Aerogrammes and Other Stories - By Tania James Page 0,2

the heat. At some point, Imam wanted to sit in the shade, but his uncle refused to move, too busy staring at Gama, as if with every bethak, the boy was transforming into something winged and brilliant. When Imam complained about the sun, his uncle said, “Look at your bhaiya. Does he complain?”

Imam looked at his brother: serene and focused, impervious to pain—everything Imam was not. There was a gravity about Gama in his youth, as if he had been schooled from the womb in the ways of the pehlwan, to avoid extremes of emotion like rage and lust, to reserve his energies for the pit. Their father had begun Gama’s training at age five and died three years later, before Imam could prove himself worthy of the same attention.

The bethak contest lasted four hours, and by the end, only fifteen men remained standing. Raja Singh yanked Gama’s hand into the air, declaring him the youngest by far and, thus, the winner. Greased in sweat, Gama wore a funny, dreamy expression, listing slightly before his knees buckled. Seeing him this way—limp, waxy, the crescent whites of his eyes between his lashes—made something jerk in Imam’s chest. He could not move. At that moment, Imam began to hate his uncle. He hated the raja for coming up with this contest, and he hated every person who herded around his brother and blocked out the sun, claiming him as if he were theirs.

•

The bell clangs, and the match with Roller begins. Gama slaps his thighs, beats his chest, charges. He plunges at Doc’s leg. Doc evades him the first time, but not the second. With a smooth back heel, Gama fells him and finishes him off with a half nelson and a body roll. One minute and forty seconds.

The second fall happens in but a blur—Doc laid out on his belly, sweat-slick and wincing at the spectators in the front row, who lean forward with their elbows on their knees. Roller gives in, and then: bedlam. The emcee yanks Gama’s hand into the air; men mob the mat like sparrows to a piece of bread. Mr. Benjamin wrings Imam’s hand, then shoulders his way through the crowd. Imam hangs back, Gama’s robe in his arms, craning his neck to see over all the hats and heads between him and his brother.

Over the next few days, Gama defeats two more challengers, sends them staggering to the mat like drunken giants. The newspapers have begun to take notice. Sometimes, while warming up, Gama and Imam spot a reporter watching from the road, the brim of his hat shadowing his eyes as he scribbles something in his notebook. Imam doesn’t like being ogled while doing his dands, but Mr. Benjamin has told them not to shoo the scribblers away. Press, he says, breeds more press.

Mr. Benjamin is right. These days, he brings more clippings than ever before, and Gama wants to digest every word, his appetite inexhaustible. Imam would rather play chess, the only game at which he consistently beats his brother. The journalists rarely, if ever, mention him.

“Gama the Great,” writes Percy Woodmore in Health & Strength, “has so handily defeated all his European challengers that one can only wonder whether the Oriental strong man possesses some genetic advantage over his Occidental counterpart.” Imam can recognize barely half the words in this sentence, but he understands the next: “Will the Hindoos ever lose?”

“Do you know,” Gama interjects, “these sahibs have so few counters—only one to the cross-buttock hold.” Gama shakes his head in bemusement, and just when Imam thinks he cannot stand him a minute longer, Gama adds, “Wait till they see you in the ring.”

Imam is beginning to wonder if that day will ever arrive. He feels the distinct weight of malaise, same as he used to suffer in school. When they were children, Gama got to train at the akhara with Madho Singh, while Imam had to recite English poems about English flowers. After Gama’s triumph at Jodhpur, people talked as if the boy could upend mountains, greater than all the pehlwan ancestors who had preceded him.

Sometimes, if Imam was sitting alone, sullenly reciting his multiplication tables, Gama took pity on him. “Come on, chotu,” he’d say, taking Imam outside to show him a new hold. Gama was the only one who called him chotu, a word that raised his spirits when nothing else would.

By age twelve, Imam was fed up. He began cutting school and hovering around the akhara, where the