Read part 1 of this story here.
“Winner stays.” Arun said, lounging on one of the chairs in the living room. Of course he’d say that, because he was better than the rest of us. Arun’s my height, with skin that had seemingly never seen the sun, and the thinnest line of hair connecting his eyebrows. The zebra-patterned lounge chair —one of two— he was sitting back in was set uncomfortably close to the flatscreen tv while the people not playing had to sit on the pergo wood floor and crane their necks to odd angles to watch the game unfold. A 2-litre bottle of Coke sat on the floor next to me, with steel tumblers next to each person in the room.
“Go fuck yourself.” Sushil replied, but we end up playing by those rules anyway. Sushil’s two years younger than Arun, Ram, and me; he’s like a nursery rhyme teapot—short and stout, but with an even shorter temper. He can be somewhat extreme—he once hit me in the head with an ironbox, though I just can’t seem to remember how that happened.
While Ram and Arun played the first FIFA match, Sushil and I sat on the ground behind them, with my dog lying between us, and a glass bowl full of cut raw mango,liberally covered with chili powder and salt, in my hands. The conversation turned naturally to our evening plans. I wanted to go down early to play cricket with a different group of people before we started football.
“Fuck off. I’m not playing cricket. Shut up and sit here. We’ll go down at five-thirty. OHWHATAGOAL!” Arun said, the last part punctuated by him punching the controller into the air, while Ram sat next to him looking dejected—though, to someone who didn’t know Ram (affectionately known as T-Rex, on account of his gait when he ran,) he might have just looked expressionless. Only a select few could read the minute changes on the (almost) blank slate that was Ram’s face.