The Legend of Pradeep Mathew (36 page)

You’re not the first to claim that.

That Nelson bastard collected 20 per cent of Pradeepan’s Bloomfield salary till I put a stop to it.

Newton. What happened to his coach and physio?

Whatmore and Kontouri. I got them jobs at the SLBCC.

I don’t accept that there is race discrimination in Sri Lankan cricket.

There is every sort of discrimination everywhere in this country.

What happened to his girlfriend?

That bitch? If I knew she would be like that I would never have set them up.

You did that as well?

I don’t appreciate your tone, Karuna. What do I gain out of lying to you?

What do you gain out of telling me the truth?

It might help you find him. And I would like you to find him.

What if I don’t?

Let me rephrase. I expect you to find him.

What if I publish everything you’ve told me in the
Daily News?

They wouldn’t print it.

Why not?

Because, I’m pretty sure they already know.

*  *  *

From the terrace I can see how well paved this nameless road is. How well kept the gardens are. How every house has a Sudu and a Chooti lookalike standing at the gate. I ask Daniel who the neighbours are. He says he cannot say. I say I’m sure I don’t know them. He says he’s sure that I do. Right then, a neighbour comes out, a bearded man with a familiar face. He picks up the morning papers off his veranda and waves.

‘No movies, Rohana?’ shouts Daniel.

‘I’ll send,’ calls the man.

Daniel looks at me while Kuga gets off the phone. ‘Any film that man can get. Even before Hollywood. He has original
Godfather 4.
Film hasn’t even been made.’

‘Rohana who?’

‘Please don’t ask dirty questions.’

*  *  *

That Shirali was a curse. Every project I got for Pradeepan, she would reject.

Project?

Ads, tours. I could’ve made him a superstar.

Sri Lankan cricketers didn’t do ads those days.

What about Aravinda and Keells sausages? Who do you think set that up?

Really?

I had Gold Leaf and Lion beer willing to pay big bucks. Where? That bitch said no, no?

She didn’t approve of tobacco and booze.

She didn’t approve of anything. She even tried to get him back with his old coach.

You said you put them together. I heard a different story.

What?

About a beauty contest and a fight with skinheads.

No one mentioned me in your story?

I’m afraid not.

Are you sure? Karuna, I have photos of every famous cricketer with one of my girls. I have video recordings of Lanka’s seniormost cabinet minister grunting over a Russian tart like a baboon. I have organised complex operations for the government, the opposition and the LTTE. Sometimes at the same time.

Impressive.

You think I can’t fix a beauty contest and a bar fight?

*  *  *

Later in the afternoon, a cricket match is organised between the Sudu and Chooti lookalikes of each house. It is then that I realise they are all wearing the same clothes. White shirts worn tails out and black cotton slacks. It is then that I realise that these are uniforms. One of them has a gun tucked into his belt; in fact, all of them do.

The air smells of fresh flowers and trees, with the occasional whiff of something frying. I recognise the rumbling beyond the tall trees whose names I do not know. It is water, moving down an incline. Peeping between trees I see turrets of cool grey stone, overlapping tiles and varnished railings.

Kuga has to take a phone call and I have to contend with Daniel who is now more than a little tipsy. ‘OK. OK. Mr Karuna. I will give you one name. That is all. But don’t tell Kuga Anna.’

‘Kuga Anna? Aren’t you older than him?’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

He tells me most of these houses were designed in the 1950s by architect Geoffrey Bawa, that none of them face each other, though some share balconies. That the road is shaped like a spiral and a famous river runs around it like a moat on a conveyor belt.

I hear the cuckoo clock, hung next to the portrait in the next room. It makes the koha sound fifteen times.

‘Is that a twenty-four-hour cuckoo clock?’

‘Upali Wijegunawardena.’

‘What about him?’

‘See that house with the helipad?’

I follow his jewelled arm and the finger on the end of it. Wijegunawardena, magnate, political prince and owner of several publications I had been fired from, went missing in 1983.

‘I thought they found the plane and the body.’

Daniel winks at me.

‘They did. That house near the maara tree? Parakrama Ekanayake.’

‘The hijacker?’

Parakrama Ekanayake was proof of the lengths Sri Lankans would go to get a visa. In June 1982, estranged from his Italian wife and young son by immigration, Ekanayake threatened to blow up an Alitalia Boeing 747 en route to Tokyo with ‘the most sophisticated bombs manufactured in Italy’ unless his demands were met. They were. He returned to Sri Lanka, a folk hero to some, with his wife and son and ransom, while Italian and Sri Lankan authorities argued over who would arrest him.

‘Far back there, below the hill is Rudi Solheim.’

‘Who?’

‘Importer of Dutch hoffman, Malali chocolate and Colombian charlie.’

‘What?’

‘You don’t want to know, Uncle.’

‘Why does every house have bodyguards? No one can find this place anyway.’

‘Bodyguards,’ laughs Daniel. ‘Those are no bodyguards.’

‘Then?’

He winks again and walks off.

*  *  *

I set up the meeting with Alvin Rowe and Laurence Kallicharran.

The great West Indians?

Those days all the West Indians were great. Even the ones who couldn’t make Lloyd’s team. Colis King. Franklyn Stephenson. Sylvester Clarke.

What was the meeting about?

A second Sri Lankan rebel tour of South Africa.

I heard the first one was a disaster.

That’s because we didn’t have the players. In ’91, not only did we have the players, almost all were willing to do it.

You mean …

Don’t ask names. Pradeepan got me fifteen signatures of some of the leading players in the country. Kallicharran was liaising with the South African Cricket Board, SACB.

What was the catch?

The two rebel West Indian tours of South Africa not only made huge money, they provided some great cricket. Rowe thought if he could get a hungry Sri Lankan team, it would pave the way for another West Indian tour.

How much money?

More than any of those guys would’ve seen. Pradeepan could’ve looked after his father, married Shirali and retired. Sri Lankan cricket had no future for him.

So?

Mandela was released the day we started negotiations. Who knew apartheid would end? By the time we had all the signatures, South Africa were being welcomed back. In vain.

Didn’t SLBCC punish the organisers?

I had fifteen signatures. If they touched Mathew I would’ve sent them to the newspapers. I was even able to negotiate Mathew back into the side.

Was the 1992 Aussie test fixed?

That, Uncle, is a very long story.

*  *  *

Days later Ari brought me a copy of the
Sunday Leader,
a sensational tabloid, the only paper with the balls to take shots at the government. Many feared that the government would one day take shots at them. That Sunday there was a double-page spread outlining connections between prominent politicians and the criminal underworld.

Cheques signed by the president and members of cabinet for vast sums to the likes of Soththi Upali, Baddagana Sanjeewa and Nawala Nihal. Mentioned in the article is a kasippu mudalali called Kalu Daniel and a betting tycoon called Kuga Anna. Unfortunately there are no photographs.

*  *  *

I was called in for special ops in ‘93. I didn’t see much of Pradeepan.

Did he have something with a girl called Danila?

After Shirali, there were a lot of women. I was happy for the fellow.

What kind of special ops?

Special ops that got me arrested. I didn’t get to see Pradeepan’s ’94 season for Bloomfield.

I saw it. My. He was lethal in the final against SSC. Demon fast.

Did you follow his African tour?

I didn’t know he toured Africa. I thought his last tour was against New Zealand in ’95.

Zimbabwe, South Africa and then New Zealand. And then he vanished.

When were you released?

Who said I was released?

I didn’t know prisons came with driveways and TVs and laser discs.

There is a lot, Mr Karuna, that you don’t know.

We sent Jabir with our ID cards and he returned empty-handed, cursing the post office staff. ‘Dumb bloody lazy bloody buffaloes. Two hours I had to wait, Uncle. Then this ugly woman tells me to see this smelly man, then they go for tea break, then they tell me they can’t hand over the parcels.’

I am sent to the third floor where my chit is signed by a large yawn wrapped in a sari, then I go to the first floor where twelve grotesques surround my parcel and make me fill out seven identical forms. I resist the compulsion to break my walking stick across someone’s nose, and take a seat with other seething customers. We watch burly bureaucrats sign papers, which they paste onto other papers and put into crumpled files. They then disappear for a tea break at 11 and return at 12 to say the postmaster is bath kanawa. Eating rice. We wait a further hour till he finishes.

In the West, the term ‘going postal’ refers to alienated postal workers turning up to work with machine guns and opening fire on random customers. In Sri Lanka, it would not surprise me if one day the reverse occurred. In the absence of a gun, I use the only weapon I have a licence for, my foul mouth. I call the postmaster a donkey, refer to the staff as mules and threaten to write to every paper in the land. They hand over my parcels without opening them.

I lean on my walking stick and wait for Jabir to U-turn. He pulls up to the kerb grinning. ‘See, I told you, Wije sir. I went and watched a blue film at the Ruby while you were inside.’

Back at Ari’s house, we sit at the dining table and stare at the square parcels. ‘They could be bombs,’ says Ari, a little too hopefully.

‘Who would want to bomb us?’

‘Maybe Uncle Kuga.’

‘If I was him, I’d drop napalm on the parcel office.’

I claw at the cellotape. Ari tears the brown wrapping. On top is a hardcover book with our friend in his straw hat holding a microphone and smirking at the camera.
Graham Snow: Middle of the Bat.
We compare books and grin. Both our books are signed, but Ari’s has the inscription:

Page ix is the acknowledgements page. ‘This book could not have been written without …’

The list is twenty-seven names long; it contains the names of a few great cricketers, an Indian film star, a British novelist and seven commentators. It also contains the names ‘Ariyaratne Byrd’ high up and ‘W.G. Karunasena’ around the middle.

‘See, see. My name is above Kapil Dev,’ coos Ari.

‘It’s alphabetical, Putha.’

Ari counts the names. ‘At least we made Graham’s squad.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of brilliant cricketing minds that have inspired him.’

‘It looks like a list of people he’s stolen ideas from. He must be scared that we’ll sue.’

Ari’s parcel contains a manuscript. He frowns at it, then his eyes widen.

‘I say. You know what this is? An original draft of the Duckworth–Lewis with scribbles by Tony Duckworth and Frank Lewis themselves.’

He reads the accompanying note and chuckles. ‘Graham found it in an ICC wastepaper basket. Ade pukka! Finally I can understand it.’

My box contains two more books.
Sport is War
by Simon Marqusee, about the West Indian rebel team of the 1980s, signed by Kallicharran, Rowe, Rice and Croft. I gasp and smell the fresh pages. The other book is a hardcover biography,
The Great Anton Rose
by Booth Beckmann. This book is not autographed, though there is a bookmark sticking from its last pages. On it in a familiar scrawl:

To the other great W.G.,

You may find this interesting.

Graham

I open at the marked page and find an index which includes the following:

A captain will declare an innings closed if he believes his side has enough runs on the board, if he wants to give his bowlers more time to bowl out the opposition, or if a player he doesn’t like very much is about to break a record.

When Anton Rose declared 117 runs behind in the Robert Mugabe XI vs Sri Lanka in 1994, it was not a sporting gesture to force a result. It was to deny a Sri Lankan spinner from getting 10 wickets. And it was because he knew torrential rains were expected the next day.

The 1994 Zimbabwe test series is not remembered at all. Every match was either rain affected or deathly dull. Neither team wanted to lose and be branded the worst in the world. So everyone from the groundsmen to the selectors to the players played it safe.

Those who were on that tour remember it for a string of brilliant individual performances from Rose and Lankan spinner Pradeep Mathew.

‘Like only two players were playing cricket on that tour,’ remembers Reggie Ranwala, Sri Lanka’s trumpet tooting cheerleader.