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Chapters (23)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Notice
  3. Stories
  4. Portrait of an Artist
  5. Four Days Before the Saturday Night Social
  6. The Man from Khurda District
  7. Beyond Translation
  8. The Great Game
  9. Real Time
  10. Prelude to an Autobiography: A Fragment
  11. The Second Marriage
  12. Words, Silences
  13. The Party
  14. Confession of a Sacrifice
  15. The Old Masters
  16. An Infatuation
  17. The Wedding
  18. White Lies
  19. E-Minor
  20. E-Minor
  21. Chasing a Poet: Epilogue
  22. Note
  23. Also by Amit Chaudhuri

But I never thought of myself as a visitor; and I do not know what my cousins thought, as we finished reading our stories in different languages, and looked up, and became conscious once more of the house, with secret flashlight signals and demons who could grow eight times their size in a minute still in our heads. Once finished, the books lost their interest, but remained precious as material objects, that we would pretend to sell each other as make-believe hawkers. But our worlds, essentially, remained locked to each other; we never read each others’ stories, though I admired the covers of their books, with severed heads dripping blood, and dragonfly-wing-frail princesses. They would never know what it meant to live outside this world, as I did, of magic and small means; and I would never know what it meant to grow up reading those stories by Saradindu and Sukumar Ray and Hemendra Kumar, and to be transported, for that half hour, more completely into another world, as I believed, than I was.

The Great Game

The Great Game

IT WAS INHUMAN to play cricket at this time of the year, in this heat, but that was precisely what they were doing these days. Moreover, the team was being sent out into that cauldron to pick up something called the Pepsi Cup. You had to feel for them, though they looked like young braves. While others might shop at the airport in Dubai, one would expect them not to glance at the watches and shapely state-of-the-art CD players, to have nothing but a glass of orange juice at the hotel before going into the nets.

Among them was Tendulkar, whose name, everyone agreed, sounded like an ancient weapon of destruction, and who carried a one-and-a-half-ton bat. He disembarked from the plane with a singleness of purpose, and a sealed, expressionless face. He and the “boys” (though you wouldn’t ordinarily call Azharuddin a “boy”) were here to deal with the English and the vigorous Pakistanis, mainly the Pakistanis, who came from a country that had sprung troublingly from a gash in the side of their own about fifty years ago.