The months began to pass more quickly after that.
Not because the work became easier.
It did not.
The reserve team trained at an intensity that still left Bishal exhausted at the end of every session, still sent him back to his room with legs that trembled and lungs that burned.
But the exhaustion had become familiar.
He knew its shape now.
He knew how to carry it.
The rhythm of the season established itself.
Training on Monday through Friday, with Wednesdays slightly lighter to allow for recovery.
Matches on Saturdays, or occasionally Sundays if the schedule demanded it.
Film sessions on Monday afternoons, the reserve team gathered in a small room with a television and a whiteboard, watching footage of their own matches and the matches of upcoming opponents.
Fonseca led these sessions, pausing the footage at critical moments, pointing at the screen with a marker, asking questions in Portuguese and then repeating them in English for the players who needed it.
Bishal learned to see the game differently in those sessions.
On the pitch, everything was fast and fluid, decisions made in fractions of a second.
On the screen, the game was frozen, dissected, examined from angles he had never considered.
He watched himself play and saw things he had not seen in the moment.
A pass he had delayed too long.
A run he had missed.
A space he should have occupied and did not.
The footage was humbling.
It was also invaluable.
“You are improving,” Fonseca told him one afternoon, after a session in which Bishal had made two assists in a reserve match against a side from northern Portugal.
“You see the game faster now.
You make decisions before the ball arrives.
This is what I wanted from you.”
Bishal nodded.
“I still have a long way to go.”
“Yes.
But you know this.
Knowing this is part of why you will keep improving.”
It was the closest thing to a compliment Fonseca had ever given him.
Diego was called up to the first team in late November.
The news came on a Tuesday morning, delivered by Mateus himself, who appeared at the reserve team dressing room and spoke briefly to Fonseca before calling Diego outside.
The Brazilian returned a few minutes later with an expression Bishal had never seen on his face before.
Not joy, exactly.
Something more complicated.
Relief, perhaps, and fear, and a fierce, burning determination.
“First team,” Diego said.
“Training starts tomorrow.”
Bishal clasped his shoulder.
“You earned it.”
“I know.” Diego grinned, the old bravado returning.
“I have been earning it for weeks.
They finally noticed.”
The reserve team was quieter without Diego.
His voice had filled the dressing room, his laughter, his constant commentary on everything and everyone.
The other players adjusted, as players always did.
New trialists arrived and departed.
The squad shifted and changed.
But Bishal felt the absence keenly.
Diego had been his first friend in Portugal, the first person to treat him as an equal rather than a stranger.
Without him, the dressing room felt slightly emptier.
They still met for dinner when their schedules allowed.
Diego’s stories became more elaborate now that he was training with the first team.
He described Mateus’s methods in detail, the tactical demands, the physical intensity.
He described the senior players, their hierarchies and rivalries.
He described the feeling of sitting on the bench during a first team match, close enough to see everything, close enough to taste it.
“I will play soon,” Diego said.
“The coach is watching me.
He knows I am ready.”
“Are you?”
Diego considered the question seriously, which was unusual for him.
“I think so.
Other days I am terrified.
But the terror is useful.
It keeps me sharp.”
Bishal understood that.
The terror had kept him sharp for months.
The season deepened into winter.
The weather turned colder, the Atlantic throwing rain across the coast in long, grey sheets.
The training pitches became heavy and slow, the ball skidding unpredictably across the wet grass.
Bishal learned to play in conditions he had never encountered in India.
He learned to adjust his touch, to account for the wind, to read the bounce of the ball on sodden ground.
Every week brought a new lesson.
He called home regularly.
His mother’s voice was a constant, warm and worried and full of questions about food and weather and whether he was sleeping properly.
She had begun to sound less anxious as the months passed, as though she was slowly accepting that he was not going to disappear.
His father’s contributions remained brief but steady.
Practical questions about training and matches.
Occasional observations about football, which Bishal suspected his father had begun researching in private.
The thought of his father reading about Portuguese football, preparing himself to have informed conversations with his son, was quietly moving.
Sohini called once a week, sometimes more.
Her research had entered a new phase, something involving data analysis and a paper she was trying to finish.
She talked about it with the particular intensity she brought to everything she cared about.
Bishal listened and asked questions and understood perhaps half of what she told him.
The other half was simply the sound of her voice, which was enough.
“You sound different,” she said one evening, near the end of December.
“Different how?”
“Less tired.
Or tired in a different way.
The first months, you sounded like you were holding your breath.
Now you sound like you are breathing.”
He thought about this.
“I think I am.”
“Good.
Breathing is important.
I read that somewhere.”
“Was it a scientific paper?”
“Probably.
I read everything in scientific papers.
It is a professional hazard.”
He laughed.
The sound of his own laughter still surprised him sometimes.
It had been rare in the first months.
Now it came more easily.
Christmas passed quietly.
The club shut down for a few days, the training ground empty, the players scattered to their families.
Bishal spent the holiday alone, walking the empty streets of Estoril, eating at the café where the owner now greeted him by name.
João had gone to his parents’ house in Lisbon but called on Christmas Day to wish him well.
Diego was in Brazil, visiting his mother, sending photographs of beaches and family gatherings and food that made Bishal deeply hungry.
He called home on Christmas morning.
His mother had gathered the extended family, aunts and uncles and cousins crowded into the flat in Bengaluru.
They passed the phone around, voices overlapping, questions coming faster than he could answer them.
His mother took the phone back at the end and spoke quietly, her voice thick with emotion.
“We miss you.”
“I miss you too.”
“But you are doing what you went to do.
That is the important thing.”
“Yes.”
“Next Christmas, you will come home.”
“I will try.”
“Not try.
You will come home.
I will tell God.”
He smiled. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
“Then I will definitely come home.”
January brought a change.
Mateus appeared at a reserve team training session, the first time he had attended one directly since the final trial.
He stood on the touchline with Fonseca, the two of them speaking quietly while the players went through their drills.
Bishal noticed him immediately and felt the familiar tightening in his chest.
The head coach’s presence still carried weight.
After the session, Fonseca called Bishal over.
Mateus was still there, still watching.
“The first team has an injury,” Fonseca said.
“A midfielder.
He will be out for several weeks.
Coach Mateus wants you to train with the first team while he recovers.”
Bishal stared at him.
“The first team.”
“Yes.
Starting tomorrow.
This is not a promotion.
It is temporary.
But if you train well, it may become something more.”
Mateus spoke for the first time.
“Fonseca tells me you are ready.
I am not convinced.
But I trust his judgment.
Do not make him wrong.”
He walked away before Bishal could respond.
Bishal stood still for a moment, processing.
The first team.
Training with the first team.
It was not a contract.
It was not a guarantee.
It was a chance.
Another door, slightly open.
He called Sohini that evening and told her.
“First team,” she said.
“That is significant.”
“Temporary.
While someone is injured.”
“Everything is temporary.
That does not mean it is not significant.”
“I am terrified.”
“Good.
Terror is useful.
You told me Diego said that.”
“I did.”
“So be terrified.
And then go to training and do what you have been doing for months.
You know how to do this now.”
He sat with the phone in his hand after the call ended.
Outside, the parking lot lights were on.
The same lights, the same cars, the same view he had seen every evening since arriving.
But everything was different now.
Everything was always different.
He thought about the boy who had stood in this room on the first night, exhausted and afraid and wondering if he had made a terrible mistake.
That boy was still him.
But he was also someone else now.
Someone who had been invited to train with the first team.
Someone who had earned the attention of the head coach, even if that attention was still sceptical.
Tomorrow would be a new challenge.
New players, new expectations, new fears.
But he had faced new challenges before.
He had faced them every day since arriving in Portugal.
He would face this one too.