The difficulty with having a famous namesake is that people often see evidence of a personality that is not actually there. Someone called Edison likely has no ability to innovate, in the same way naming a child Zico will not guarantee the ability to dribble.
However, output does not matter as much as perception. A man called Williams or Singh remains largely free to choose whatever path they wish. A commonly heard name has no inherent blocking points. Someone named Stalin, however, would struggle to win an election. At least, this is what seventeen-year-old Azharuddin Mohammed from Pace Village in Central Trinidad thought, until he saw a paragraph about Indian elections in the newspaper his fish was wrapped in.
“You seeing this?” Azhar said. “A man name Stalin win election in India. I would have never imagine that could ever happen.”
Azhar had always had difficulty with his name. It was an uncommon one on the island. Named after the Indian captain in 1999, the subsequent match-fixing conviction had unforeseeable consequences. Azhar became, in Trinidadian cricket circles, a person who could not be trusted.
This would not have mattered had he been interested in football or table tennis. But for a person of Indian origin in the villages, there was only one sport. Azhar kept playing cricket, even though his name made him work harder than others for opportunities.
“Over there, name not the same like here. You name Mohammed because that’s your father title, I name Mangalsingh because that is my father own. Over there, people name Engineer because they father was engineer. People have one name, and they have they father first name as title, so every generation have a different last name.”
“And don’t even start with misspell when they have to put English characters. Every time I see Abdul Razzaq, he jersey have a different spelling with ‘K’ and ‘C’,” the fish vendor replied.
“He from Pakistan, though.”
“That is beside the point, it still true enough. Once I went to look in the archive to see if I could have figure out where my family from. The way they was spelling name then
to now, plenty things change. And you already know how much mistake they probably make before they put people on the boat. Imagine a British officer trying to write down Hindi spelling. He bound to spell it wrong. You does get the same thing when you go licensing office and tell people your name. Depending how they look, the name might spell right.”
“For me it easy, it don’t have so much ways to spell Mohammed. Is the Azharuddin people can’t manage, unless they old and like cricket.”
“Is the benefit of being name after somebody. Nobody could have spell Tendulkar or Muralitharan when I was born, but they could spell it now. Tell somebody spell Prahalad Mangalsingh and see the kind of magic you go get.”
“Anyway, the thing is name don’t matter. Stalin win the election,” Azhar said.
“I know you didn’t read the thing good. Is not name, is who you know. This man father used to be the minister and all.”
“How I could read it with carite guts all over the thing?”
“Is only yesterday papers. Here, hold this and read while I go down to the end of the road and see if anybody want the cavalli.”
Mangal drove off, shouting out of his car window about the powers of fish broth and his prices, leaving Azhar with the day-old newspaper.
Despite the fish he held dripping through the soggy newspaper onto the ground, Azhar retreated to a chair next to the gate, in the shade of a frangipani. The tree was free of caterpillars, but Azhar knew it was only a matter of time before the yellow and black pests would return. He risked having his mother yell at him for staying outside and dripping watery fish residue into the yard instead of putting the fish into the freezer, but he did not want to risk missing Mangal’s return. If he was not at the gate, Mangal would drive straight past, even though the fish vendor had nowhere in particular to be.
“Look, I smarter than anybody in this team. But they go ever let me be captain?” Azhar said.
Mangal, if he saw Azhar after finishing his tour of the village, would sit with him in the shed under the mango tree at the back of the house, during the stultifying hours of the afternoon.
His car would bake outdoors, and Azhar could not fathom how he endured the stench. Despite Mangal’s repeated claims that the heat made the odour decrease, since it cooked the fish remnants, Azhar couldn’t believe it. But he never belaboured the point. If Mangal lost his temper, he would strike someone off his route and would not stop no matter how much the person flagged him down. This could go on for months. It wasn’t that Azhar liked fish so much that he could not go without, but that the replacement of chicken or goat meant walking all the way to the other side of the village. Fish came straight to the door, and there was no risk of getting the wrong ones because the halal supplier hadn’t delivered that day.
“You really think is just your name stopping you?” Mangal said. “I mean, captain have to make the team first.”
“Most wickets is me. Second most runs is me. Probably most catch, if they was counting it,” Azhar said. “Captain is not about that. Is about smart. Darren Sammy didn’t do nothing when we win World Cup.”
“But people like Sammy. He players like him. Anybody like you? Me ain’t saying, it just so. Is just, captain is not just knowing what to do, is knowing how to make sure everybody pulling in one direction. Or somebody go call for a run and stay in he crease.”
“Look at this Stalin character. He could have never win an election over here. If he wanted to captain a side, he would have.”
“If your father was the captain, maybe you could have be captain, too,” Mangal said. “Because Indian Stalin, I sure he father tell him exactly how to win. And then people say the father was probably good, so the son bound to be and all. But you, if this was 1999, then for sure you had name for a captain. But now, you just have name for match fixing. Anyway, real Azharuddin win election, too.”
“I just saying, here they not taking me seriously. Over there, I might make it. It have too much things going against me here,” Azhar said. “They don’t want spin bowlers in West Indies anyway. But nobody coming down in the village to find players either. Everybody who make national went some prestige school. And if your hair straight, you have to be twice as good to get in. And I already have to be twice as good just to get a look. That’s four now.”
“Look, you not wrong. But if you was able to study even a little bit, you and all would have go prestige school. They could put people in sixth form just to play cricket and football if they barely pass anything. But they can’t put them in if they didn’t pass nothing,” Mangal said. “I know you could play. Don’t mind I does give you horrors. In truth, I never see anybody turn the ball big like you and struggling to make national. But selectors watching the scorecard for school cricket. And your name not there.”
Azhar’s main problem, apart from his name, was he was terrible at school. It hadn’t helped that he was seen by all the teachers as untrustworthy. The rare occasions when he performed well academically were greeted with consensus that he had cheated in some way. Though most teachers did not watch cricket and had probably not heard of the former Indian captain’s involvement with gamblers, Pace Village was not a big place. When someone has a reputation, it sticks, even though the underlying reasoning may have been obscure.
“People with this face, we supposed to be good at school, and other than that, it don’t have nothing for me. Can’t sing soca, must sing chutney. Can’t play football, must play cricket. Or work in the garden and drink rum till diabetes or heart attack come for me. And then my children go fight for the land. I don’t want that.”
“What else you could do? You think I wanted to drive around and sell fish in a falling-down old car without air conditioning?” Mangal replied. “To have to wake up early and go down by the depot to get what piece of fish I could get, and even then, is fighting for leftovers. Because they hold the best ones to sell in the hotel or big boys’ restaurant. Here, you have the choice between doing whatever you could do or doing nothing and starve. It don’t have nothing like doing what you want to do. You have to go abroad for that.
“What you would have do if you could have?”
“You wasn’t the first who wanted to play cricket. When I was growing up, I wanted to be a fast bowler. You couldn’t not want to, back in the days. No seam or swing, just pace for making men smell leather. And I was good, too. By the time men put they bat down, keeper done hold the ball. No pelting, neither. Action clean like a textbook.”
“So, what happen?”
“What does always happen? They watch me and they say, ‘It don’t have nothing like an Indian fast bowler. Why you don’t try leg spin?’ And I can’t make no team bowling long hop looking for stick,” Mangal said. “Alright, you struggling because of your name. And that not right, and it not fair. But one way or another, you would have end up struggling down here. You can’t get away from that.”
Mangal often watched cricket, but Azhar had never known he ever played. The story did not surprise him, however.
*
Only after failing everything at the end of fifth form was Azhar finally able to stop going to school. For the past year, he had done almost nothing. His mother had briefly tried to get him to go work with his cousins, who planted peppers on the land they had been given as part of a severance package when the sugar industry had collapsed. The work had been long and tiring, with days that began before sunrise and continued until late afternoon. He had not been prepared to stay all day in the sun. Years of cricket, especially multi-day matches, had led him to believe he was immune to the heat. He quickly realised that removing weeds and dragging a five-gallon knapsack full of industrial chemical liquid along the beds was a very different prospect from occasionally returning a throw from fine leg. He managed to keep at it for two weeks before giving up.
His father’s attempt to have him try construction was no more successful. Azhar considered himself the kind of person who was adept at tasks and self-sufficient. On the worksite, he discovered he was the kind of person who could not hammer a nail proper- ly, nor could he easily saw through pieces of wood without getting the length wrong. All his life he had heard a difficult task be compared to mixing cement. He finally was able to understand just how apt the comparison was. He had lasted less than eight days.
The last he had heard was that his father was trying to have him apprenticed as a fisherman. It was not something he wanted to do, but he was not worried. No fisherman, from this notably superstitious community, would be willing to take him on a boat. Not even if they were paid. The fact that his father had last spoken about this months ago seemed to give credence to this assumption.
There was little to do in Pace Village. He tried not to spend a lot of time in the house, as his mother would give him chores or berate him on his lack of academic achievement. Often, she would do both at the same time.
The village was not empty during the day, as it had been when he was younger. Then, only housewives could be found on their way to shops or religious functions, while husbands worked in the sugar cane fields or the industrial estates. Since the sugar industry had collapsed, the numbers of unemployed who lived off their voluntary severance package had increased immensely. Few took up the opportunity to retrain. The closure of the oil industry only hardened the belief that it was better to do nothing, as the un- employed oil field workers swelled the ranks of the idle in the village.
The rum-shop had never been empty, even during the morning, but it had become a place that was always full. The mosque was only crowded on Fridays, and the temple on Sundays, but both houses of worship always had people on the compounds at any given time.
Azhar avoided the options of both alcohol and religion. He was too young to drink, though this was no real barrier, as anyone who looked old enough would be served (and sometimes this criterion was waived). It was against his religion anyway. It was one of the few religious ordinances he followed, as well as not eating pork. He was not strict enough to deny himself bake and shark at the beach, nor did he pray five times a day.
The mosque was a place he avoided not because he did not wish to be involved in religion. He distrusted atheists, though he had known but two in his entire life, because to not believe in anything was itself unbelievable. He avoided the mosque because he struggled to remember the prayers and could not remember verses from the Quran. To see children easily reciting surahs, while he struggled through the shahada, filled him with shame. Even Jumah he no longer attended, despite nominally never missing it when he had been a student. The main allure had been for its allowance of having a half-day on Friday, though even then he often went home instead of to the masjid.
The only choice left to Azhar was to try to visit other equally idle former classmates. They, too, steered clear of their own houses, some in hiding from irritating parents and some just to have a change of scenery. It was becoming harder to find anyone, anymore, as most had committed to the types of jobs Azhar avoided. Though his family was not rich, just by being able to stop working at a job he did not enjoy meant he was far better off than most of his contemporaries. He did not imagine this luck would continue forever.
As he frequently found no one to waste time with, Azhar would drift off to the village cricket grounds where it was certain some idlers would always be present. Mangal came occasionally after his route was over, though he did not live in the village, but his own village a few miles away had no cricket grounds. There were usually training sessions in the late afternoon, and on mornings players could be found working on their game in the nets. During midday, when the temperature was the highest, the nets would be empty, and most people would take a siesta. It was at this time, when he knew the nets would be empty, that Azhar chose to work on his game.
The nets were in a state of disrepair, and the club did not have the equipment that a club in the North would have. Certainly, there was no bowling machine, and as no one could be convinced to bowl to him at 1 p.m., Azhar would use this time to work on his own bowling. Only later, around 3 p.m., when the shadows of the almond and coconut trees began to cast a shadow over the nets, would it be possible to find the first willing participant to help him work on his batting.
The club canteen opened early, and ex-members as well as the public would gather to drink beer, especially if there was a match playing on TV. They used this time to pass comment on the many ills of West Indies cricket, which usually boiled down to not having enough local players in the regional side. By mid-afternoon most would be asleep, in the chairs they sat on or in the stands of the pavilion, gathering energy to begin a fresh round of criticism for the training session ahead in the evening. The only man who would be awake at 3 p.m. would be Coach.
Coach was not really a coach. He had no qualifications that Azhar knew of and neither had he been given charge of any team at any level. Though he had an opinion on how every aspect of the game should be executed, this did not make him unique in a country where every fan professed himself an expert. His nickname, though Azhar was unsure if it was really the case, likely came from his willingness to help others train. Albeit many were quick to give verbal pointers, Coach was the only person not paid who would give throwdowns or loft hits into the outfield to simulate high catches.
They did not speak much to each other, separated by an age gap that made communication difficult as well as a familiarity with each other that rendered dialogue also superfluous. It was then surprising that after one session Azhar asked Coach if he could give an opinion on a plan. Though he must have been surprised, Coach’s face showed no change in emotion.
“If your mother and father already say no, I can’t say yes,” he said.
“No, Coach, I don’t need you to sign nothing. Just to ask advice. Let we talk in the shade, nah?”
“The thing is I see in the newspaper that anybody could make it in India, don’t mind what your name is,” Azhar began.
“I tell him is only when you have links you could do that, you know,” a voice behind him said.
Azhar had not looked around before sitting and so had not noticed Mangal was be- hind him, several rows behind, laying on the concrete bleacher. “If living in India was a good plan, why we come here? We could have just stay,” Mangal continued.
“I not saying everybody have to go. I just saying it might do me better to go back,” Azhar replied.
“The boy could have a point. This is what I have to say about that. Now, nothing in life guaranteed. Anybody who talking about guaranteed, either they lying or they going to say something that everybody already know anyway,” Coach said. “But India now is not India like 100 years ago. It not even like India 20 years before. It have money. And you should never tell somebody, especially somebody who playing sports and one bad in- jury is the end, to not go and look for money. This gentleman’s game nice to talk about, but it don’t full your belly.”
“Coach, I go be the first man to say everybody have to eat a food. But it probably have more cricketers in India than it have people in this whole country. How he going to make? He can’t even talk the language, and he don’t know nobody. What he supposed to do?”
Azhar had thought about every point Mangal had laid out. He was unwilling to bring any of them up due to anxiety about presenting a brave face. So he was grateful to the fish vendor for addressing the issues. He knew without full conviction, or at least solutions, any plan of playing cricket in India was dead before he even bought a ticket.
“He supposed to try. That should be the first thing. To go from here to play in India, it could happen. A Knight in red could soon be a Knight in black in Kolkata. The problem is not going to India, the problem is playing for Trinidad,” Coach said. “The boy have talent. I training with him, so I know. And you see him, so you know, too. But cricketers from around here never going to get a chance.”
“So, what you saying, Coach? It done and is best I only play for fun?”
“Not at all, although it could come to that. What might be best for you is to skip a step.”
“Which step he skipping? He done skip out from school already.”
“Players here want to do well and go play in India, not so? But that wouldn’t happen for you. So go India direct and play. Wouldn’t be the first time. It happen to Robin Singh.”
“Azhar, you too young to remember Robin Singh as anything except a fielding coach. He from Princes Town, and went India because he wasn’t getting a chance down here,” Mangal said. “But he went university, and it was a different time.”
“Exactly. It was a different time. Now, no need for the university. Cricket is enough,” Coach said. “Azhar, your family from India. This mean once you ask by the Indian Embassy, then they going to give you a card to live in India. India have a million cricket schools where you going to eat and sleep cricket, all day and night. If you think you working hard here, well, you going to learn what really is hard work when you reach.”
“Coach, who paying for that? And I not sure my parents going to agree.”
Even as Azhar said this, he was already thinking of himself in the subcontinent. In his mind, it was a place where clichés both old and new amalgamated into a unique world. The land of old traditions his community had brought with them during indentureship, as well as the exciting modern world he saw in the Bollywood films his parents were fond of. A land of slow, dusty pitches baked bone dry in the relentless heat, as well as green outfields under floodlights, with fireworks in celebration of boundary hits. It was a place where community mattered and rules were strict, but also where a man called Stalin could win an election. He saw it as a place where anything was possible.
“The boy have a point, you know. It expensive to go India,” Mangal said. “And I hear it not so easy for Muslims over there.”
“If you could play, then everything OK. They will pay you to come. And we already know he could play. Same thing for religion. Bat and ball don’t say prayers. Once you good, nothing going to stop you. Over there, name don’t matter.”
“You really feel it simple so? Because I more than ready.”
“The thing is, boy, nothing simple,” Coach said. “But to remain here, that not simple neither. So, is best you try, not so? If you go and it don’t happen, well, what you go lose? Your mother and father still going to be here, this cricket club going to still be here, and anyway, you not leaving work or school or wife and child behind. The way I see it, best you go now and make up your mind and try a thing.”
“You never know, you might find a nice dulahin and fix up right over there,” Mangal said jokingly.
India was everything that Pace Village was not. It contained more possibility than the entire island. But there was no proof of this. He had never even met anyone from there.
The only person he had ever met who had been to the land of his forefathers was his primary school teacher in standard three, who also doubled as a pundit. (Azhar had heard that he had left the teaching service to go full-time into the world of religious services.) The pundit-teacher’s experience had been six months of learning Hindi and religion in Benares. Azhar doubted this would have any overlap with the life of a cricket- er. Still, he did not need to know India, neither first nor second-hand, to believe that it would be a life-changing place.
It was impossible to go to a place where neighbourhoods had more people than the entire island and not learn things that were impossible to learn at home. Maybe all he would learn would be to be a better cricketer. This would be enough. If he achieved success and a career in the sport, and perhaps a family life, it would exceed expectations immensely. This was unlikely, and the chances were low. Azhar already knew this. It was not important to him, the probability of success, even though what success meant exactly was vague. Success was as irrelevant as the reality of the country of India itself. It did not matter. What mattered was there was a possibility. And this sliver of opportunity was greater than any that he could see for himself by remaining in Pace Village. Even though he would not be an adult for a few months still, he already saw a stagnant life if he remained.
“First thing, let we go and talk to your parents,” Coach said. “And then is time to get serious with this training. Mangal, you go have to dry yourself out. He go need some practice with fast bowling. We going to need a whole video presentation to send them over there.”
“Coach, I ready to go in academy, too, you know.”
The two continued to banter as they all walked down the street. Azhar had stopped listening. In his mind he saw himself raising his bat, wearing the blue jersey (the green would have made his mother happier, but it was as out of reach as the maroon), with his name emblazoned on the back. He already knew he would put his entire name on the back. Space constraints didn’t matter, he would make a circle if he had to. It was the first time he had thought of a situation where he could display his name proudly.