of men reserve for the reticent good egg. Chutney music was playing, and to its relentlessly tinny and cheerful urgings we’d drive off to New Jersey, Philadelphia, Long Island. We sat mostly silently in the van, absorbed into the moodiness that afflicts competitors as they contemplate, or try to put out of their minds, the drama that awaits. What we talked about, when we did talk, was cricket. There was nothing else to discuss. The rest of our lives – jobs, children, wives, worries – peeled away, leaving only this fateful sporting fruit. Women were rarely present. Their moment came on Family Day, held at Walker Park on an August Saturday. Family Day was when the men repaid, at an outrageous bargain, the mothers and children who had suffered their absences during the season. The men cooked – fussily, on enormous transportable barbecue pits – and the wives, with heartbreaking good nature, played a chaotic game of cricket with the kids. There were foot races and hot dogs and paper plates loaded with curry chicken and dal puri. Everybody went home with a trophy.
In the world of men’s cricket, I surprised myself. Aged thirty-four, troubled increasingly by backache, I found I could still fling the ball into the wicket-keeper’s gloves with a flat throw from forty yards, could still stand under a skyer and hold the catch, could still run up and bowl outswingers at a medium pace. I could also still hit a cricket ball; but the flame of rolling leather, caught up in long weeds, almost always was quickly put out. The bliss of batting was denied to me.
Of course, it was open to me to make adjustments. There was nothing, in principle, to stop me from changing my game, from taking up the cow-shots and lofted bashes in which many of my teammates specialised. But it was, I felt, different for them. They had grown up playing the game in floodlit Lahore car parks or in rough clearings in some West Indian countryside. They could, and did, modify their batting without spiritual upheaval. I could not. More accurately, I would not change – which was uncharacteristic of me. Coming to America (I’d done so willingly, though not primarily on my own account: it was Rachel who’d applied for an opening with the New York office of her firm, and I who’d had to look for another job), I’d eagerly taken to new customs and mannerisms at the expense of old ones. How little, in the fluidities of my new country, I missed the ancient clotted continent. But self-transformation has its limits; and my limit was reached in the peculiar matter of batting. I would stubbornly continue to bat as I always had, even if it meant the end of making runs.
Some people have no difficulty in identifying with their younger incarnations: Rachel, for example, will refer to episodes from her childhood or college days as if they’d happened to her that very morning. I, however, seem given to self-estrangement. I find it hard to muster oneness with those former selves whose accidents and endeavours have shaped who I am now. The schoolboy at the Gymnasium Haganum; the Leiden student; the clueless trainee executive at Shell; the analyst in London; even the thirty-year-old who flew to New York with his excited young wife: my natural sense is that all are faded, by the by, discontinued. But I still think, and I fear will always think, of myself as the young man who got a hundred runs in Amstelveen with a flurry of cuts, who took that diving catch at second slip in Rotterdam, who lucked into a hat trick at the Haagse Cricket Club. These and other moments of cricket are scorched in my mind like sexual memories, forever available to me and capable, during those long nights alone in the hotel when I sought refuge from the sorriest feelings, of keeping me awake as I relived them in bed and powerlessly mourned the mysterious promise they held. To reinvent myself in order to bat the American way, that baseball-like business of slugging and hoisting, involved more than the trivial abandonment of a hard-won style of hitting a ball. It meant snipping a fine white thread running, through years and years, to my mothered self.
Iran into Chuck again by accident. In the late summer, a friend of mine from a poker game I’d briefly belonged to, a food critic named Vinay, suggested that I might find amusement in joining him on his nightly forays for material. Vinay wrote a magazine column about New York restaurants, specifically, cheap, little-known restaurants: an enervating assignment that placed him on a treadmill of eating and writing and eating and writing that he couldn’t face alone. It did not matter to Vinay that I knew nothing about food. ‘Fuck that, dude,’ he said. Vinay was from Bangalore. ‘Just tag along and stop me from going mad. If we eat some fucking Gouda cheese, I’ll ask for your opinion. Otherwise just eat and enjoy yourself. It’s all paid for.’ So from time to time I went with him to places in Chinatown and Harlem and Alphabet City and Hell’s Kitchen or, if he was really desperate and able to overcome his loathing of the outer boroughs, Astoria and Fort Greene and Cobble Hill. Vinay was unhappy with his beat. He believed he ought to have been writing about the great chefs in the great restaurants, or educating the public about vintage wines or – his obsession – single malt whiskies. ‘I used to hate whisky,’ he told me. ‘My dad and his friends drank it all the time. But then I found out they weren’t drinking real whisky. They were drinking Indian whisky – look-like whisky. McDowell’s, Peter Scot, stuff that almost tastes like rum. When I got into Scotch – that’s when I began to understand what this drink is really about.’ Vinay found it distasteful to deal with the owners and cooks at the cheap places, immigrants who generally spoke little English and saw no particular reason to spend time talking to him. Also, the sheer variety of foodstuffs bothered him. ‘One night it’s Cantonese, then it’s Georgian, then it’s Indonesian, then Syrian. I mean, I think this shit is good baklava, but what the fuck do I know, really? How can I be sure?’ Yet when he wrote, Vinay exuded bright certainty and expertise. As I repeatedly went forth with him and began to understand the ignorance and contradictions and language difficulties with which he contended, and the doubtful sources of his information and the seemingly bottomless history and darkness out of which the dishes of New York emerge, the deeper grew my suspicion that his work finally consisted of minting or perpetuating and in any event circulating misconceptions about his subject and in this way adding to the endless perplexity of the world.
Similar misgivings, I should say, had begun to infect my own efforts at work. These efforts required me, sitting at my desk on the twenty-second floor of a glassy tower, to express reliable opinions about the current and future valuation of certain oil and gas stocks. If an important new insight came to me, I would transmit it to the sales force at the morning shout, just before the markets opened at eight. I stood at a microphone at the edge of the trading floor and delivered a godless minute-long homily to doubting congregants distributed amongst the computer screens. After the shout, I spent a half-hour on the trading floor going over the particulars.
‘Hans, this Gabon joint venture watertight?’
‘Maybe.’
Grins all round at this joke. ‘Who’s the CEO over there? Johnson?’
‘Johnson’s with Apache now. Frank Tomlinson is the new guy. Used to be with Total. But the FD is still the same guy, Sanchez.’
‘Huh. What kind of development costs we talking about?’
‘Five dollars a barrel, max.’
‘How they going to do that?’
‘The tax structure’s good. Plus they’re only paying a two-buck royalty.’
‘Yeah, well, I need a better story.’
‘You might want to try Fidelity. I was over there Monday. Tell them something about innovative horizontal drilling technology. That’s another story in itself, by the way – Delta Geoservices. Karen’s got the details.’
Somebody else: ‘I’ll take details on horizontal drilling from Karen all day, every day.’
‘So what’re you saying, Dutch or Double Dutch?’
I smiled. ‘I’m
