Aerogrammes and Other Stories - By Tania James Page 0,3

only language that mattered was the heave and grunt of bodies in constant motion, whether climbing the rope hanging from the neem tree, or hoeing the wrestling pit, or swinging a giant jori in each arm, spiky clubs that surpassed him in height. Moving, always moving. The akhara seemed a splendid hive unto itself, sealed off from mundane concerns like school and exams and the sting of the teacher’s switch. Here was his classroom. Here, among the living, was where he belonged.

•

Finally Mr. Benjamin arranges a match for Imam. He is to take on the Swede Jon Lemm, who has won belts from both the Alhambra and Hengler’s tournaments.

They meet at the Alhambra once again, to a sold-out arena. Imam has the advantage of height but feels gangly next to Lemm, who is a stout tangle of muscle, and pale, with eyes of a clear, celestial blue.

The referee summons them to the center of the mat. Lemm gives a cordial nod and locks Imam in a hard handshake before releasing him to his corner. Imam can feel the spectators watching him, murmuring. One fellow openly points at Gama, who seems not to notice, sitting beside Mr. Benjamin with an air of equanimity. There is a proverb that their forefathers minded for centuries: Make your mind as still as the bottom of a well, your body as hard as its walls.

Imam touches the mat, then his heart.

The bell clangs, and Lemm hurls himself at Imam; his back heel topples Imam onto his back. Imam slips free, darts around Lemm, quick as the crack of a whip. He does not see Lemm in terms of ankle and knee and leg. Instead he tracks Lemm’s movements, listening for one false note—the falter, the doubt, the dread.

At one point Lemm stalls, a fatal mistake. Imam lunges, lifts him up, and hurls him to the mat. He flips the bucking Swede and pins him. Three minutes and one second.

Not long into the second bout, Lemm is sprawled out on the mat, Imam on his back. Imam can feel Lemm struggling beneath him, trembling down to his deepest tissues until, with a savage groan, he deflates. One minute and eight seconds.

Imam gets to his feet, heaving. Something bounces lightly off his back. He whirls around to find a beheaded flower at his feet. Someone else tosses him a silver pocket watch. Imam turns from one side to the other; the men are roaring. It takes him a dizzying moment to realize they are roaring for him.

Of the fight with Lemm, a reporter from Health & Strength goes into rapture: “That really was a wonderful combat—a combat in which both men wrestled like masters of the art.… Let us have a few more big matches like unto that, and I tell you straight that the grappling game will soon become the greatest game of all.”

In the two weeks that follow, Gama and Imam defeat every wrestler who will accept the challenge. Though Gama the Great commands the most public attention, a dedicated sect of Imam devotees takes shape. They mint him with a new name: the Panther of the Punjab. They contend that the Panther is really the superior of the two, citing the blur of his bare brown feet, so nimble they make an elephant of every opponent. Gama may be stronger, but Imam has the broader arsenal of holds and locks and throws, as seen in his victories over Deriaz and Cherpillod, the latter Frenchman so frustrated that he stomped off to his dressing room midway through the match and refused to come out. Within a year or two, they claim, Imam will surpass Gama.

Gama listens in silence when Imam relays such passages. He betrays no emotion, though his fingers tend to tap against his glass of yogurt milk.

Baron Helmuth von Baumgarten is the only critic to speak in political terms, a realm unfamiliar to both Gama and Imam. “If the Indian wrestlers continue to win,” the baron writes, with typical inflammatory flair, “their victories will spur on those dusky subjects who continue to menace the integrity of the British Empire.”

And where most articles include a photo of Gama or Imam, this one displays a photo of a young Indian man in an English suit, with sculpted curls around a center part as straight as a blade. This is Madan Lal Dhingra, the baron explains, a student who, several months earlier, walked into an open street, revolver in hand, and shot a British government official