The Wrestler of Kabilan Street
Gopu was seventeen, and he discovered his destiny on a Tuesday evening in the front room of Ramanujam, the retired sub-registrar. Ramanujam had the only television set on Kabilan Street, and he kept it under a crocheted cover, the way some people kept a parrot. That evening he took the cover off, and eleven people sat on his floor to watch the Olympic Games coming from some faraway city whose name nobody could pronounce.
A man in a red costume had just won at wrestling. He stood on a little wooden box with a gold medal round his neck and wept while his country's flag went up slowly behind him. Gopu felt something stir in his chest, the feeling one gets after a second cup of coffee, only more so.
"That," he said, standing up abruptly and stepping on the sub-registrar's toe, "is what I am going to be."
"A crying man?" asked Ramanujam, rubbing his foot.
"A champion," said Gopu, and walked out with the dignity of someone whose life has just been settled.
At home his father, a clerk at the Taluk office, was reading the newspaper by the hurricane lantern. He believed that every ambition beyond a permanent government post was a kind of fever, best treated with rest and plain rice.
"Wrestling," he repeated. "And your Intermediate examination?"
"Champions do not worry about examinations, Father."
"Champions may not, but their fathers do," said the old man, and the paper went back up. In that house, a subject was closed when the newspaper went up.
There was an akhada behind the old Mill on the way to the Kollidam, run by Sambu Pehelwan. He was perhaps sixty and as broad as a door, and he twisted his enormous moustache whenever he was about to say something unpleasant. Gopu presented himself there at nine o'clock in a freshly ironed shirt.
Sambu looked him over the way a buyer at the cattle fair looks at a bullock he has no intention of buying. "Nine o'clock. My boys finished at seven. They began at four."
"Four?" said Gopu. He had believed that four o'clock existed only in the afternoon.
The old man twisted his moustache. "You want to be a champion. Everybody wants to be a champion. Wanting costs nothing. Now listen to what it costs." He counted on his thick fingers. "You will rise at four, in rain or cold. You will eat what I tell you and nothing more. No sweets, no fried things, no hotel tiffin."
"And coffee?" Gopu asked, in the voice a man uses at his own sentencing.
"Water. Only water."
For a boy born and raised in Lalgudi, giving up coffee was not a rule of diet. It was nearly a change of religion.
"You will practise with your face pushed into the earth," the old man went on. "You will eat sand. You will twist your ankle and nobody will carry you home. And after all this, a boy from Kumbum, who also eats sand, will beat you by a hair's breadth." He spread his hands. "So go home and think. If you still want it, come back at four. If you only want to want it, go and want something else. There is plenty in the bazaar."
Gopu went home and thought, which was a new experience for him and a tiring one. That night he set his father's tin alarm clock for half past three. Nobody had used it since a pilgrimage to Tirupati eleven years earlier. When it went off it woke the whole house, the next house, and a dog three doors down, which kept up its protest until dawn.
"Is it a fire?" said his father.
"It is training," said Gopu, and went out into the dark.
The weeks that followed are best described briefly. He ran to the Kollidam in the dark and came back in the half-dark. Sambu threw him onto the red earth so often that Gopu could tell you, in all seriousness, that the soil near the neem tree was sweeter than the soil near the well. He drank water, thought about water, and came to dislike it with an intensity he had once kept for mathematics.
Deepavali came. His mother set out laddus and murukku in shining brass vessels, and Gopu walked past them with his eyes on the ceiling, like a sanyasi passing a cinema poster. Once, at midnight, he got as far as lifting the lid of the laddu tin and stood a long time breathing in the ghee. Then he put the lid back and did fifty sit-ups in the moonlight. The night-watchman reported in the bazaar next morning that the clerk's son had gone mad. That was how news travelled on Kabilan Street.
In February the District Wrestling Meet was held at the Albert Mission grounds, under a shamiana, with a loudspeaker playing film songs between bouts. Gopu's father came, which surprised everyone, the father most of all. He sat in the third row with his umbrella across his knees, though there wasn't a cloud in the sky.
Gopu won his first bout and his second. In the third he faced a long-armed boy from Kumbum with a shaven head and an expression of permanent boredom. They rolled and strained, the red dust rose like a curtain, and once, pinned, Gopu got a mouthful of the arena's sand. It was not so sweet as the soil near the neem tree. In the last half-minute something in his ankle went click, like the latch of a door.
The boy from Kumbum won by a single point, by a whisker, exactly as foretold. He received his brass cup with the same bored expression and went off to find a soda.
Gopu's father said nothing the whole length of Market Road, a silence worse than any lecture. At the corner of Kabilan Street he finally spoke. "So. All that sand and water, and nothing."
That night his mother rubbed tamarind paste on the ankle and set a plate of laddus beside him. Being a mother, she believed grief could be treated through the stomach. Gopu looked at them, round and golden, and noticed with surprise that he didn't particularly want them.
He lay awake weighing the matter. He had given up coffee, sweets, sleep and the good opinion of the night-watchman, and lost by one point to a boy who didn't seem to care. On the scales it looked a poor bargain. And yet something in him was quiet, a stillness he had never known in the old days, when he wanted to be a film hero, then a cricketer, then a lawyer like his uncle in Madras. He had wanted all of it, like a child with his nose against the glass of Rama Rao's sweet shop, and never wanted any one thing enough to pay for it. This one thing he had paid for, rupee by rupee. Somehow the paying had left him richer, though the cup had gone to Kumbum.
At half past three the tin alarm clock went off.
"Again?" said his father. "You lost, you fool. It is over."
"It was only one game, Father," said Gopu, binding his ankle, and limped out toward the river and the old man with the moustache. The dog three doors down took up its protest.
His father stared at the ceiling a while. Then, for reasons he never explained, he put on his shirt, took his umbrella and walked down to the Kollidam to watch the sun come up, something he had not done in thirty years. Kabilan Street concluded, without much difficulty, that the madness ran in the family.