SCORE!

  SCORE!

  Aarti V Raman

  BLOOMSBURY INDIA

  Bloomsbury Publishing India Pvt. Ltd

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  First published in India 2023

  This edition published 2023

  Copyright © Aarti Venkatraman, 2023

  Aarti Venkatraman has asserted her right under the Indian Copyright Act to be identified as the Author of this work

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  To the cricket-obsessed nation that is India. And the romance-obsessed reader. This happy ever after is for you.

  To my Thathu and Paati, the OG Viswanathans. I couldn’t ask for better grandparents to love me.

  And, as ever, to Mom, my own True North.

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  Email from: rajivs@iccb.in

  Email to: selectioncommitte@iccb.in

  Sub: Replacement of Player in WC Squad

  Priority: Very High

  Hello,

  It is with a heavy heart that I write this email.

  Zakeer Hussain was a brilliant player with a wonderful future. He was a good man, a good boy with a kind heart and dreams of being the best cricketer in the world like his idol Sachin Tendulkar. He was also thinking about settling down with his girlfriend, per his parents’ wishes.

  We will all mourn this young life cut so tragically short for a long, long time to come.

  But as Zakeer was fond of saying, the game always comes first.

  And with the World Cup looming closer than ever before, I believe it is time we take action and come to a decision regarding Zakeer’s T20 replacement. We need an all-rounder, someone competent, just like the young Zakeer who had will and talent and so much dil!

  His shoes are tough to fill, but we must fill them.

  This is not the time for sentiment, gentlemen. Let us roll up our sleeves and present the best sixteen at the World Cup and bring the cup home. I believe Zakeer would have wanted this above everything else.

  Submitting a longlist for your consideration. Let us convene soon and get cracking on the problem at hand.

  It is what the young boy from Latur would have wanted.

  Cheers,

  Rajiv S.

  (Chief Selector ICCB)

  1

  THREE MONTHS LATER

  Skulking.

  She was skulking.

  Bee couldn’t believe that her life had been reduced to this. She was hiding in the branch of an ancient tree with a pair of binoculars trained on a hotel room window. Her butt was numb from sitting on the tree. And it was raining!

  For a single mad moment, she had a vision of herself as a female Sherlock Holmes with a deerstalker hat and a magnifying glass, spying on someone’s cheating spouse.

  Except, Sherlock was cool, yaar! He didn’t skulk!

  And neither did Bee . . . usually, in her career as a reporter. She’d worked at a couple of newspapers and was now a correspondent for Krikket-365, the cricketing arm of a sports website run by a media entertainment company.

  She still remembered that fateful day when she’d interviewed with the features editor of Krikket-365, Carleena D’Silva, almost three years ago. Carleena had interrogated her on everything! Her stories at the now-defunct Afternoon D&C, her stint with a local sports newsletter Saptahik Sports Illustrated, which had risen ten times in circulation once Bee had become lead reporter, and even her dating habits and dietary preferences!

  Mercifully, Carleena hadn’t probed Bee too much about her last place of employment, the one that shall not be named, and for that Bee owed the woman a lot.

  Scoring this job at Krikket-365 was definitely not part of the career path she’d mapped out for herself at eighteen. But it was the best Bee Vishwanathan could do after the debacle at the ‘place that shall not be named’.

  Having already spent a few years in the trenches as a fresher— covering city beats, nightlife, the glamour pages, tech and science, and business—first for Afternoon D&C and then for ‘that’ publication which had almost ruined her career, Bee was determined to make senior correspondent before completing four years at Krikket-365.

  Bee knew that working in the trenches was the first step to becoming a special correspondent who was sent on the coolest assignments, then becoming an assistant editor and finally the editor, preferably of the foreign bureau. Her dream job.

  And she was well on her way to becoming an editor at one of the best dailies before turning forty by working her butt off.

  As a cub reporter, Bee had repeatedly approached Mitra, the chief editor of ‘that’ publication, in hopes of securing at least a single assignment that would get her a by-line, but her pleas were routinely rejected. Hell, she had even covered sports for Mitra, especially the football World Cup, adding local colour stories to dry and boring features about who beat whom by how many goals.

  But Mitra was super underwhelmed by her zeal, enthusiasm and the fact that she’d been editor of her college newspaper.

  ‘There are hundreds like you just waiting to get your plum job,’ Mitra was fond of reminding her, adding slyly that she could always leave if she wanted to or if she felt the pressure was too much or if her current job fell wildly short of her ambitions. However, if she wanted to stay, she would have to cover the local small claims court in Bandra and try to find a juicy titbit that would be run with the Indian Times Services by-line.

  That too if she was lucky.

  It would have made a lesser woman quit, but not Bee. She was blessed with an overload of stubbornness.

  Finally, her persistence had paid off and they had given her the holy grail of assignments—politics.

  Bee had been asked to do a short interview with Shreenath Patil, the Kennedy of Indian politics. He was handsome, charming and a real man’s man. She’d always had a little crush on him. The interview could have been her ticket out of shit assignments. But one tiny question about his ‘love’ life had changed the geography of her life. Bee had become the mother of all memes with the words ‘Patil-gate’ attached to her resume for ever and ever.

  So here she was—a lowly correspondent for a sports website, of all things. But beggars couldn’t be choosers, and her boss, the founder of Krikket-365, was such a decent guy (a rarity in media) that she had decided to stay on, even after Carleena had left the company for greener pastures. After all, she knew it could be worse, much worse.

  Now Bee was a part of the website’s three-person team, but their star reporter, Abhinoy, was out with a deadly case of dengue and her other teammate, Satyarth, was getting married just when it was time to cover the T20 World Cup being hosted by India.

  This World Cup was a crucial one for India. The host country was going in as more than an underdog, considering the tragedy of Zakeer Hussain’s death and the subsequent shuffle-up. The bookmakers had conservative odds of 10–1 on India winning the cup.

  No one expected the Indian team to do well, including the Indian media. And so when Bee, by sheer bad luck, had been assigned to cover the tournament, she didn’t exactly jump with joy. Any other sports reporter would have been happy, thrilled even, to cover the cricket World Cup.

  But Bee was an idealist, a reporting snob if you will. Cricket might be the lifeblood of sports in India, but it was as far away from politics or finance or business as she was from becoming a size zero. And she had been cursing herself every day for the last three years for padding her resume with the Saptahik Sports Illustrated’s circulation figures, one of the reasons she’d got this job in the first place.

  What she had omitted to mention to Carleena three years ago was that most of the figures belonged to her uncle’s company, the periodical’s main advertiser. But at the time, she had been desperate enough to find an organisation that would hire her after the catastrophic ‘Patil-gate’. And lying about one tiny work qualification was not such a bad thing, was it?

  Of course, karma comes to collect from all those who sin, and it had come for her too.

  Thus, here she was, skulking. On top of a tree. In the rain. In Jaipur!

  A few minutes later, her butt vibrated.

  Bee swore under her breath and, dropping the binoculars around her neck, wriggled her butt to get the phone out of her pocket. It was tricky, considering the tight spot she was in.

  ‘Kidhar hai tu?’ an irate female voice asked. ‘We’ve been waiting for ever for you, babe.’

  ‘Hey, Dhee.’ Bee tried to pitch her voice to a low monotone. She didn’t want anyone in the posh seven-star hotel to look out of their window and see her. Not that people who could afford such fancy hotels ever looked out.

  ‘You’re mumbling, Bee. Where are you?’

  Bee rolled her eyes and considered telling her the truth. Dhee aka Dheera Chakravorty was a freelance photographer who’d been sent with her to cover the cup because she was affordable, talented and a badass.

  Dhee also didn’t like to be kept waiting.

  ‘You guys go ahead with dinner. I’m stuck somewhere.’

  Literally, Bee added to herself.

  ‘Stuck? Stuck where? I hope to some hot guy’s lips.’

  Bee laughed before catching herself mid-laugh. Trees didn’t laugh. Someone could look out and hear her. She couldn’t afford to get caught.

  ‘Something like that,’ she said. ‘Seriously, you guys have dinner. I’ll catch up with you tomorrow. We need to get the opening shots, don’t we?’

  ‘You’re beginning to worry me, babe. Please don’t tell me you’re at their hotel. You know the media has been banned from talking to them anywhere except outside officially sanctioned events. You know that.’

  ‘I am not at the hotel, Dheera,’ Bee replied firmly. Then she said her goodbyes and hung up before Dheera could discover the truth.

  Bee figured she was telling the truth. Kind of.

  She wasn’t inside the hotel or even at the hotel. She was up on a tree, staking out the room of the Indian cricket team’s captain in hopes of catching the man in an unguarded moment and getting a quick quote from him before he threw her out.

  At least that was her plan.

  The Indian Cricket Control Board or the ICCB was very strict in its gag order. The members of the national team, all sixteen of them, were not supposed to talk to anyone outside of the playing arena. The ‘boys’ had been told to stay away from the media.

  The Zakeer Hussain incident had left the whole team shaken up and determined to play better than ever, even if they had no chance in hell of making it past the round robin.

  Bee could understand their commitment and dedication. She even admired it. That was why she was here, on a tree, like a shady small-town detective, instead of being at the nice air-conditioned restaurant with her friends Dheera, Harry and Sholes, wolfing down yummy parathas and rajma chawal.

  Bee had big dreams and an annoying thing called a conscience which would not let her copy-paste the press release that talked about what the team was feeling and how they were preparing for their first match. Like every other reporter covering the event had done before filing their story.

  Bee might not have been overly enthusiastic to cover the World Cup, but that didn’t change the fact that she wanted the scoop. She wanted to report.

  So she was up a fricking tree outside the hotel room of the nation’s favourite son, about to ambush him on the gorgeous balcony!

  The curtains at the balcony doors twitched and she saw the broad back of a man as he shucked off his shirt and pants and walked into the bathroom. He was built!

  Bee sucked in her breath. Chance pe dance karle, Bee, she thought even as her stomach pitched nervously.

  This was her moment.

  With all the stealth of a girl used to sneaking out to pub crawl with her teammates, Bee left her perch on the tree and started crawling down the bent branch that almost touched the balcony railing of the Jaipur Continental Grand.

  Her binoculars swayed from side to side as she crept like a badly balanced cat burglar and quickly reached the end of the branch. Bee took a deep breath and jumped down the three feet to the balcony. But she hadn’t counted on the unseasonal rain making the marble floor slippery. Her foot skidded as it made contact with the floor, her balance thrown, and she fell, butt first, with an undignified screech.

  2

  Arhan Kapoor was having a horrible day. In fact, it had been a horrible month.

  Or maybe he was just horrible. Horrible, disillusioned and upset with his superiors who refused to guide him on how he was supposed to do his fricking job when no one was in the mood to play the World Cup.

  Three months ago, he’d been brought in as the assistant coach of a team reeling from a personal loss and barely surviving, much less ready to participate in the T20 World Cup. As the vice-captain of the Indian cricket team, Zakeer had been an integral part of the spirit and josh, the lifeblood, that the Indian team was known for. He’d loved the game and was super talented, such a natural leader. To lose him to such tragic circumstances had impacted the whole team. It was dreadful just being in the dressing room. The silence was positively ghost-like.

  And it was this melancholic team that Arhan been hired to manage after his successful Ranji Trophy stint with Punjab while also overseeing his family business.

  The ICCB’s brief had been simple. Talk to the team, pep them up and get them excited about the game again. Get them in a winning mindset. The media gag order was also not helping the situation. Those vultures who called themselves ‘journalists’ attacked his team every-effing-where—waylaying members as they boarded the bus for net practice or at restaurants they were known to frequent.

  One enterprising ‘journalist’ had even shown up in the locker room thrusting a recorder in the showering captain Viren’s face, manically asking him about India’s chances of winning the cup.

  As if the brief press conference they’d given in Mumbai before the start of the tournament wasn’t enough! All of it was enough to give Arhan a migraine the size of planet Mangal.

  His ex, too, was calling him non-stop because finally Madam wanted to get back together, which added to his foul mood as he walked into his hotel room.

  Arhan mentally reviewed his schedule for the next day, the opening match between India and Bangladesh—a breeze if the boys could just pull it together. Today had gone off well. He had had a breakfast meeting with the manager and coach, followed by a quick session with the playing twelve. Then they had all proceeded to the venue for warm-ups. Practice had gone off well. Zakeer’s replacement, Prithvi Narayanan, was blending in decently and so far no one had done anything too untoward.

  But Arhan knew—from a lifetime of watching, playing and now coaching the game he loved the most in the world—that this Indian team was missing that spark, that junoon, which was crucial to make champions out of them.

  It was a tragedy and he didn’t know if he could help them win . . . or help them in any way at all.

  Arhan was basking in the warm jet of the shower and wondering about possible talking points for tomorrow, his headache receding under the flow of water, when he heard a loud scream from the balcony.

  A woman’s scream.

  He cursed, ducking his head under the shower to wash off the shampoo. He grabbed a towel off the heating rack, wrapped it hastily around his dripping waist and stumbled out of the steamed-up bathroom.

  He couldn’t believe his ears. He couldn’t really believe that someone was in his room.

  ‘Dammit!’

 

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