The power was still on when Bishal reached Mr.
Nair’s apartment, which meant the television would work and the match would be watched.
Small victories.
He climbed the stairs slowly.
His legs were still heavy from the day, not from training but from the strange exhaustion of waiting.
The appeal had been submitted three days ago.
Three days of checking his phone, of starting at every buzz, of pretending to his mother that he wasn’t doing exactly that.
Tonight he had decided to stop waiting.
Tonight there was football.
Mr.
Nair’s door was already open.
It was always open on match nights.
The apartment had the particular smell of a home that had been lived in for decades.
Old wood, fried onions, the faint sweetness of incense from the pooja room Mrs.
Nair maintained with the dedication of a temple priest.
Tonight the smell of samosas cut through everything else, fresh from the oil, stacked on a steel plate in the kitchen.
“Arrey, football star.”
Mr.
Nair’s voice carried across the room before Bishal had taken three steps inside.
The man himself was planted in his usual chair, the one with the best angle to the television, the one nobody else dared sit in.
His white kurta was slightly stained at the collar.
His glasses sat low on his nose.
He looked exactly as he had looked for every match Bishal had ever watched here, which was to say he looked permanent.
“You came,” Mr.
Nair said.
“I came.”
“Good.
Sit somewhere.
Anywhere that isn’t this chair.”
The room was already filling.
Children occupied the floor directly in front of the television, cross legged and fidgeting, the way children sat when they knew they would be told to move and were determined to extract every possible second before that happened.
Teenagers lined the walls, leaning against each other, against bookshelves, against whatever surface presented itself.
The uncles had claimed the sofa and the dining chairs dragged in from the next room.
Someone had brought a plastic stool from their own flat.
Someone else was sitting on a stack of old newspapers.
Bishal found a patch of floor near the window and settled in.
The broadcast was already showing the stadium.
Luzhniki, Moscow.
The floodlights made the grass look almost artificial, too green to be real.
Flags waved in every section.
Eighty thousand people, and the sound of them came through the television like distant weather.
“Spain,” said a teenager near the door, with absolute authority.
“Easy.”
“Germany never loses finals,” someone else replied.
“This Germany will.”
“Your opinion is based on what?”
“Football.”
“That’s not analysis.”
“It’s better than analysis.”
Mr.
Nair’s wife appeared with more samosas and a stern look that suggested she had not personally invited most of these people.
She surveyed the room, sighed audibly, and put the plate down on the nearest flat surface.
Several hands reached for it before it had stopped moving.
“Germany,” she said, and walked back to the kitchen.
Nobody argued with Mrs.
Nair.
Not about football.
Not about anything.
The match began and the room went quiet.
Or as quiet as a room with thirty people in it could go.
Conversations dropped to murmurs.
The children stopped fidgeting.
Even the uncles stopped providing unsolicited opinions about formations they did not understand.
Bishal watched with the particular attention of someone who had spent his life inside this game.
The Spanish midfield moved like a single organism.
Xavi received the ball and already knew where Iniesta would be.
Iniesta received it and already knew where Silva was running.
The passes arrived not where the player was but where the player would be, which was the difference between professional football and everything below it.
He found himself leaning forward without meaning to.
The Germans were bigger, stronger, more direct.
But Spain didn’t need to be bigger.
Spain simply kept the ball and waited.
Patience as a weapon.
It reminded him of something Fonseca might have said, if Fonseca were Spanish and interested in explaining himself.
In the thirty third minute, Xavi picked up the ball in the centre circle.
Bishal saw the run before the pass was played.
Fernando Torres had drifted wide, pulling the German centre back with him, and then suddenly he wasn’t wide anymore.
He was sprinting into the channel between the two defenders, into the space that shouldn’t have existed but did, because the defenders had been pulled apart by the movement before it.
Torres touched it once, looked up, and Lehmann was already coming off his line.
The angle was narrow.
The moment was disappearing.
Torres lifted the ball over the goalkeeper with the delicacy of someone placing an egg on a shelf.
The net rippled.
The room exploded.
Samosas flew.
Tea spilled across someone’s lap.
A plastic chair tipped over backwards with a teenager still in it.
Mr.
Nair rose from his sacred armchair and shouted something that was swallowed by the noise of thirty other people shouting simultaneously.
The children on the floor jumped up and down as if the floor itself had become a trampoline.
Bishal found himself laughing.
Not at the goal.
Not even at the room’s reaction.
At the simple fact that for thirty seconds he had forgotten about the visa appeal.
About the rejection.
About the waiting.
About the six days that remained before the trial in Portugal became impossible to reach.
For thirty seconds he had been nothing but a football fan watching a beautiful goal.
The noise subsided gradually.
People returned to their seats.
The samosa plate was discovered to be empty and a fresh one appeared as if by magic.
Mrs.
Nair could be heard muttering in the kitchen about hooligans and chaos, but she brought the samosas anyway.
During the halftime break the arguments started.
“Ballon d’Or is Ronaldo this year,” said a young man in a Manchester United shirt.
“Forty two goals.
No question.”
“Messi,” said someone else.
“Messi hasn’t won anything.”
“He will.”
“How do you know?”
“I have eyes.”
An older uncle, the one who always wore a cricket sweater regardless of the weather, cleared his throat loudly.
“Kaká is still the best player in the world.”
The room groaned collectively.
“Uncle, Kaká hasn’t been the best since last year.”
“Kaká is class.
Class doesn’t disappear.”
“His knees disappeared.”
“That’s disrespectful.”
“It’s accurate.”
Bishal listened and said nothing.
He knew how these arguments ended.
He knew which of these young men would be right and which would be wrong.
He knew that the teenager insisting Messi would become the greatest of all time was seeing something nobody else in this room could see yet.
It was strange, carrying the future inside you and having to keep quiet about it.
One of the neighbourhood boys, a skinny child whose name Bishal could never remember, tugged at his sleeve.
“Bishal bhai.”
“Hmm.”
“You think India will ever play in a tournament like this?”
The question was asked quietly, as if the boy was slightly embarrassed to be asking it.
Several people nearby turned to listen.
The boy’s eyes were serious.
He wasn’t making conversation.
He wanted to know.
Bishal looked at the television.
At the stadium in Moscow.
At the flags and the floodlights and the eighty thousand people.
Then he looked back at the boy.
“One day,” he said.
“You really believe that?”
“Yeah.”
The boy seemed satisfied with that.
He turned back to the television and Bishal watched him for a moment longer.
The child had no idea that the man he was asking had spent an entire lifetime waiting for the same thing.
That the answer was hope dressed up as certainty.
That some dreams took longer than a single life allowed.
But the boy didn’t need to know any of that.
Not yet.
The second half began and Spain continued to control the game with the quiet arrogance of a team that knew it was better.
Germany pressed and pushed and tried to force mistakes, but Spain simply absorbed the pressure and passed around it.
Every German attack ended the same way.
A Spanish interception.
A Spanish pass.
Bishal’s phone buzzed in his pocket.
He ignored it at first.
The match was in its final twenty minutes and Germany were throwing everything forward.
Ballack nearly scored from a header.
Casillas saved it with one hand.
The room gasped collectively.
The phone buzzed again.
He pulled it out and glanced at the screen.
A message from the federation official.
Two words.
Appeal accepted.
For a moment he didn’t move.
Around him the match continued.
Spain were passing the ball in triangles, running down the clock, the German players growing more desperate with every touch.
The noise of the room continued.
The children continued fidgeting.
Mr.
Nair continued occupying his chair like a king on a throne.
Bishal stared at the screen and read the message again.
Not approved.
Accepted for review.
The appeal had been accepted for review.
The door that had been closed was now slightly open.
A crack of light where before there had been none.
He looked up at the television.
Spain were about to win the European Championship.
Fernando Torres, twenty four years old, was about to become a European champion.
Torres had grown up in a country where football was the second language, where every town had a club and every club had a youth system and every system fed into the national team like streams into a river.
Bishal was twenty three.
He had grown up in a country where football occupied the corners.
Where the system fed into nothing.
Where the river, if it existed at all, ran underground.
The difference wasn’t talent.
The difference was the ground itself.
The soil.
The structure.
The simple fact of being born in a place that expected you to succeed at this instead of being surprised when you tried.
He slipped the phone back into his pocket.
The final whistle blew.
Spain were champions.
The room erupted for the second time, less explosive than the goal but warmer somehow, the satisfaction of seeing the better team win.
People began gathering their things.
The children were collected by parents.
The uncles stretched and complained about their knees.
Mr.
Nair remained in his chair, watching the celebrations on screen with the contentment of a man who had seen many finals and would see many more.
Bishal stood and made his way toward the door.
“Leaving already?” Mr.
Nair called.
“Early training tomorrow.”
“Training for what?
You’re going to Portugal.”
The room went slightly quieter.
A few heads turned.
The news had spread, as news always did in apartment complexes.
Bishal smiled.
“If the visa comes through.”
“It will come through.
My wife has been praying.”
“Then it’s definitely coming through.”
Mr.
Nair laughed.
“Go.
Sleep.
You’ll need it.”
Outside, the night had cooled slightly.
The stairs were empty and quiet.
Bishal walked down them slowly, one hand on the railing, the other in his pocket where the phone sat with its two word message.
Appeal accepted.
Not victory.
Not yet.
But the possibility of victory.
The chance to keep fighting.
And right now, with the noise of the final still ringing in his ears and the memory of Torres’s goal still fresh behind his eyes, that felt like enough.
He reached his flat and stood outside the door for a moment.
Six days.
He would tell his parents in the morning.