us how you missed the penalty.’
‘What?’ said Rishabh, gagging. ‘What penalty?’
‘I heard you missed the final penalty.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘They did,’ said Krupa, pointing at Rahul and Dave, who sat two benches ahead. They had been shaking with concealed giggles but were now howling with laughter.
‘Act it out and show, no,’ insisted Krupa.
‘We’ll show you how he missed it,’ Rahul offered.
The bevy leapt out of their seats with unholy joy.
‘I’m Rishabh,’ began Rahul, ‘and Dave is their keeper, okay?’ Rishabh glanced at Tamanna, who suddenly seemed to be giving her full attention to this mockery.
‘So he stands over the ball like Beckham for a long time, just like this.’ Rahul kept an imaginary ball down, pouted theatrically and heaved with exaggerated nervousness. ‘We all think he’s going to score. Then he runs up to the ball and kicks it.’
Dave walked over and picked up the imaginary ball just an inch away from Rahul.
‘That’s also too far!’ said Rahul over Krupa’s loud cackles.
‘Even the ball was saying, “You haven’t had breakfast or what?”’ jeered Dave.
‘The referee was happy. He didn’t even have to place the ball back on the spot. It had not moved only!’ Rahul added.
Rishabh was livid. His face had turned so red you could use it to send people off the field. Then he looked at Tamanna. She was laughing, with her head thrown back and her body convulsing with hysteria.
It’s because of me! he thought. Eh, I’ll take it.
Seeing her laugh made him giggle, and soon he was laughing just as hard as the others until Hariharan, the maths tutor, came in and put an end to all happiness for the next two hours.
The bell trilled through the school and sent feet scurrying to class for morning prayers. Just as the chanting began on the PA system, two pairs of feet dragged across the white-and-brown tiles of the tenth standard corridor. The feet belonged to Rishabh and Puro. They shuffled to class like zombies. Their wet hair was uncombed, their shirts untucked; they struggled to carry their school bags and their legs felt like they were made of marble—marble that could feel pain.
‘May we come in, miss?’ they groaned once the prayer was over.
Kaul Miss was repulsed by their appearance. ‘Come in. Why are you looking like this? Animals—both of you. Tuck your shirt in. Abhay . . . your fly is open,’ she said and looked away with the embarrassment of a fifty-five-year-old schoolteacher.
Puro dazedly zipped up. ‘Sorry, miss,’ he mumbled.
‘Go sit down,’ said Kaul Miss with nothing short of disgust.
They hobbled past her and she sucked in her breath. ‘What is this unearthly smell? You boys didn’t have a bath or what?’ Soon two whole rows of students were gagging as Rishabh and Puro made their way to their desks, emanating a smell so putrid that decomposing corpses would have asked them to do something about it.
‘I think I’m going to retire,’ said Rishabh. ‘I’ve had enough football.’
‘I can’t feel my feet,’ squeaked Puro.
This was the miserable condition of every footballer of Shri Sunderlal Sanghvi School after the first day of practice under the new coach. The Mongoose had conducted his first session on the Monday after the tournament loss. He had told them to take it easy over the weekend because they would begin intense training right from day one. He hadn’t been joking. All the anticipation of training under the assured Mehfouz Noorani had been crushed out of them after a single day.
They had arrived on time (save for Aurobindo, who was consequently made to sit the session out) and found the coach reading the newspaper in the little shed that overlooked the ground. He peered at them over the rim of his reading glasses and asked them to kit up quickly.
A sack of balls lay on the ground, besides equipment they had never seen before: cones, markers, bibs and mini posts. The boys imagined these to be the
paraphernalia that professionals played with. This must have been what they used in the training grounds in Manchester and Madrid. They raced to put their studs on and galloped to get to the ground. They couldn’t wait to get started that cold Monday morning under an ice-grey sky.
The coach patted his pockets, then slapped his forehead. ‘My whistle is in the office. I’ll go bring it. You boys stay here.’
The minute the coach left, they ran over to the equipment. Rishabh, Puro and Sumit each picked up a cone or a bib and inspected it.
‘So many balls!’ exclaimed Rahul, shaking the sack.
‘Having balls must be new to you, no, Rahul?’ said Floyd.
Rahul took one out and flung it at him.
Rana had begun chasing after Vade again after the latter had jammed a cone on to his head. Tejas had slipped on a bib to see how it looked on him. Khodu was kicking a ball high in the air and trying to trap it.
‘AYE!’ bellowed the coach, sending a flock of mynahs into flight. ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING?’
Cones, balls and bibs dropped to the ground faster than you could say ‘penalty’. The coach’s moustache flared again. His eyeballs threatened to fly out of his sockets and hit them in the face.
‘Sorry, sir,’ said Puro. ‘We got a little excited seeing all this. We were just looking. Really.’
‘Did I tell you to touch that?’ asked the coach.
‘No, sir.’
‘What did I tell you?’
‘To wait for you.’
‘Then why did you touch the stuff?’
There was no answer.
‘You got excited seeing this? You want to train so badly? You are so happy to run around? Okay, I will make you use all the balls and all the cones. Come, line up.’
No one moved.
‘I SAID, LINE UP.’
Once they were in two files, the coach ordered, ‘Ten rounds of the ground. You like to run, I will make you run. Go!’
They jogged ten tiring circles and came to a stop, panting and huffing, but before they could catch their breath, the coach blew his whistle. He had set up the cones and now made them dribble around them. Whistle. They dropped to do push-ups. Whistle. Relay sprinting. Whistle. Knee-ups. Whistle. By the time they had to play a five-a-side match, they were finding it difficult to even don their bibs.
‘You wanted to wear them, no?’ queried the coach. ‘Put them on now.’ Whistle.
Just then, Bhupi staggered to the touchline and threw up a concoction of banana and milk out of sheer exhaustion.
‘One team will have one player less,’ said the coach coolly.
By the end of the session, they were as close to being dead as was possible while still having a pulse. Most of them lay collapsed on the ground with their arms splayed, waiting for the cold embrace of death. They got, instead, the grim spectre of the coach standing over their motionless bodies as he said in a low voice, ‘What I told you? I want champions. Champions have discipline. If you can’t be disciplined, I don’t need you. If I cannot trust you to stand in one place for five minutes, I can’t trust you to win a game. It’s that simple. Now, get up and go study.’ Whistle.
In class, Meesha Pinto, the geography teacher, could see Rishabh’s eyes shutting. On any other day, Pinto would have unleashed carnage upon a student who dared to sleep in her class, but seeing Rishabh’s grimy face and dishevelled appearance, she felt pity instead of anger.
‘Rishabh! RISHABH!’ she called, firm yet concerned.
The boy opened his eyes and was startled to see the class staring at him.
‘Stop dreaming in class,’ said Pinto.
Meesha Pinto couldn’t say for sure, but she thought she heard him say, ‘But this is a nightmare.’
‘Football is war, and I only go to war with those I trust,’ the Mongoose had said. And by the tenth day of training, he had his squad. He hadn’t picked them as much as let them do the picking for him. It had started with a gruelling five days, during which he had put them through a relentless program of drills and games. In the hour-long session each morning, he allowed them to rest a measly ten minutes. They spent the rest of the time on their feet, in constant motion and alert because of the coach’s whistle or rebuke.
The reporting time was 6.30 a.m. sharp. Aurobindo, whose love for pav bhaji was only eclipsed by his love for sleep, found it impossible to wrench himself away from his pillow on time. He always bounced in around 6.45 a.m., smiling—he was one of those ever-smiling boys who grew up to be a cynical research assistant in a chemical factory—and was always bounced out by the coach with equal severity.
‘This isn’t a brothel, where you can come any time you want,’ snarled the coach. ‘Shut up!’ he added in response to the giggling that followed the word ‘brothel’.
On the third day, Aurobindo beat a personal record and was only five minutes late. Unfortunately, in the coach’s book, late was late, no matter the minutes. He didn’t even look in Aurobindo’s direction. He simply held up a steady arm towards the gate. ‘Out.’
‘Please, sir. Sorry, sir,’ said Aurobindo, the smile dimmed to a helpless grin.
‘Don’t come from tomorrow.’
‘But sir—’
‘People who are late are lazy. Do I want lazy people in my team? No.’
‘No, sir! It’s not like that . . . my rickshaw—’
‘Lazy people always have excuse. Do I want people with excuse? No.’
‘Sir . . . it’s the truth—’
‘It’s the truth on one day, not three. You don’t value my time, but I value yours. Don’t waste any more. Get out.’
‘Sir—’
‘OUT!’ yelled Mehfouz Noorani, once again scattering the mynahs.
Aurobindo never came back, and the rest of the team never came late.
On the fifth day, the coach had split them into two sides and assigned them positions for the five-a-side match.
‘Khodu, right back,’ said the coach.
‘Sir, that’s Bhupinder. I’m centre back.’
‘Aye! You will play right back.’
‘I’m not good in that position, sir. My best place is centre back, I’m telling you.’
‘You will tell me now? You think I’m stupid here or what? Haan? Why am I putting you at right-back: because you have speed, stamina. You can run down the flank, box to box. In the centre-back position, what you do? Play dangerously. Play the ball inside. Try to attack from middle. You want to attack, go to the right-back position.’
‘I don’t want to play there.’
‘Then I don’t want you to play anywhere,’ stated the coach. Khodu glowered at Mehfouz Noorani. It looked like he would punch the older man. Khodu’s fuse was a short one. It took very little to make him feel insulted, but the coach didn’t care much for Khodu’s wrath. ‘Leave the ground, and take your stare with you,’ he said, putting his whistle to his lips.
Khodu clomped off the ground, muttering abuses under his breath. Although no one considered Khodu a bosom buddy, the boys were sad to see him go. It wasn’t disputed that Khodu was the best defender in the team. His imperious build and savage aggression, though menacing off the field, were both comforting qualities when he was defending your goal. Besides, his replacements were Vipul Dutta and Sumit Awasthi, both of whom inspired little confidence. Puro asked the coach to forgive Khodu’s petulance, but the coach refused.
‘This team doesn’t need players like him. You only think he is a good player because you haven’t seen what I will make of you.’ Saying so, the coach had welcomed new recruits in an effort to deepen the squad. None of them lasted beyond the week. Priyesh Manjarekar (laughing at a joke while the coach was speaking), Ojas Rahane (playing without warming up properly) and Vishwas Pannu (plain lack of talent) were all told to leave almost as soon as they had come.
On the tenth day, after practice, the coach blew his whistle in one long note. This was the signal for the boys to assemble. They staggered into a cluster around him. ‘You are my team. Each of
you I have chosen. Each of you is standing here because you have discipline and determination. Each of you knows how to play with your legs. Now you will learn to play from here,’ he said and thumped his chest. ‘Each of you I have picked for a reason. I know deep inside me that you will be champions. You will lift many, many trophies. Do you want to win?’
‘Yes, sir!’ roared the boys.
‘Do you want to be champions?’
‘Yes, sir!’ went up an even louder shout.
‘Good. In September, we are playing. We are playing a district-level tournament. But there is good news. This time you will be playing for the school in the school.’
Surprise washed over the faces that looked at the coach.
‘The tournament is being held over here only, in this school, on this ground. The war has come home, and each of you will fight and all of us will win!’
‘YES, SIR!’
Rishabh clenched his fists and shut his eyes. He would play in school, play in front of Tamanna. He would score, and it would make her leap up from her seat and clasp her hands. He would like that. He would really, really like that.
Ever since the tournament was announced, they could sense it. If you’d asked them what ‘it’ was, they couldn’t have told you, but ‘it’ felt like a trophy was around the corner.
The boys were no longer tired of training. Their teeth didn’t chatter in the rain. They made sacrifices without complaint. Most of it was because of the Mongoose. He was competent and confident, and both these qualities rubbed off on the team. The better they got on the pitch, the more they believed they were winners off it. Though he barked his orders and greeted mistakes with a fusillade of foul language, they had grown accustomed to the coach’s tough love. What they admired most about him was his fairness. All his anger was filtered through the objective of improving them. To that end, it didn’t matter who you were, how talented you were or how much he liked you; if you didn’t display the discipline and dedication that was demanded of a top-class player, then Mehfouz Noorani would immediately let you know what he thought of you and your entire family.
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