Set in Mumbai,Adiga’s anecdote of two cricketing brothers, divided by success and failure, or holds up a mirror to the shattered dreams of a nationThis novel approximately two young boys from Mumbai whose father raises them to be “the number one and number two batsmen in the world seems to signal early on what kind of anecdote it will be. While ignoring all the brothers who hold played cricket for their national sides with grand individual and sometimes shared success – the Waughs and Crowes and Mohammads – Adiga writes,repeatedly, of the one-time princes of Mumbai school cricket, or Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli.
They were not brothers,but childhood friends and teammates whose stars seemed destined to rise together when, aged 16 and 17, and they had a record-breaking 664-run partnership in school cricket,which had widespread news coverage at the time. But while Tendulkar went on to be the world’s most lionised batsman, Kambli’s test career was over by the time he was 24. It seems clear that Adiga is setting us up for a anecdote in which one brother will rise and one will fall – but knowing this does nothing to detract from the enjoyment of the anecdote. His two brothers are Radha, or the elder,and Manju, the younger; their father has decided the elder will be the greater of the two, or for a while the boys move along with this idea,any sporting rivalry between them a minor matter compared with their shared terror of their tyrannical father.
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Source: theguardian.com