Aerogrammes and Other Stories

Aerogrammes and Other Stories - By Tania James

Lion and Panther in London

• • •

The Sensation of the Wrestling World

Exclusive Engagement of India’s

Catch-as-Catch-Can Champions.

Genuine Challengers of the Universe.

All Corners. Any Nationality. No One Barred.

GAMA, Champion undefeated wrestler of India, winner of over 200 legitimate matches.

IMAM, his brother, Champion of Lahore.

(These wrestlers are both British subjects.)

£5 will be presented to any competitor, no matter what nationality, whom any member of the team fails to throw in five minutes.



Gama, the Lion of the Punjab, will attempt to throw any three men, without restriction as to weight, in 30 minutes, any night during this engagement, and competitors are asked to present themselves, either publicly or through the management.



NO ONE BARRED!! ALL CHAMPIONS CORDIALLY INVITED!!

THE BIGGER THE BETTER!!

Gama the Great is bored. Imam translates the newspaper notice as best he can while his brother slumps in the wing-back chair. On the table between them rests a rose marble chessboard, frozen in play. Raindrops wriggle down the windowpane. It is a mild June in 1910 and their seventh day in London without a single challenge.

Their tour manager, Mr. Benjamin, lured them here from Lahore, promising furious bouts under calcium lights, their names in every newspaper that matters. But the very champions who used to thump their chests and flex their backs for photos are now staying indoors, as if they have ironing to do. Not a word from Benjamin “Doc” Roller or Strangler Lewis, not from the Swede Jon Lemm or the whole fleet of Japanese fresh from Tokyo.

Every year in London, a world champion is crowned anew, one white man after the next, none of whom have wrestled a pehlwan. They know nothing of Handsome Hasan or Kalloo or the giant Kikkar Singh, who once uprooted an acacia tree bare-handed, just because it was disrupting the view from his window. Gama has defeated them all, and more, but how is he to be Champion of the World if this half of the world is in hiding?

Mr. Benjamin went to great trouble to arrange the trip. He cozied up to the Mishra family and got the Bengali millionaires to finance the cause, printed up press releases, and rented them a small, gray-shingled house removed from the thick of the city, with space enough out back to carry on their training. The house is fairly comfortable, if crowded with tables, standing lamps, settees, and armchairs. When it rains, they push the furniture to the walls and conduct their routines in the center of the sitting room.

Other adjustments are not so easy. Gama keeps tumbling out of bed four hours late, his mustache squashed on one side. Imam climbs upon the toilet bowl each morning, his feet on the rim, and engages in a bout with his bowels. Afterward, he inspects the results. If they are coiled like a snake ready to strike, his guru used to say, all is in good shape. There are no snakes in London.

These days, when Mr. Benjamin stops by, he has little more to offer than an elaborate salaam and any issues of Sporting Life and Health & Strength in which they have been mentioned, however briefly. He is baby-faced and bald, normally jovial, but Imam senses something remote about him, withheld, as though the face he gives them is only one of many. “You and your theories,” Gama says.

Left to themselves, Gama and Imam continue to hibernate in the melancholy house. They run three kilometers up and down the road, occasionally coughing in the fume and grumble of a motorcar. They wrestle. They do hundreds of bethaks and dands, lost in the calm that comes of repetition, and at the end of the day, they rest. They bathe. They smooth their skin with dry mustard, which conjures homeward thoughts of plains ablaze with yellow blooms. Sometimes, reluctantly, they play another game of chess.

On the eighth morning, Mr. Benjamin pays a visit. For the first time in their acquaintance, he looks agitated and fidgets with his hat. His handshake is damp. He follows the wrestlers into the sitting room, carrying with him the stink of a recently smoked cigar.

The cook brings milky yogurt and ghee for the wrestlers, tea for Mr. Benjamin. Gama and Imam brought their own cook from Lahore, old Ahmed, who is deaf in one ear but knows every nuance of the pehlwan diet. They were warned about English food: mushy potatoes, dense pies, gloomy puddings—the sort of fare that would render them leaden in body and mind.

When Mr. Benjamin has run out of small talk, he empties a sober sigh into his cup. “Right. Well, I suppose you’re wondering about the tour.”

“Yes, quite,” Imam says, unsure of his words but too anxious to care. It seems a bad sign when Mr. Benjamin sets his cup and saucer aside.

Wrestling in England, Mr. Benjamin explains, has become something of a business. Wrestlers are paid to take a fall once in a while, to pounce and pound and growl on cue, unbeknownst to the audience, which nevertheless seems to enjoy the drama. After the match, the wrestlers and their managers split the money. Occasionally these hoaxes are discovered, to great public outcry, the most recent being the face-off between Yousuf the Terrible Turk and Stanislaus Zbyszko. After Zbyszko’s calculated win, it was revealed that Yousuf the Terrible was actually a Bulgarian named Ivan with debts to pay off.

“And you know of this now only?” Imam asks.

“No—well, not entirely.” Mr. Benjamin pulls on a finger, absently cracks his knuckle. “I thought I could bring you fellows and turn things around. Show everyone what the sport bloody well should be.”

Imam glances at Gama, who is leaning forward, gazing at Mr. Benjamin’s miserable face with empathy.

“There would be challengers”—Mr. Benjamin shrugs—“if only you would agree to take a fall here and there.”

After receiving these words from Imam, Gama pulls back, as if bitten. “Fall how?” Gama says.

“On purpose,” Imam explains quietly.

Gama’s mouth becomes small and solemn. Imam tells Mr. Benjamin that they will have to decline the offer.

“But you came all this way.” Mr. Benjamin gives a flaccid laugh. “Why go back with empty pockets?”

For emphasis, Mr. Benjamin pulls his own lint-ridden pockets inside out and nods at Gama with the sort of encouragement one might show a thick-headed child.

Gama asks Imam why Mr. Benjamin is exposing the lining of his pants.

“The langot we wear, it does not have pockets,” Imam tells Mr. Benjamin, hoping the man might appreciate the poetry of his refusal. Mr. Benjamin blinks at him and explains, in even slower English, what he means by “empty pockets.”

So this is London, Imam thinks, nodding at Mr. Benjamin. A city where athletes are actors, where the ring is a stage.

In a final effort, Mr. Benjamin takes their story to the British press. Health & Strength publishes a piece entitled “Gama’s Hopeless Quest for an Opponent,” while Sporting Life runs his full-length photograph alongside large-lettered text: “GAMA, the great Indian Catch-Can Wrestler, whose Challenges to Meet all the Champions have been Unanswered.” The photographer encouraged Gama to strike a menacing pose, but in the photo, Gama appears flat-footed and blank, his fists feebly raised, a stance that wouldn’t menace a pigeon.

Finally, for an undisclosed sum, Doc Roller takes up Gama’s challenge. Mr. Benjamin says that Doc is a fully trained doctor and the busiest wrestler in England, a fortunate combination for him because he complains of cracked ribs after every defeat.

They meet at the Alhambra, a sprawling pavilion of arches and domes, its name studded in bulbs that blaze halos through the fog. Inside, golden foliage and gilded trees climb the walls. Men sit shoulder to shoulder around the roped-off ring, and behind them, more men in straw boaters and caps, standing on bleachers, making their assessments of Gama the Great, the dusky bulk of his chest, the sculpted sandstone of each thigh. Imam sits ringside next to Mr. Benjamin, in a marigold robe and turban. He is a vivid blotch in a sea of grumpy grays and browns. He feels slightly overdressed.

Gama warms his muscles by doing bethaks. He glances up but keeps squatting when Roller swings his long legs over the ropes, dauntingly tall, and whips off his white satin robe to reveal wrestling pants, his abdominal muscles like bricks stacked above the waistband.

They take turns on the scale. Doc is a full head taller and exceeds Gama by thirty-four pounds. Following the announcement of their weights, the emcee bellows, “No money in the world would ever buy the Great Gama for a fixed match!” To this, a hailstorm of whooping applause.

Imam absently pinches the silk of his brother’s robe, which is draped across his lap. Every time he watches his brother in a match, a familiar disquiet spreads through his stomach, much like the first time he witnessed Gama in competition.

Imam was eight, Gama twelve, when their uncle brought them to Jodhpur for the national strong-man competition. Raja Jaswant Singh had gathered hundreds of men from all across India to see who could last the longest drilling bethaks. The competitors took their places on the square field of earth within the palace courtyard, and twelve turbaned royal guards stood sentinel around the grounds, their tall gold spears glinting in the sun. Spectators formed a border some meters away from the field, and when little Gama emerged from their ranks and joined the strong men, laughter trailed behind him. Gama was short for his age but hale and sturdy even then.

When the raja raised his hand, Gama began, up and down, steady as a piston. His gaze never wavered, fixed on a single point of concentration in the air before him, as if his competitors and critics had all dissolved into the heat. At some point, Imam wanted to sit in the shade, but his uncle refused to move, too busy staring at Gama, as if with every bethak, the boy was transforming into something winged and brilliant. When Imam complained about the sun, his uncle said, “Look at your bhaiya. Does he complain?”

Imam looked at his brother: serene and focused, impervious to pain—everything Imam was not. There was a gravity about Gama in his youth, as if he had been schooled from the womb in the ways of the pehlwan, to avoid extremes of emotion like rage and lust, to reserve his energies for the pit. Their father had begun Gama’s training at age five and died three years later, before Imam could prove himself worthy of the same attention.

The bethak contest lasted four hours, and by the end, only fifteen men remained standing. Raja Singh yanked Gama’s hand into the air, declaring him the youngest by far and, thus, the winner. Greased in sweat, Gama wore a funny, dreamy expression, listing slightly before his knees buckled. Seeing him this way—limp, waxy, the crescent whites of his eyes between his lashes—made something jerk in Imam’s chest. He could not move. At that moment, Imam began to hate his uncle. He hated the raja for coming up with this contest, and he hated every person who herded around his brother and blocked out the sun, claiming him as if he were theirs.

•

The bell clangs, and the match with Roller begins. Gama slaps his thighs, beats his chest, charges. He plunges at Doc’s leg. Doc evades him the first time, but not the second. With a smooth back heel, Gama fells him and finishes him off with a half nelson and a body roll. One minute and forty seconds.

The second fall happens in but a blur—Doc laid out on his belly, sweat-slick and wincing at the spectators in the front row, who lean forward with their elbows on their knees. Roller gives in, and then: bedlam. The emcee yanks Gama’s hand into the air; men mob the mat like sparrows to a piece of bread. Mr. Benjamin wrings Imam’s hand, then shoulders his way through the crowd. Imam hangs back, Gama’s robe in his arms, craning his neck to see over all the hats and heads between him and his brother.

Over the next few days, Gama defeats two more challengers, sends them staggering to the mat like drunken giants. The newspapers have begun to take notice. Sometimes, while warming up, Gama and Imam spot a reporter watching from the road, the brim of his hat shadowing his eyes as he scribbles something in his notebook. Imam doesn’t like being ogled while doing his dands, but Mr. Benjamin has told them not to shoo the scribblers away. Press, he says, breeds more press.

Mr. Benjamin is right. These days, he brings more clippings than ever before, and Gama wants to digest every word, his appetite inexhaustible. Imam would rather play chess, the only game at which he consistently beats his brother. The journalists rarely, if ever, mention him.

“Gama the Great,” writes Percy Woodmore in Health & Strength, “has so handily defeated all his European challengers that one can only wonder whether the Oriental strong man possesses some genetic advantage over his Occidental counterpart.” Imam can recognize barely half the words in this sentence, but he understands the next: “Will the Hindoos ever lose?”

“Do you know,” Gama interjects, “these sahibs have so few counters—only one to the cross-buttock hold.” Gama shakes his head in bemusement, and just when Imam thinks he cannot stand him a minute longer, Gama adds, “Wait till they see you in the ring.”

Imam is beginning to wonder if that day will ever arrive. He feels the distinct weight of malaise, same as he used to suffer in school. When they were children, Gama got to train at the akhara with Madho Singh, while Imam had to recite English poems about English flowers. After Gama’s triumph at Jodhpur, people talked as if the boy could upend mountains, greater than all the pehlwan ancestors who had preceded him.

Sometimes, if Imam was sitting alone, sullenly reciting his multiplication tables, Gama took pity on him. “Come on, chotu,” he’d say, taking Imam outside to show him a new hold. Gama was the only one who called him chotu, a word that raised his spirits when nothing else would.

By age twelve, Imam was fed up. He began cutting school and hovering around the akhara, where the only language that mattered was the heave and grunt of bodies in constant motion, whether climbing the rope hanging from the neem tree, or hoeing the wrestling pit, or swinging a giant jori in each arm, spiky clubs that surpassed him in height. Moving, always moving. The akhara seemed a splendid hive unto itself, sealed off from mundane concerns like school and exams and the sting of the teacher’s switch. Here was his classroom. Here, among the living, was where he belonged.

•

Finally Mr. Benjamin arranges a match for Imam. He is to take on the Swede Jon Lemm, who has won belts from both the Alhambra and Hengler’s tournaments.

They meet at the Alhambra once again, to a sold-out arena. Imam has the advantage of height but feels gangly next to Lemm, who is a stout tangle of muscle, and pale, with eyes of a clear, celestial blue.

The referee summons them to the center of the mat. Lemm gives a cordial nod and locks Imam in a hard handshake before releasing him to his corner. Imam can feel the spectators watching him, murmuring. One fellow openly points at Gama, who seems not to notice, sitting beside Mr. Benjamin with an air of equanimity. There is a proverb that their forefathers minded for centuries: Make your mind as still as the bottom of a well, your body as hard as its walls.

Imam touches the mat, then his heart.

The bell clangs, and Lemm hurls himself at Imam; his back heel topples Imam onto his back. Imam slips free, darts around Lemm, quick as the crack of a whip. He does not see Lemm in terms of ankle and knee and leg. Instead he tracks Lemm’s movements, listening for one false note—the falter, the doubt, the dread.

At one point Lemm stalls, a fatal mistake. Imam lunges, lifts him up, and hurls him to the mat. He flips the bucking Swede and pins him. Three minutes and one second.

Not long into the second bout, Lemm is sprawled out on the mat, Imam on his back. Imam can feel Lemm struggling beneath him, trembling down to his deepest tissues until, with a savage groan, he deflates. One minute and eight seconds.

Imam gets to his feet, heaving. Something bounces lightly off his back. He whirls around to find a beheaded flower at his feet. Someone else tosses him a silver pocket watch. Imam turns from one side to the other; the men are roaring. It takes him a dizzying moment to realize they are roaring for him.

Of the fight with Lemm, a reporter from Health & Strength goes into rapture: “That really was a wonderful combat—a combat in which both men wrestled like masters of the art.… Let us have a few more big matches like unto that, and I tell you straight that the grappling game will soon become the greatest game of all.”

In the two weeks that follow, Gama and Imam defeat every wrestler who will accept the challenge. Though Gama the Great commands the most public attention, a dedicated sect of Imam devotees takes shape. They mint him with a new name: the Panther of the Punjab. They contend that the Panther is really the superior of the two, citing the blur of his bare brown feet, so nimble they make an elephant of every opponent. Gama may be stronger, but Imam has the broader arsenal of holds and locks and throws, as seen in his victories over Deriaz and Cherpillod, the latter Frenchman so frustrated that he stomped off to his dressing room midway through the match and refused to come out. Within a year or two, they claim, Imam will surpass Gama.

Gama listens in silence when Imam relays such passages. He betrays no emotion, though his fingers tend to tap against his glass of yogurt milk.

Baron Helmuth von Baumgarten is the only critic to speak in political terms, a realm unfamiliar to both Gama and Imam. “If the Indian wrestlers continue to win,” the baron writes, with typical inflammatory flair, “their victories will spur on those dusky subjects who continue to menace the integrity of the British Empire.”

And where most articles include a photo of Gama or Imam, this one displays a photo of a young Indian man in an English suit, with sculpted curls around a center part as straight as a blade. This is Madan Lal Dhingra, the baron explains, a student who, several months earlier, walked into an open street, revolver in hand, and shot a British government official seven times in the face. Before Dhingra could turn the revolver on himself, he was subdued, arrested, tried, and hanged.

Imam looks over Gama’s shoulder at the article. They stare in silence at the soft-skinned boy with the starched white collar choking his throat. He looks much like the interpreters who sometimes tag along with the English journalists, a few stitches of hair across their upper lips, still boys to the mothers they must have left behind.

Gama folds the paper roughly, muttering, “Half of it is nonsense, what they write.” He tosses the newspaper on the coffee table and goes upstairs. This clipping they will not take back home.

Imam remains in the sitting room, waiting until he can hear the floorboards creaking overhead. From his kurta pocket, he removes the pocket watch he has been keeping on his person ever since it landed at his feet. The silver disk, better than any medal, warms his palm. He draws a fingertip over the engraved lines, each as fine as a feline whisker.

As word spreads of the Lion and the Panther of the Punjab, all the European wrestlers fall silent but one—Stanislaus Zbyszko, the winner of the Greco-Roman world championship tournament at the Casino de Paris four years ago, ranked number one in the world before his more recent scandal with Yousuf the Terrible. This time, Zbyszko is looking to rebuild his name and promises a match with no foul play. He and Gama will face off at the John Bull Tournament in early July.

“This is it,” Mr. Benjamin says to Gama. “You pin him, you’ll be world champion. You—” Here he jabs a finger at Gama’s chest. “Rustom! E! Zamana!” Mr. Benjamin’s pronunciation brings a smile to Gama’s face.

Imam is less amused. He detects a growing whiff of greed about Mr. Benjamin in the way he goads Gama toward desire and impatience, the very emotions they have been taught to hold at bay. Just as troubling is his refusal to offer a clear figure of ticket sales, though he promises to give them their earnings in one bulk sum at the end.

Out of habit and innocence, Gama puts his faith in Mr. Benjamin. Through him, Gama dispatches a single message in Sporting Life: he will throw the Pole three times in the space of an hour.

Imam has seen pictures of Zbyszko: the fused boulders of muscle, the bald head like the mean end of a battering ram. Even hanging by his sides, his arms are a threat. Gama has seen the pictures too, but they never speak of Zbyszko, or his size, or his titles. They refer only to the match.

News of the bout spreads to India. Mr. Mishra, their Bengali patron, writes Gama a rousing letter, imploring him to prove to the world that “India is not only a land of soft-bodied coolies and clerks.” Mishra rhapsodizes over Bharat Mata and her hard-bodied sons, comparing Gama to the Hindu warrior Bhim. Regarding Europeans, Mr. Mishra has only one opinion: “All they know is croquet and crumpets.”

Imam isn’t sure if Mr. Mishra knows that Zbyszko is a Pole. He considers writing back, then recalls the article with Dhingra’s picture, the words “traitor” and “treason” captioning it. Once, a journalist asked Gama and Imam about their political leanings, whether they considered themselves “moderate” or “radical.” Imam turned to Gama, each searching the other for the correct answer, before Gama, bewildered, said, “We are pehlwan.”

Those words return to Imam later, as he sets a lit match to the letter. They do not want trouble. He holds the burning letter over the sink and then rinses the ash down the drain.

A week remains until the John Bull Tournament. Life narrows its borders, contains only wrestling and meditation, bethak and dand, yakhi and ghee and almonds. Food is fuel, nothing more. They wake at three in the morning and retire at eight in the evening, their backs to the sunset slicing through the crack between the curtains.

For all their time together, Imam has never felt further from his brother. He can detect some deep tidal turn within Gama, a gravity at his core, pulling him inward and inward again into a wordless coil of concentration. He declines all interviews. His gaze is a wall.

Lying in bed, Imam imagines entering the ring with Zbyszko. He pictures himself executing an artful series of moves never witnessed on these shores, the Flying Cobra perhaps, an overhead lift, a twirl and a toss. The papers would remember him all over again. Twitching with energy, he can hardly sleep.

One day, he upends Gama with the Flying Cobra. Imam knows he should withdraw, but something snaps in him, and it happens in a blink: Imam dives and pins his brother.

Imam lies there, wide-eyed, panting. Beneath him is Gama the Great, Rustom-e-Hind, Boy Hero of Bethaks with his cheek against the mat. No one has ever pinned him, until now. “Get up,” Gama says.

Imam springs to his feet, embarrassed. He knows better than to offer his brother a hand. Somehow he wants Gama to strike out at him, to rear up in anger or indignation.

Gama sits for a moment, catching his breath, before he hoists himself up and shifts his jaw right and left, back into place.

“Again,” Gama says, tugging at his langot. “Again.”

July arrives and, on a damp evening, the John Bull Tournament. Gama and Imam enter a music hall with cut-out cartoons of clowns between the windows, and a painted lady in a twirling skirt, her knees exposed. Imam does his best to ignore these ivory knees. White lights reading HOLBORN EMPIRE silver the cobbled street below, the stones shining like fish scales.

Inside, the arena smells unpleasantly of wet wool. Mr. Benjamin keeps twisting around in his seat to take in the hundreds of spectators. “Sold out,” he enunciates to Imam, turning his hands upward. “No more tickets. None!”

Imam says, “Yes, splendid,” unable to remove his gaze from Zbyszko. He stands in the opposite corner of the ring, twisting his torso from side to side. He seems larger than in his pictures, his head so prominent and bald that his ears are reduced to small, pink cups. In the ring, Gama does one bethak after another, taking no notice of his opponent.

Finished with bethaks, Gama turns his back on Zbyszko and jogs in place, opening and closing his hands. Imam realizes that he is warming up more than usual, as if to keep his mind occupied. The day before, Gama looked up from his chicken broth and said, “I heard he once squeezed a man unconscious.”

Imam dismissed this as nonsense, but they said nothing else for several minutes, picturing Zbyszko and his victim, limp as a pelt at his feet.

The bell clangs. Gama lunges, felling Zbyszko with a neat foot hook. He clamps Zbyszko with a half nelson, flings him over, and pins his shoulder to the mat. Zbyszko keeps his other shoulder raised as long as he can, quivering. Imam leans forward, wills the other shoulder to kiss the mat.

But now, a shock: Zbyszko wriggles out of Gama’s clutch.

Zbyszko then deploys a move so bizarre that Imam thinks it a practical joke. Without warning, Zbyszko falls to the mat on all fours. Like a farm animal.

Gama tries to push him over or pull him up by the waist, but Zbyszko bears down, muttering as if to brace himself against the hurled curses of the spectators. He will not move. Gama tries the wrist lock, the quarter nelson—every hold he can imagine—but Zbyszko will not be thrown; nor will he attempt a throw.

A tiresome hour passes, for the most part, in deadlock. People bark, pitch insults and peanut hulls, cursing Zybszko more than Gama, though neither is spared. Imam sits with his hand propped against his mouth, speechless. Even if he could be heard over the din, he wouldn’t know what to say.

At one point Gama’s hands fall to his sides. He looks helplessly at Imam, who shakes his head.

A crumpled wad of newspaper bounces off Zbyszko’s rounded back. Spectators thunder to the exits. The match is eventually stopped, and it is decided that both parties will wrestle again the following Saturday.

•

Imam opens the door to Gama’s bedroom. In all the weeks they have been staying in this house, he has never seen his brother’s room until now, the day before they are leaving. He enters to find a vast bed, Gama’s suitcase lying open upon it. On the nightstand is a glass of water, a few yellow wildflowers wilting over the rim. Imam stares at the sullen blooms, unable to imagine his brother bending to pick them.

Gama gets up suddenly from the window seat, as if caught in a private moment. He asks if Imam has packed.

“I was helping Ahmed,” Imam says. “His is the heaviest trunk.” The cook brought an endless supply of ghee and almonds, not knowing when they would return.

Imam runs a hand over the oak footboard and peers into the suitcase. Among the clothing, Gama has nested a trio of paper-wrapped soaps for their mother and a tin of Crawford’s biscuits in the shape of a barrel organ, with finely painted green wheels and a tiny monkey extending its hat. Mr. Benjamin procured the gifts for them. He has promised to send along their earnings once their bills are settled up, a promise that Gama doesn’t care enough about to question.

Wedged in between the gifts is the John Bull belt. Imam holds it up to his face. The leather is soft and pliant, the center plate broad and bordered in gold scrollwork. On the plate is a painting of a heavyset man wearing britches tucked into his boots and a black top hat. This, presumably, is John Bull, and peering from behind his ankles is a bulldog who shares his build. Englishmen and their dogs—Imam will never understand the attraction. There are a great many things he will never understand.

Gama was awarded the belt two days before, after showing up for the rematch only to learn that Zbyszko had fled the country. Gama won by forfeit. Only a handful of people clapped as Gama received the belt from the referee and raised it limply over his head. He never even removed his turban and robe.

The next day, a journalist called the house, wanting a comment on Percy Woodmore’s recent opinion in Health & Strength, which stated that Gama “showed a surprising ignorance of strategy” in the match against Zbyszko. The journalist also referred to rumors, hinted at in Woodmore’s piece, that Zbyszko had secretly agreed to flee the country if Gama paid him a percentage of his winnings. The journalist said, “Hello?” several times before Imam set the phone back on its hook.

Imam replaces the belt and peers around it. “You forgot the newspapers,” he says. “Everyone will want to see them.”

Gama shakes his head. “There’s no room.” He shuts and buckles the suitcase. Imam moves to help him, but Gama has already hefted the box in both hands, and eases it onto the floor, next to his battered leather valise.

He smooths down the bedspread and, with his back to Imam, casually asks if the newspapers have said anything about the John Bull Tournament.

“Just the usual nonsense,” Imam says.

“But someone called yesterday. You looked upset.”

“Oh, what does it matter.” Imam squints through the window, as if the sky has claimed all his attention. He can feel his brother’s eyes on him. “We are going home.”

“You aren’t telling me something.” When Imam doesn’t answer, Gama raises his voice. “I am not a child, Imam.”

Imam turns to face his brother, who stands rigid with irritation. “Some are saying that you paid Zbyszko to run away. They say that’s how you got the belt.”

Gama blinks as this news crashes over him. He takes a step back, his hand fumbling for the edge of the bed before he sits. He has never looked more like a child, Imam thinks, even when he was a child.

“But who …,” Gama begins, then drops his gaze to the floor and does not speak for a long time.

“It’s just a rumor,” Imam says quickly. “A stupid rumor. Back home, you are a hero.” He tells of the telegram that just arrived from Mishra, reporting the top headline from The Times of India: GAMA THE GREATEST—INDIA WINS WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP.

Gama gives a weak smile. “Is that what they’ve decided.”

“You have the belt to prove it,” Imam says. For a long moment, Gama looks over his shoulder at the suitcase but does not go near it. “It’s true—”

“No, chotu. I am just a pawn.”

He says this so softly he could be talking to himself, if not for that one tender word, which Imam has not heard from him in years. It is as if they are eight and twelve again, and Gama has set him apart from everyone else—chotu. Imam feels himself rising to the word. Inglorious as it is, this is something that for once only he can be. Only he knows to say nothing, to rest his hand at the back of his brother’s neck, to let his grip say everything, or simply: Not to me.