2084: An Algorithmic State — Act IX: Patience, Chapter 47: Manoj

The profile that de-listed Manoj did not count his forty-one runs. It took biomechanics. Twelve years later, every Sunday, his body still plays three overs of correct cricket for sensors that are no longer there.

In Brief: Manoj is forty-one and was dropped from licensed cricket at twenty-nine, when his measured profile fell below threshold. Now he plays on Sundays on a strip of packed earth behind the grain market, where nobody measures anything. A quick, undisciplined sixteen-year-old bowler named Irfan wants him to teach the shot he cannot explain.

Manoj had been out of the licensed game for twelve years and could still tell you what the sensors would have said about any ball he faced.

It took him three overs every Sunday to get free of it. He had never managed to shorten the three overs, and he had stopped trying somewhere around the fourth year.

Overs one to three: the correct shot. Weight forward, elbow high, bat straight, the shot the profile approved. He could not help it. He had been doing it since he was seven, and doing it under measurement since he was seventeen. A body that has been measured for that long does not stop presenting itself for measurement just because the sensors have been taken down.

Somewhere in the fourth over something went in him and he started playing.

The de-listing had come by notice. Everyone said that was the humane way, and Manoj had never been able to see the humanity in it.

He had been twenty-nine. His numbers were down, and he did not dispute that, then or since. The notice said that his profile had fallen below threshold against the age-adjusted curve. In practice, a body of measurements taken from him at seventeen, twenty-one and twenty-six had been extrapolated forward. The extrapolation and his actual twenty-nine-year-old body had been compared, and the extrapolation had won.

He had gone to an office about it. There was an office. The man in the office had been decent and had explained, correctly, that de-listing was not a judgement of ability. Manoj had said that he had made forty-one in a competitive match nine days earlier. The man had said yes, he had seen that, but it did not enter the profile, because the profile did not take match outcomes. It took biomechanics. This was in fact a protection, the man said, because outcome-based assessment had historically been vulnerable to favouritism.

Everything the man said was true.

Manoj had gone home and had not touched a bat for two years. He came back to it at thirty-one, on a strip of packed earth behind the grain market, in a match that nobody was measuring. He played three overs of correct cricket and then hit a ball over a wall.

Nobody had taught him the shot.

He could not get anybody to understand it, including the men on the plastic chairs, who had a theory.

The theory was that his eyes had gone at twenty-nine, which was why the Programme had dropped him. In the fourth over, they said, he stopped trying to see the ball. It was wrong in both halves, and he had never said so.

It was not a shot. It was not in a coaching manual and could not be put in one. It was what his body did in the fourth over, when it had finally given up expecting to be scored. It had a different shape every time. Some Sundays it was a heave across the line. Some Sundays it was almost nothing, a late, small, wrong-footed thing that went behind square. It ran four because nobody had been standing anywhere near where a correct player would have put it.

It had taken twenty years to arrive at. He would sometimes try to say it, and always said it badly. Not twenty years of practising it, because you could not practise it. Twenty years of playing correctly, thousands of hours of it. By the end the correct thing was so deep in him that there was something underneath it for the correct thing to be a lid on.

A boy who had never learned the correct shot could not play the exception. He would just be a boy playing badly.

He was forty-one now, and the three overs had become four. He had a job at a fabrication yard two sectors over, and he did not think about it on Sundays.

That summer the yard went from six days to four, by a notice nobody in it read to the end. The ration counter behind the grain market shut at eleven now instead of one. On Sundays its queue ran along the wall where the plastic chairs were, and the men in the queue watched the cricket while they waited.

A bowler of about sixteen had started coming, quick and undisciplined, and he wanted to be taught. His name was Irfan and he worked mornings at the grain market, where he carried sacks.

Manoj taught him the forward defensive.

“That’s not what you do.”

“It’s what I did for twenty years.”

“You do the other thing.”

“You will do the other thing when you are forty-one,” Manoj said, “and you have been playing correctly since you were seven, and something in you gets tired of it in the middle of an afternoon. Until then you are just a boy hitting across the line and getting out, and I have seen four hundred of those and none of them were worth watching.”

Irfan sulked for a fortnight and came back.

The match ran until the light went, the way it always did, and ended without ceremony.

In the second hour Manoj was in during the sixth over, which was late for him. He took two balls the correct way and then did something on the third that nobody afterward agreed about. The two Sikh boys had it as a cut. The Malayali shopkeeper had it as a pull. One of the old men insisted it was neither and had no name. That argument ran on the wall for the rest of the afternoon, and it was not settled, and it would come back in a fortnight.

The ball left the game and became somebody else’s problem.

Manoj stood in the packed earth with his weight wrong and both feet in the wrong places. His shoulders were open in a manner no profile in the Programme would have passed. The noise came up off the wall from both sides. He did not smile, because he had never smiled after it, and had never been able to say why, and had stopped being asked.

He walked back to the crease. The sixteen-year-old was already running in.

About this serial: 2084: An Algorithmic State is a dystopian novel by Nithin Palal, published online one chapter at a time.

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