Chapter 2: Hrithik

# Chapter 2: Hrithik

## The Morning After

The alarm on my Nokia — the basic one, the 105, the phone that Baba had bought me in Standard 10 with the specific instruction that a phone was for calls and emergencies and not for the nonsense that the boys in his shop spent their time on — went off at 5:15 AM. I had set it for 5:15 because 5:15 was the time that allowed me to shower, dress, eat the poha that Aai made every morning with the mechanical precision of a woman for whom breakfast was not a meal but a military operation, and reach the cricket ground behind Yashwantrao Chavan Stadium by 6:30, which was when Sanju-sir started morning practice.

I taught Standard 8 and 9 boys at Shivaji Vidyalaya. Cricket coaching was not my primary job — my primary job was assistant clerk at the Satara Zilla Parishad, a job that Baba had arranged through a connection that he described as "a favour from Bhosale-kaka" and that I suspected was a favour that had involved a discount on plumbing supplies from Patil Hardware, because in Satara, as in most of Maharashtra, favours were the currency that powered the economy that the official economy did not acknowledge. But cricket coaching was the thing I did that made me feel like I was doing something rather than processing something, and the difference between doing and processing was the difference between waking at 5:15 with purpose and waking at 5:15 with resignation.

I showered. The water was cold — October mornings in Satara carried the first suggestion of the winter that would arrive in December, a suggestion that the water heater, which Baba had installed in 2019 and which had stopped working in 2023 and which neither of us had fixed because fixing it would require calling the electrician and calling the electrician would require an admission that neither Baba nor I could fix it ourselves, and that admission was incompatible with the Patil family's self-image as people who could fix anything, which was, after all, the founding principle of Patil Hardware — did not correct.

The cold water was useful. It erased the residue of the dream I'd had — the dream that was a memory, the memory that was Tanvi at the garba, turning in the second ring with the mirrors on her lehenga scattering light like a girl made of small suns, the moment when she had looked at me and I had looked at her and the kokam sharbat had paused halfway to my mouth because my hand had forgotten how to complete the motion, the hand's priorities having been rearranged by the visual input of Tanvi Kulkarni in a green lehenga under pandal lights.

I had walked away. I had always walked away. Walking away was the thing I was best at — not cricket, not clerk work, not the general maintenance of a human life, but the specific act of walking away from Tanvi Kulkarni at the exact moment when walking toward her was the obvious, correct, reasonable course of action. If walking away from Tanvi were a sport, I would represent India. I would medal.

The poha was on the table when I came downstairs. Aai was at the stove, making chai — the chai was not negotiable, the chai was the load-bearing wall of the Patil household's morning architecture, the thing without which the day would not hold — and the smell of the chai was the smell of my entire life: cardamom, ginger, the specific sweetness of Amul milk heated to the temperature at which it released the scent that was chemically indescribable and emotionally total.

"Navratri was good?" Aai asked without turning from the stove. This was her technique — the question delivered to the wall, the casual inquiry that was not casual, the intelligence-gathering operation disguised as small talk.

"Fine," I said. The word was a barricade. One syllable. No handholds.

"Tanvi was there," Aai said. This was not a question. This was a statement of fact delivered with the precision of a woman who had been monitoring the Tanvi situation for approximately six years and who had developed, in that time, a network of informants (Kulkarni-kaki, Tanvi's mother, with whom Aai spoke across the compound wall with the regularity of a news broadcast) that would make RAW envious.

"Everybody was there," I said. "It's Navratri."

"She looked nice, I heard."

"I didn't notice."

Aai turned from the stove. The expression on her face was the expression that mothers in Maharashtra had perfected over centuries — the look that said I have known you since you were smaller than a watermelon and I carried you inside my body for nine months and I can hear the lie in your voice the way a tabla player hears a mis-tuned dayan, which is to say instantly and with total certainty.

She did not say anything. She poured the chai. The chai said everything.

I ate the poha. The poha was, as always, precisely calibrated — the ratio of poha to kanda to mirchi to shenga was a formula that Aai had optimized over twenty-five years of marriage and that she executed with the consistency of a machine, except that machines did not add the squeeze of lemon at the end with the particular wrist-flick that Aai added, the flick that distributed the lemon juice in an arc across the surface rather than a puddle at the centre, and this distribution was, I believed, the secret that separated Aai's poha from all other poha in Satara, though I had never said this because complimenting Aai's cooking was like complimenting gravity — the force was so fundamental that acknowledging it felt redundant.

"Tanvi has completed her hotel management," Aai said, returning to the wall-facing interrogation technique. "Kulkarni-kaki told me. She's working at the restaurant. Saudagar's."

Saudagar's was the restaurant on the highway — the Pune-Bangalore highway that ran through Satara and that was the town's main artery, the road that connected Satara to the larger world and that also, in a sense, reminded Satara that it was not the larger world, that it was a town on the way to somewhere else. Saudagar's occupied the prime location at the highway turn, the spot where trucks stopped and families on road trips stopped and anyone who knew the Satara-Pune route knew that Saudagar's misal was worth the fifteen-minute detour from the toll road.

I knew Tanvi worked at Saudagar's. I knew this because Satara was a town of one lakh sixty thousand people and information about any one of those people was available to any other of those people within approximately forty-eight hours of the event occurring, and information about Tanvi Kulkarni was available to me within approximately four hours because the compound wall was porous and the mango tree was a listening post and Aai's intelligence network was faster than broadband.

"Good for her," I said. My voice was the voice of a man discussing weather. Neutral. Ambient. Committed to nothing.

Aai said nothing. The nothing was louder than speech.

---

The cricket ground behind Yashwantrao Chavan Stadium was not a ground in the way that Wankhede or Gahunje was a ground — it was a field, an open rectangle of reddish-brown earth that the municipal corporation maintained with the enthusiasm of a body that had sixteen higher priorities, which meant that the grass was patchy, the pitch was unpredictable, and the boundary on the south side was a barbed wire fence behind which a farmer named Shinde-kaka grazed his goats, the goats occasionally wandering onto the field mid-match with the entitlement of creatures who had been grazing this land before the cricketers arrived and who would be grazing it after the cricketers left.

My boys were already there when I arrived. Twelve boys, Standard 8 and 9, from Shivaji Vidyalaya — the municipal school on Station Road, not the private school, the municipal school where the fees were ₹400 per year and the cricket kit was shared and the pads had been new in 2017 and were held together now with tape and the stubborn refusal of sporting equipment to acknowledge its own obsolescence.

"Sir, good morning!" Raju called. Raju was my opening batsman — a boy from the Budhwar Peth chawl whose father sold vegetables at the Saturday market and whose mother worked as a domestic help in three houses and whose cricket talent was the kind that appeared once in a generation in a town like Satara: natural, effortless, the ball leaving his bat with a sound that was different from the sound other boys made, a sound that was cleaner, truer, the sound of wood meeting leather at the precise point where physics and instinct converged.

"Raju, warm-up. Tell the others — four laps, then stretching." I dropped my kit bag and surveyed the ground. The morning mist was thin over the field, burning off in the early sun. The Sahyadri hills beyond the ground were purple in the haze — the colour they turned in October, when the monsoon was a memory and the winter was a rumour and the hills existed in the interval between the two, the interval that was Satara's most beautiful season and that lasted exactly the number of weeks that beauty always lasted, which was not enough.

The boys ran their laps. I set up the stumps — the aluminium stumps, not wooden, because wooden stumps had been stolen twice and aluminium was harder to sell at the scrap dealer's. The batting net was already rigged — Sanju-sir had installed it permanently last year with funding from the District Sports Authority, which meant government money, which meant the net had taken fourteen months to arrive and had arrived in a different specification from what was ordered and the poles were slightly too short, but it was a net, and a net was better than no net, and the principle that something imperfect was better than nothing perfect was the operating philosophy of small-town Indian cricket.

I bowled to Raju first. Raju was left-handed, which meant his cover drives went to mid-off instead of point, which confused field placements, which delighted me because confusion in the opposition was the first victory. His backfoot punch was developing — three months ago it had been a stab, now it was a controlled shot with a follow-through that suggested confidence in the weight transfer.

"Raju — front foot coming across. Watch the guard." My coaching voice was the voice I did not recognise as my own — louder, firmer, carrying the particular authority that I did not possess in any other context of my life but that emerged on the cricket ground the way certain chemicals only reacted in the presence of specific catalysts. On the cricket ground, I was not the assistant clerk at the Zilla Parishad who processed land revenue documents. I was not the boy who walked away from Tanvi Kulkarni. I was the coach, and the coach was a person who knew things and who said things and whose opinions were heard and acted upon, and this version of me — the coaching version — was the version I wished I could export to the other areas of my life, particularly the area that involved a compound wall and a mango tree and a girl in a green lehenga.

Practice lasted ninety minutes. The boys improved in the incremental way that boys improved — the change invisible within a single session but measurable across weeks, the way the Sahyadri hills eroded, too slowly to see but undeniable over time. Raju's cover drive was better. Yash's bowling length was tighter. Manoj, who had been dropped from the team last month for not attending practice, had returned with the specific intensity of a boy who had been told he wasn't good enough and who had decided to make that assessment incorrect.

At 8:00, practice ended. The boys dispersed — to school, to breakfast, to the morning routines of boys who existed in the gap between childhood and whatever came next. I packed the kit bag, shouldered it, and walked toward the gate.

And there, parked at the gate, engine running, window down, arm resting on the door frame with the specific casual authority of a man who owned the car and the road and possibly the entire concept of roads — was Sachin.

Sachin Kulkarni. Tanvi's older brother.

The man who had told me, eleven years ago, in language that a thirteen-year-old boy could understand without ambiguity: Stay away from my sister.

He was driving the Innova. The white Innova that was the most visible vehicle in Satara — not because it was expensive (it was, by Satara standards, very expensive) but because Sachin drove it the way some men wore gold chains, as a statement, a broadcast, a continuous advertisement for the proposition that Sachin Kulkarni had succeeded and that his success was mobile and air-conditioned and had alloy wheels.

"Hrithik!" He waved from the window. The wave was not friendly. The wave was territorial — the motion of a man marking his presence in a space, letting you know he had seen you and that being seen by him was not optional.

I walked to the car. The morning was not going to be the morning I had planned.

"Sachin-bhai," I said. The bhai was not affection. The bhai was protocol — the linguistic equivalent of removing your shoes before entering a temple, an acknowledgment of a hierarchy that I did not endorse but that I followed because not following it would create problems that I was not equipped to solve.

"Coming from practice?" He gestured at the kit bag. "Still coaching the boys, haan?"

"Yes."

"Good, good. Community service." He said community service the way some people said hobby — with the subtext that it was cute but not serious, not the real thing, not the kind of work that produced Innovas and alloy wheels.

"What can I do for you, Sachin-bhai?"

He adjusted his sunglasses — Ray-Ban, or the Sadar Bazaar version of Ray-Ban, I could not tell — and leaned his elbow further out the window. "Just passing by. Saw you. Thought I'd say hello."

Sachin Kulkarni did not say hello. Sachin Kulkarni said whatever it was that advanced Sachin Kulkarni's interests, and hello was not in that category unless hello was a prefix to something else.

"How's the coaching going? The boys any good?"

"They're improving."

"Improving." He repeated the word as if tasting it. "That's nice. But improving doesn't win tournaments, does it? You need funding for that. Equipment. Proper ground. Travel expenses for away matches."

I said nothing. The silence was not agreement. The silence was the absence of the specific words I wanted to say, which were words about what Sachin could do with his assessment of my coaching programme and where he could place it, but which I did not say because Sachin Kulkarni was not a man you said those words to, not because he was dangerous (though he might have been) but because he was connected, and connected in Satara meant connected to the municipal council and the Zilla Parishad and the political network that decided who got tenders and who got transferred and who got the cricket ground booking on Sundays.

"I might be able to help," he said. "I'm sponsoring the Satara Premier League this year. Twenty-over format. Good prize money. Good exposure for the boys."

"That's generous."

"It's business." He smiled. The smile was the kind of smile that a crocodile might produce if crocodiles understood the concept of plausible deniability. "The car showroom is doing well. Kulkarni Motors. You've seen it? On the highway, next to the petrol pump?"

I had seen it. Everyone in Satara had seen it. Kulkarni Motors — Sachin's used-car dealership — occupied a plot on the highway that was larger than the cricket ground and that displayed, at any given time, thirty to forty vehicles in various states of second-hand excellence, each vehicle polished to a shine that was meant to obscure the odometer's secrets.

"Think about the tournament," Sachin said. "Your boys could play. Good exposure." He paused, and the pause was the pause that came before the real sentence, the sentence that the previous sentences had been building toward. "And Hrithik — you know my sister is back in Satara, right? Working at Saudagar's?"

"I'd heard."

"She's doing well. Focused. Building something." He lowered his sunglasses and looked at me directly. "She doesn't need distractions."

The word distractions was me. The word had always been me.

"I'm not a distraction, Sachin-bhai."

"I know." He pushed the sunglasses back up. "That's why I'm telling you. Not warning. Just... informing."

He started the engine — the Innova's diesel rumble was a sound that Satara knew the way Mumbai knew the local train's horn — and pulled away from the gate with the unhurried speed of a man who had delivered his message and whose message did not require a response.

I stood at the gate with the kit bag on my shoulder and the morning sun on my face and the very specific sensation of being twenty-three years old and still being told, by a man who had been telling me for eleven years, that the girl next door was not for me.

The goats on the other side of the barbed wire fence regarded me with the blank compassion of animals who had witnessed human drama and found it unimpressive.

I walked home. The compound wall was there, as it always was — blue on one side, white on the other, the mango tree's branches reaching over the divide like an invitation from a country I was not allowed to enter.

Through the wall, I could hear the sound of the Kulkarni household waking — a pressure cooker's whistle, a radio playing Marathi devotional songs, the clatter of steel vessels that was the soundtrack of every morning in every house in every lane in Satara.

Tanvi's morning. Happening ten feet from mine, separated by six inches of brick and plaster and eleven years of her brother's prohibition.

I went inside. Aai had made a second cup of chai. The chai was waiting on the table, steam curling from the steel glass in the morning light, and the light caught the steam and made it visible, the way light sometimes made visible the things that were always there but that you only saw when the angle was right.

I sat down. I drank the chai. The chai was perfect, as it always was — Aai's chai, the chai that was the first and last certainty of every day, the thing that was reliable when nothing else was.

On the other side of the wall, a pressure cooker whistled for the third time. Tanvi's Aai was making dal. I knew the whistle count — three whistles for tur dal, five for chana dal, seven for rajma. Three whistles meant tur dal. Tur dal meant an ordinary day.

An ordinary day. The kind of day where nothing happened and everything continued and the compound wall stayed where it was and the mango tree's branches stayed where they were and the boy on one side and the girl on the other went about their lives in parallel lines that never touched, like railway tracks that ran beside each other all the way to the horizon and that the geometry textbook promised would never meet, though the eye insisted they did, somewhere far away, in the place where parallel lines went to become something else.

I finished the chai. I put on the shirt and trousers that the Zilla Parishad required — the uniform of a man who processed land revenue documents, not the uniform of a man who coached cricket, not the uniform of a man who wanted things he could not have.

The morning continued. Ordinary. Parallel. The tracks running side by side.