Selection Day: Cricket!

I loved Aravind Adiga’s first novel, White Tiger, and so I was eager to  read Selection Day. It was just okay. Following a father and two sons in the slums of Mumbai as the father abuses them in his efforts to secure them a place on the Indian cricket team, and with that spot, a new life. I don’t care very much about cricket, and I didn’t care very much about these characters, so it was a stretch to make it to the end. I was carried along by the relationship between the youngest son, Manju, and his friend-competitor-would-be-lover, Javed. I wondered and wanted Manju to figure out what *he* wanted  for his life (I guess I want the same for my own) and struggled with the resolution to this question as it felt… disappointing. Not in a narrative way, it makes narrative good sense, but because of the lost potential. Mourning possibility and all that. In those painful moments of life where it’s abundantly clear you are making a Big Decision, how do you know you’re making the right one, until decades later when the regret has found its way to you?