Free The Legend of Pradeep Mathew by Shehan Karunatilaka

batsman would require near-super powers.
    My Lanka Lime tastes like chilled food colouring. Lucky Sir offers me biscuits and I decline. I do not understand why biscuits are considered good things to put in your mouth. The sun lowers the heat and the boys come in for tea.
    ‘Adihetty. Very poor. Buck up. Buck up!’ Lucky Sir gets into master-in-charge mode.
    ‘Did you meet him when he played for Sri Lanka?’
    ‘Sometimes. In the early days he would drop in. I said, son you have a talent, work every day at it. Fellow was lazy.’
    Lucky Sir’s rich ebony voice blends well with the fading light. The boys who missed catches begin running their laps of penance along the boundary ropes.
    ‘I would advise him on variations. He listened, same expression, like he’s not listening. Then he’d bowl a brilliant ball, but not the ball I asked him to bowl.’
    I close the tattered scorebooks, they have nothing more to tell.
    ‘So how did he go from U-17 to playing for Sri Lanka without 1st XI cricket?’
    Lucky Sir gathers the scorebook and looks around.
    ‘He might have unofficially played for the Royal 1st XI.’ He pats down his hair and winks. ‘But I did not tell you that.’

Nineteen Eighty-three
    Consider these facts:
In 1983, a team of West Indian rebels toured apartheid South Africa.
In 1983, Pradeep Mathew may or may not have played 1st XI cricket for Royal.
In 1983, the Tamil Tigers sank a Sri Lankan army boat. The ensuing riots by Sinhalese mobs ensured that over the next decade (a) 80,000 lives would be lost and (b) Sri Lanka would only play ten home test matches.
In 1983, Royal won the Royal–Thomian cricket match for the first time in fifteen years.
After seven years of Grand Slam glory, Björn Borg lost his confidence and retired aged twenty-six.
In 1983, India snatched the World Cup from Clive Lloyd’s invincible Windies in classic underdog fashion.
That year, I wrote an uncomplimentary article about Indian cricket and Kapil Dev refused to be interviewed by me.
Millennium Bug
    My phone starts ringing at 6 a.m. I hear it as if in another room, my conscious mind misted by the fumes of evaporated rum. My body aches and my head is nailed to my pillow. The phone keeps ringing. I hear Sheila mumbling, asking, replying, snapping, screaming, shrieking. I pick out random words. ‘Y2K… Millennium Bug… Y2Komputers… Pradeep Mathew…’
    I turn over, cover my ears and part my eyelids. Sheila is lying on her side snarling into the phone. It rings as soon as she puts it down.
    ‘Listen. You… you… f… f… fellow. I told you no Millennium bugging.’
    Next caller.
    ‘Who is this… There is no b… blooming Pradeep Sivanathan… Kindly stop calling.’
    She slams down the phone and I jolt awake. She glares. She is in her nightdress and even though she is shaped more like an alarm clock than an hourglass, I see beauty in her. When she glares, her eyes shine and her skin glows, and the girl who I followed on a bus to Kotahena in ’64 barks at me in her sweet voice. ‘Did you put some ad in the papers about Y2K or Millennium something?’
    The memory of the Burgher girl at Galle Face Hotel Dinner Dance 1963, the girl on the bus to Kotahena, takes what little blood I have in my brain and sends it elsewhere. I barely manage a grunt.
    ‘From morning… ringing… ringing… Y2K… Millennium… Sivanathan… Mathew…’
    I first saw her on the night of 31 December at Galle Face, when my friend asked her to dance, while I sulked at the bar. She was going steady with a trainee reporter, apprenticed with me at the Daily News under Mr Herbert Hulugalle. For six months, I pretended to live in Kotahena, even though I was boarded in Nugegoda on the other side of town.
    Once, we both happened to be standing in a packed bus. Every time her bosom brushed my arm, she apologised, politely and sweetly.
    After six months of buses to Kotahena, I gave the fair girl a letter. A poem by the Lord Byron which I passed off as my