Every time the camera returned to the ground, it showed the dust swirling in minute particles across it. Tendulkar was still wearing his protective headgear, boiling in the dressing room, staring back hard at the night; yet, in the prolific commercial breaks, there he was again, leaning against a van and drinking Pepsi-Cola, or wearing a striped T-shirt and flashing a Visa card. Meanwhile, the Bombay housewives pressed saris against their faces and looked for a moment like local Muslim women; but Urmila Deshpande’s face remained composed, as if nothing had happened. Again and again, the commentators scrutinised a slow-motion almost-run-out from the afternoon, Saeed Anwar raising his bat and setting out infinitesimally on his long odyssey, while Ijaz Ahmed, too, in agonising protractedness, lunged towards the white line.

When play resumed an hour later, Tendulkar came back looking intent; at the other end, Ganguly began to prod the ball gently and sent it to somewhere near the boundary. Raghav Chopra ran his hand through his hair; it looked absolutely white in the floodlights. The women from Bombay self-consciously dusted their saris.

“If there’s anyone who can win India the match,” said Ravi Shastri in his oratorial voice, “it’s that man out there.” For no one referred to Tendulkar by name anymore.

“He’s gone,” said Khatau, despondent.

Ummar Aziz had disappeared; Khatau had been absorbing this fact for the last five minutes. Urmila had gone as well, probably to a different destination, but he couldn’t help noticing it. The one nondescript and aging, the other resplendent. “Beauty and the Beast,” thought Khatau in bold letters.

Almost immediately, Tendulkar, on sixty-one, was bowled by an in-swinger. One large section of the crowd—the Indians—stared into the distance, as if a film they’d been watching had been stopped midway. The others danced festively, as if a country separated them from the Indians.

“How did that happen,” enquired Boycott, “to the little master?”

The executive vice president of Pepsi moved impatiently in his seat; he’d been talking to his companion about a rival bid from Coke at that moment. Tendulkar, his head bowed beneath his visor, strode heavily towards the pavilion; but, almost immediately, he was drinking Pepsi, leaning against a van, and flashing a Visa card (“Now You Go Get It”), indifferent to his debacle.

“But how did you know, yaar?” said Yusuf, curving the palm of his hand in a question.

“What?” asked Khatau, straightening his shirt.

“You said just now, ‘He’s gone.’ How did you know he’s going to be out?” Yusuf smiled. “You’re a clairvoyant or what?”

The dismissal was shown twice from the point of view of the stump camera: the ball rising from near the batsman’s feet, so quickly as almost to hit Khatau’s and Yusuf’s faces, and then the lens falling backward and staring lidlessly at the sky, a dead eye gazing at space.