Epilogue

They drove home in the car his father had borrowed from a neighbour, because theirs was in the garage with a broken alternator.

They lost the match by eleven runs. Arjun's thirty-one was the highest score. He would not remember this for another three years, when it would suddenly matter.

His father drove with both hands on the wheel, which he only did when he was thinking carefully about something.

At a red light, he said: You ran hard between the wickets.

Arjun said: We lost.

His father said: Yes. And then, after the light changed: That's not what I was talking about.

There are things a game teaches that have no name in the rulebook.

How to wait. How to fail publicly and walk off a field anyway, with your bat under your arm, in front of the people who love you. How to sit beside someone in silence and let that be enough.

The coin had landed. The game had been played.

The afternoon light, as they drove, did what afternoon light does — fell long and golden across everything — and made the ordinary world look, for a moment, like the thing it actually is.