Red Card Read online

  KAUTUK SRIVASTAVA

  RED CARD

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  CONTENTS

  FIRST HALF

  July 2006

  August 2006

  September 2006

  SECOND HALF

  October 2006

  November 2006

  December 2006

  EXTRA TIME

  March 2007

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  RED CARD

  Kautuk Srivastava is a Mumbai-based writer and comedian. He is a member of the popular comedy collective SnG Comedy. As a screenwriter, he has written many successful TV and Web-based shows, including MTV Reality Stars, Sumit Sambhal Lega and Shaitaan Haveli. His previous stand-up special, Anatomy of Awkward, is featured on Amazon Prime Video. This is his debut novel.

  To my parents.

  Looking back, I realize that the tenth standard was harder

  on you than it was on me.

  FIRST HALF

  July 2006

  ON A HOT evening in Berlin, France are playing Italy in the World Cup final. The scores are level. France 1–Italy 1. The match is in the second half of extra time. At the 110th minute precisely.

  France’s captain, Zinedine Zidane, is jogging away from a miserable free kick. Tailing him is Italy’s Marco Materazzi, his arm wrapped around the Frenchman’s torso like a boa constrictor as he proceeds to administer what in common Indian parlance is known as a pungi on Zidane’s left nipple. And, as any pungi victim will testify, this annoys Zizou. He shrugs Materazzi off. Words are exchanged. Though Zidane jogs a few steps ahead, more words fly in his direction. Suddenly, he spins around with that classic, career-defining grace and rams his big bald head squarely into Materazzi’s chest.

  The stadium erupts—one half in indignation and the other in disbelief. The whistle is blown sharp and clear. The ball comes to an abandoned stop. The players freeze. The only pair of feet streaking down the pitch belong to the referee. He’s hurtling towards them. The Italian defender is writhing in pain, clutching his chest. Zidane towers over him, snorting like a rhinoceros, fumes rising from his cannonball head. Finally, the referee reaches the spot and, in a fatal flourish, raises a red card in the air.

  Zidane darts his eyes towards the card flashing in front of his face. He begins explaining to the referee why a man at the peak of his powers, in the last match of his footballing career, playing the biggest match a footballer can play in, would choose to headbutt an opponent. A pretty solid tale it must have been too. Referees, however, are an obstinate bunch, and after patiently hearing Zidane out, he points to the exit.

  Zidane hands over the captain’s armband to Willy Sagnol and makes the long walk to the dressing room. He’s taking off the tape around his hand as he goes. He steps off the field. The World Cup, glinting golden, sits seductively on a pedestal beside the touchline. Zidane walks right past it with neither a wistful glance nor rueful resignation. All he sees in the last moments of his career is a flaming red card.

  Many, many miles away, in suburban Thane, four jaws dropped so low that a dentist could have worked on them without complaint.

  ‘What the hell—’ began Abhay Purohit.

  ‘Impossible!’ said Rahul Rawat, peeking at the screen through his fingers.

  ‘This sucks . . .’ breathed Sumit Awasthi. He slumped further in the sofa.

  ‘Yes!’ said Rishabh Bala and fist-pumped the air. A fifteen-year-old of medium height, he had an oval face that was redeemed by the presence of cheekbones and the faint trace of a jawline. On his chin and the prime real estate of his cheeks grew a beard. It wasn’t fuzzy like his classmates’. It was well defined and bristly from a full year of shaving—an early gift from puberty, which had also left him with six pimples that almost exactly formed the Big Dipper constellation on his forehead. Rishabh wore his wavy dark hair brushed back. He thought it made him look like David Beckham. On his nose rested rectangular glasses that definitely made him look like David Beckham’s accountant.

  For that night, Rishabh was an Italy supporter. Not like he particularly liked them, though. The only reason he had been cheering for them was because the other three had their hearts set on France winning. ‘No fun if we all support the same team, no?’ he’d said. And he had warmed to his adopted team rather quickly. He’d howled in anguish when they conceded and whooped with delight when they’d scored, and now he gloated at the ignominy of Zidane’s exit.

  ‘If only he had headed the ball that well,’ he said.

  ‘Shut up. If you want to live to see tomorrow, just shut up,’ growled Sumit. This was no empty threat. Sumit could have waded into a pond full of hippos and they would have welcomed him as one of their own.

  Rishabh turned his head to the screen, but not before sticking up his middle fingers at the French supporters. The match went on, bathing the dark hall in blue.

  When Italy scored the winning penalty, Rishabh took off his shirt and ran up and down the length of the house, screaming soundlessly. His parents were sleeping, and, though he was happy for Italy, he wasn’t happy enough to incur their wrath. He did, however, do a victory dance right in the faces of his dejected friends. Puro hurled a cushion at him in disgust.

  ‘Fuuucck!’ he bellowed. It echoed in the dim hall.

  ‘Hey!’ said Rishabh, putting a finger to his lips. ‘Parents.’

  Puro continued cursing under his breath.

  ‘Oh well, happens,’ said Sumit, crossing his arms and closing his eyes. As far as he was concerned, the match was over—a team had won, another had lost—and now it was time to sleep.

  ‘How could Zidane do this?’ spat Puro with venom in his voice. ‘Who gets a card like that?’

  ‘Zidane would normally never act like that. Materazzi must have said something really bad,’ said Rahul, as if he were Zidane’s long-time girlfriend.

  ‘Please! It was plain stupid. The guy is clearly nuts,’ said Rishabh.

  ‘I’m telling you, it’s Materazzi’s fault. That was Zizou’s last match. There’s no way he would choose to end his career that way.’

  ‘I want to kill that Italian bastard!’ said Puro, punching a wall. Abhay Purohit felt a special kinship with Zinedine Zidane. They were both number 10s, captains of their respective teams, the one the rest of the team looked to for inspiration, and both were blessed with talent and temper in equal measure. That’s where the similarities ended. Unlike Zidane, Puro was a short, scrawny boy with a headful of messy hair. He was the smallest member of the school football team but made up for the missing inches with his leonine ferocity—which was on display even now, as he prowled about the hall, gnashing his teeth and swinging blows at an imaginary Materazzi.

  ‘Well, you lost. That’s all that matters. You losers owe me three vada pavs,’ said Rishabh, deciding to take care of business before everyone forgot.

  Just then, they heard three shrill toots of a horn, and Puro’s demeanour went from a pacing lion’s to a leaping kitten’s. He sprang to the window and peeled back the curtain an inch.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he muttered and dashed out the door.

  Rahul and Rishabh looked out the window and saw Puro’s father atop his bike. Vijay Purohit had a scowl on his face. His burly arms rested on the fuel tank. The bike, its ignition left on, puttered steadily, in sync with Purohit Senior’s furiously moving moustache. Puro emerged soon, apologizing. The father glared at his son and jerked a thumb towards the back seat. Puro got on and they sped off.

  Puro lived just down the road from Rishabh’s house, but his father never let him stay over. He knew his son would run amok through the streets if left alone even for a single night. With a son like Puro, the dread wasn’t
exactly misplaced. But it did leave Puro feeling like he had grown up in a high-security prison.

  The boys turned in for the night. Rahul and Rishabh had to hoist a slumbering Sumit up from the sofa and all the way to the bedroom—an act of kindness that was also a year’s worth of weight training. They deposited him on a mattress on the floor and got into bed. Rahul shut his eyes, but his mind was filled with scenes from the match.

  ‘I’m telling you he had a good reason for doing what he did,’ he whispered.

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Rishabh, ‘but what could possibly be worth losing for?’

  Rishabh opened his eyes to a dull grey room. Surly clouds hung in the sky. Electricity crackled in the air. He glanced at the alarm clock—7.30 a.m. Springing out of bed, he smacked Rahul on the back of his head and kicked Sumit awake. As they grumbled to consciousness, the door opened and his mother entered.

  ‘Finally, thank God! I’ve been trying to wake you up for an hour,’ said Chitra Bala. ‘Hurry up, have a bath and run!’

  So the three of them took express showers, slipped into their school uniforms—white shirt and brown pants—hoisted their bags and trooped out the door. Mrs Bala handed them a banana each as they went.

  That morning, the corridor and classrooms of the tenth standard of Shri Sunderlal Sanghvi School were divided. The boys staggered around in a sleep-deprived stupor, with yawning dark circles around their eyes, as they fervidly discussed the game and ‘that incident’. Meanwhile, the majority of the girls, fresh and rested, wondered how the boys could be so affected by something they had so little to do with. The bell rang. The chatter reached a crescendo as the students raced to get their final words in, before the plodding footsteps of approaching teachers sent them scampering to their classes.

  Rishabh and Puro were one of the last to vacate the corridor. Eventually they ambled into 10 F. Their class teacher, Kaul Miss, frowned at them. ‘And which garden are you two strolling in? Go on, go to your desks!’ she said, glaring at them over her large bifocals.

  ‘Yes, miss . . . sorry, miss,’ piped Puro, giving her a cheeky grin.

  ‘The same specimens every year,’ she muttered to herself.

  Rishabh liked Asha Kaul. Behind her prickly comments was a kindly warmth, and behind her gold-rimmed spectacles were the twinkly eyes of the easily amused. Her laid-back attitude could lull one into a false sense of security, but with one swift throw of the duster, Asha Kaul would establish the boundaries once again. She launched them with unnerving ease and unerring accuracy, and had she not been a Hindi teacher, she would most definitely have been an international darts champion. ‘This is a duster, and Kaul Miss doesn’t use it to wipe the board,’ were her first words to the batch.

  That had been a mere week ago, but to Rishabh’s mind it seemed a lot longer. The tenth standard was turning out to be just as hectic as advertised. Nearly everyone in the batch was going to two dozen after-school tutorials. Rishabh and Puro went to Basu’s for English, Prasad’s for Hindi and Oswal’s for maths and science. Thankfully history and geography weren’t deemed complicated enough for their own tuition. Between school, coaching classes and the extra hours of study their parents insisted on at home, every brain in the tenth standard had begun to feel like an empty tube of toothpaste after only the first week of school—flattened, rolled up and with nothing left to give.

  In class, Kaul Miss had departed, and the first period had begun. Rishabh gazed out the window. A chilly wind rippled through the room. Raindrops spluttered in. The gloom was barely dispelled by the dim tube lights. Chatter had erupted in class, which Barkha, the scrupulous class monitor, was finding hard to quell. Another gust of wind blew in and Rishabh felt it wiggle into his shirt. He shivered. He turned to Puro, who sat behind them. ‘You feeling cold too?’

  Puro nodded. ‘I’m a Puro-flavoured popsicle.’

  Rishabh laughed as he got up to shut the window. He was still tugging at one of the jammed frames when a high-pitched shriek rang out. ‘STOP THIS NOISE AT ONCE!’

  He whirled around to see Poulomi Bobde standing at the door, her eyes popping like the purple of her sari. ‘SHUT UP! ALL OF YOU!’ she yelled. Her wild eyes roved the classroom and then fell on Rishabh. Just when he thought he would get blasted with another high-intensity sound wave, Rishabh saw Bobde’s face break into a smile. Her eyes softened. ‘And what are you up to, young man?’ she said.

  ‘I was shutting the window, miss,’ said Rishabh.

  ‘How about you SHUT YOUR MOUTH!’ roared Bobde.

  Rishabh was taken aback by how quickly she shifted gears from sweet to savage. He mumbled an apology and slunk back to his seat. He had hated the new English teacher from the first minute she sashayed into the classroom with a smug expression on her face. His hatred was justified when she began her class with ‘Shakespeare was written by Julius Caesar.’ What’s more, he had made the mistake of correcting her. She had studied him with a cold-blooded stare. ‘Next time you say a word without raising your hand, rest assured that I will raise mine.’ Then she’d smiled at him with the innocence of Heidi, leaving him and the rest of the class wondering whether it was the same woman who had just threatened a student with violence. Years later, Poulomi Bobde would be diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and if the students of 10 F were to hear about it they would say, ‘Aha! We knew it!’

  That morning, Poulomi Bobde asked them to open their poetry textbooks to page 103. Everyone rummaged in their bags and then ruffled through the pages until they arrived at ‘The Listeners’ by Walter de la Mare. Bobde read the poem aloud with the cadence of a preschool teacher—another thing Rishabh couldn’t stand. From behind him, he heard a murmur. ‘You have a pencil or what?’ asked Puro.

  Rishabh turned around. Puro, hanging low, was asking Mansi Shenoy, the girl he had been crushing on since the minute he’d seen her at the start of term.

  ‘Rishabh,’ boomed Bobde, ‘this is a final warning. Don’t talk when I’m reading. Understood?’

  Rishabh was indignant. ‘Miss, I didn’t say anything. I was just—’

  ‘QUIEEEET!’

  Bobde flicked her head and went back to reading. Rishabh was seething. He didn’t care much for getting yelled at, especially when he was blameless. He gulped large breaths of air to calm himself and tried to return to Mr De la Mare’s verse.

  A minute later came another urgent whisper. ‘Mansi, pass rubber also, no.’ This time he didn’t look behind himself. The whisper, however, floated to Bobde’s ears, and she traced it to the same source.

  ‘RISHABH! WHAT DID I TELL YOU? YOU CAN’T UNDERSTAND ENGLISH?’

  ‘Miss, I really didn’t—’

  ‘SHUT UP! I don’t want to hear another word from you. UNDERSTOOD?’

  So Rishabh didn’t say a word. His teeth were gnashing.

  ‘Answer me!’

  He nodded.

  ‘Good,’ Bobde said and blithely returned to the poem.

  Puro patted him on the back. ‘Sorry,’ he whispered.

  Rishabh shrugged him off. Colours were flashing in front of his eyes. He yanked out his notepad and scribbled a message. He tore it out, folded it neatly until it was a little chit and then slipped it to Amay Khatri, who sat to his right. ‘Pass it on,’ he said, the arch of his eyebrows indicating the direction.

  Khatri slipped it to Parth Popat, who gave it to Priyal Pandey, who palmed it to Bhargav Chigulur. Chigu fumbled it. Bobde saw the awkward exchange and was at Chigu’s desk faster than you could say, ‘Manic-depressive disorder.’ She smiled and held out her palm. Chigu dropped the chit in it.

  Poulomi Bobde began smoothing out the creases. ‘Let’s see what you kids have written. I’m sure it’s better than Walter de—’

  In it were the words:

  Still not talking.

  She looked up at Rishabh, who smiled back sweetly.

  Poulomi Bobde rocked in her place. She had never experienced insolence. Then, slowly, she regained her composure . . . and erupted. She screamed so loud
that Devi Miss, who was teaching 10 E, peeped in to see if all was well.

  Bobde demanded Rishabh’s calendar and inaugurated the ‘Remarks’ page with a venomous account of his behaviour. ‘It’s not over. You, Rishabh Bala, will bring me nimbu pani—on a tray—from the canteen to the staffroom . . . every recess, for the whole week. This is not punishment. The way you’re going, this is just practice for your future.’

  The bell rang. Poulomi Bobde swayed out of the classroom with her nose in the air. A cold gust of wind swept in from the open window.

  Rishabh exited the staffroom, having delivered Bobde’s nimbu pani. She had smiled at him so pleasantly that Rishabh wondered if he had handed over the glass to Bobde’s nicer twin sister. He glanced at his watch. Seven minutes still remained for class to begin, and he trotted towards the tenth standard corridor, determined to make the most of them. He bounded up the steps three at a time and at the top of the flight, ran into Rakshit Dave. He waved at Dave and was continuing on his way, when Dave called out to him.

  ‘Rishabh! Rishabh! Have you seen Tamanna today?’

  ‘No . . .’ said Rishabh.

  ‘You should,’ said Rakshit with a cackle. ‘Go find her . . . quickly.’ He patted Rishabh on the shoulder and descended the stairs, still chuckling to himself.

  Rishabh knitted his eyebrows for a second and then straightened them immediately. Rakshit Dave, the twiggy, curly-haired goalkeeper of the school team, was notorious for his sly sense of humour. He’s just teasing me, thought Rishabh.

  But before long, four completely unrelated people asked him the same question: ‘Have you seen Tamanna?’ The last to ask this was Anshul Ghosh, a boy who only spoke to answer a question in the maths period. Now Rishabh was intrigued. He wanted to know what it was that Tamanna had done that was as important as trigonometry. He ran into Puro near the toilets and asked him if he knew what was up with her.