Near a low-end graveyard stands a bookie and a philosopher ("Life itself is fixed"). He has seen nearly 10 lakh Pakistani rupees pass through his hands during the one-day series and his best advice to his old friends during the series was not to bet at all. He is a loud man, so a small crowd of believers gather on the street. "Before the first match, after Inzamam won the toss," the bookie says like a preacher, "why did the white man jump the gun and declare on TV that Pakistan would bowl?"
The white man didn’t do that.
"He did," he says. The crowd around him nods in approval.
In a somewhat upmarket part of Lahore, Hamid, a marketing executive, shows text messages he received before every match. "These were tips from a good source," he says stylishly. All the tips proved to be correct. Pakistan won when the mysterious source said they would and India won on other days. "Peshawar had to be conceded for security reasons," he says knowingly. "If India had won there would have been violence."
Hamid is not a betting person. So he passed on the tips to 30-year-old Shahid who bet over a lakh during the series. "I can’t tell you how much I made, because I kept shifting the bets but all the tips that I got were so right." He is convinced "nothing that involves Pakistan can be completely clean".
And so the story goes with a tailor somewhere saying, "the governments have mutually fixed it", and a hotel manager saying, "it was in some people’s commercial interest to make the matches thrilling". The series, it appears, was a bit too beautiful for many to believe it was real.
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