The Battle of the Board - Behind the Scenes

Ding Liren, Vishy Anand, Vidit Gujrathi, Praggnanandhaa, and I – what do we all have in common? Rain or shine, we regularly attend chess tournaments, sitting through hours of gameplay, and at the end, nodding at people with a smile, irrespective of the result. But unlike them, to move the pieces around on the board, I'd need unnaturally long arms that might have to bend at odd angles and sometimes navigate through walls that separate the players' hall and the parents' waiting area.

Being a chess mom is much less glamorous than one would imagine. For one, you don't get to see your child play as you would if they were playing cricket or badminton. Sure, there are live telecasts on certain websites. However, I learned only much later (than I'd like to admit in public) that such privileges are reserved only for the first 5 or 10 boards. Until your child reaches one of those 'top' tables, you'll have to make do with their hurriedly scribbled, blotched, scratched, and incomplete scoresheets they bring back after the games.

The waiting rooms for parents are usually top-notch – you might occasionally be lucky enough to find a roof overhead or luxurious furnishings such as slightly faded plastic stools or chairs (perhaps standing in solidarity with color diversity?). They might have a slightly broken backrest or armrest, but why would any rational person lean back on the backrest or rest their arms on the armrest, I fail to understand. You can enjoy the comfort of the company of 8 to 10 other sweaty, slightly sunburnt prodigy-producing parents and coaches, seated back-to-back, side-to-back, or even arm-over-arm squeezed under small patches of broken shadow cast by a few parched trees scattered around the venue.

A good number of these individuals can be caught staring at their phones – which is what a good number of any good people are caught doing these days. Some are lost in parallel realms, their noses buried deep in books thicker than medieval castle walls. And then there's the I-must-stay-adequately-hydrated population taking swigs from their own private flasks - or bottles as we muggles call it (I've had my doubts that the flasks secretly contain Polyjuice potion and the drinkers are paid babysitters filling in for the insufferably bored parents/coaches).  Not to mention the I-eat-when-I’m bored lot munching on homemade (that sometimes look like they have been half sat-on) sandwiches or digestive biscuits or toasted almonds or anything else typically labelled ‘healdhy’ as they wait for their cerebral champs to come back with a grim or a grinning face.

Real-life sample of a scoresheet

Once your child is back from the game, you'll have the excitement of decoding the scoresheets. Reading them can be as complicated as the game itself when your child's handwriting makes every alphabet curiously resemble every other English alphabet. Some people resort to approaching their child's opponent to ask for their scoresheets in order to scout for clues and deduce missing bits of mission-critical information. In the chess world, it's often encouraged to convert the game into .pgn files reading the scoresheets by using simple-as-calculus apps meant for the purpose. 

The best part of the entire ordeal is listening to your child excitedly jabber nonstop about how they used a newly learned tactic to capture the opponent's bishop on g3, how the opponent forked their pawn and knight with their queen on b6, and how they still managed to finish off the opponent with a brilliant mate-in-4. Nodding along, throwing in a couple of questions like 'wow, really?' and 'are you serious?!' and occasionally sprinkling in a few deeper questions like 'did your opponent blunder?' and 'what opening did you play?' or 'did you finally get the dream position today?' might make you seem like the intelligent, dedicated Chess Mom that you are.

Image for illustration
purpose only. 

At the end of every tournament, which can run from anywhere between 1 to 5 days, parents (and children) are taught invaluable life lessons of patience and tolerance for hunger, while building resilience among the older population for whiny, grumpy, and genuinely tired children. With grumbling stomachs one must inevitably learn to spar with the tiny, abhorrent needles extending from a mosquito's face while they wait for the trophies and medals (which are, much to everybody’s admiration, distributed well before the clock strikes midnight). And just when you're promising yourself that you won't register for another tournament for at least a couple of weeks (so that you can live the life of a normal parent, pamper yourself with a few late hours of Netflix binge-watching and unhealthy snacks instead of being precariously perched on poorly moulded pieces of busted plastic or on the least dirty patch on the ground), you find yourself making the payment for the next U-07 tournament scheduled in 3 days. 

Behold, what other path shall a parent tread when their child's heart is captivated by the art of chess?

 

F.R.I.E.N.D.S with 6 little dots and all that

 I remember the days when I eagerly devoured series after series on my laptop and hoarded more movies than I could watch in a good decade. It had reached a point where even the boot screen would take an agonizing fifteen minutes to load – forget the home page. One could take a brisk walk, come back home and, off-key sing four whole songs behind the safety of the shower curtain, wolf down an entire pack of chips (some people do this and deserve not to be judged) and lick clean all their fingers one-by-one (again, one should not be judged for what they do when they think no one is watching them) and then come to find my laptop's home page huff, puff, pant, and wheeze into the last bit of loading.

“Game of Thrones” was all the rage in those days, and so were “How I Met Your Mother” and “Flash” and “Supernatural” and “Arrow” and “Sherlock” and a whole lot of other shows that we had to painfully scour a compatible subtitle file for. Every file was deleted promptly after a single viewing to make room for the next torrent download that was also destined to vanish into the vast digital abyss.

Amidst this digital chaos, there remained one folder in my laptop that stood untouched. No matter how many times the OS threw the Low Disk Space window in my face, begging me and sometimes even threatening me to “Manage” my space. (I was a true Engineer and was not cut out to “manage” things. Pffft.) That sacred folder bore the name 'F.R.I.E.N.D.S,' for it was, in fact my own collection of every single episode of the sitcom F.R.I.E.N.D.S. I wanted my unwavering devotion to the show to be evident, even in matters as trivial as the folder name. Even if it meant typing out 6 extra little dots and having the CAPS lock on and all that.

Many times, I had to make difficult choices between a series and a movie, as my laptop would let me have only either. While I honed the art of deliberation and careful consideration in making important entertainment choices (which subsequently felt like life choices), I continued to let my cherished F.R.I.E.N.D.S take up all the space it desired. If memory allocation had been within my control, I would have gladly granted a few extra bytes to that folder, just for the heck of it.

But was I being an evil stepmother to the rest of the movies and series? No! I regarded this dear little folder as my ultimate source of solace and stress relief. It acted as my personal sanctuary, my sanity-restorer. My own hip flask of Endorphin. I could play just about any episode of any season at any point in the day (or night) and still find it relevant and soothing like the consoling shoulder of a best friend.

The best part is that even though every one of those 6 characters could have been very successful in their lives, they fumbled and floundered their way through life like very real people. At the end of an exhausting day, we didn’t have to begrudgingly watch the extravagant life of a multi-star Michelin chef or a millionaire Hollywood actor or an impeccably dressed fashion icon. We could instead laugh, sigh, cringe, cry and live life in the company of a struggling actor who smelled fart, a boring professor who was very particular about his sandwiches or even a singing masseuse who carried the children of her own brother.

For more than one reason, this show invoked powerful emotions in me and it continues to do so. Because I know that if those 6 could get around to being happy for ten whole years on the screen, I can too, off the screen. If they could get over heartbreaks and failed marriages and childlessness and career struggles and so much more just because they had amazing people with and for them, then so can I. Because even though it hasn’t been my day or my week or my month or even my year and I’ve had a million struggles of my own in my life, I have a million and one reasons to live through them. I have my husband, my son, my brother, my sisters(in-law), my parents, my family, my extended family, and my own F.R.I.E.N.D.S (like the Australian Mahima and Hyderabadi Nireekshana who bully me into mentioning their names in my blogs) who have been and will be “there for me”.

Thank you, Marta Kauffman and David Crane for redefining sitcom. For redefining happiness. For redefining 'break'. And for defining Friends. 

The Printed Horror

 It was going to end here. On this abandoned terrace of a 20 storey building. It started in 2015 and it was damn well, ending today. She was sick of it. Sick of being the only one seeing it differently and being called wrong every single time! And she knew Abhilash was the one who had started it all, all those years ago. And so, he must go. However it happens.

She looked at him mercilessly. Gagged with an old and stinky sock, a tape covering most of his filthy mouth - the mouth that had taunted and tormented her endlessly, for only telling whatever she had seen. He looked exhausted from the dehydration. His eyes were puzzled, begging her to let him go. His focus shifted onto the bottle of cool water that lay on the table. He swallowed his parched throat as he watched longingly at those little drops of water rolling down the sides of the  bottle leaving an uneven wet ring around it. 

Under the sweltering heat, Abhilash seemed to doze off and just as his breath became deep and rhythmic, she smacked him hard on the face, waking him up in a jolt. He began sobbing, grunting muffled requests into the sock as he gagged. She wondered if he was throwing up. And the thought pleased her. He shouldn’t be spared - the little voice in her head kept telling over and over - for all those times. 

She pulled out the decrepit printout from her beige silk clutch. She took her time ironing it out on the table, trying to straighten out the creases that had impinged upon the precious photo. Her coolers were not doing a great job protecting her from the oppressive sun. She knew she would get a migraine if she stayed out any longer. But she wanted to ask him one last time what he saw on the paper. 

She ripped away the tape securing his mouth and watched him spit out the stinky sock from his mouth. No vomit - she noted with disappointment. “Sridevi, please untie me. I won't run. I just want to drink some water”, he croaked. “Oh, you don’t need to be untied for a drink” she smirked. She reached for the bottle and threw the water on his face. He shuddered in shock. But she knew how good the cool water felt against his sunburned face. She resisted her urge to swing the bottle against his head and instead poured some water into his thirsty cracked lips. “Oh, thank you, thank you” he sputtered breathlessly as he drunk up greedily.

She held up the paper in front of his face and growled “Tell me, what do you see. What do you actually see?”. 

“Argh! Not this again! I see Blue! Blue, blue, blue! I know you want me to tell White. But I don’t care if you kill me. But all I see is Blue!”. 

“What? No! You said it was White! I am the one who saw Blue!” She turned the paper in her hand and looked at the dress again. It was Blue and Black!

“You never listen, do you? I always said Blue and you said it was White!”

Sridevi tilted her head a tad to the left and looked at the paper again. It looked slightly white and gold alright. So what had she really told everyone? She couldn’t remember.

All she remembered was being the only one who saw Blue. Or White? She really couldn’t recall. 

“Lies, lies and more lies”, she screamed as she drew out the huge carving knife. She was putting an end to this and NOW! 

 

He breathed a sigh as he realised he had cut through the entire rope around his wrist with the shard of sheet metal he had located lying right next to him. Swift as a lightning, he pulled himself up and put his entire weight jamming his shoulder into her chest and sending her flying down the twenty storeys. She landed with a dull thud and he watched grimly as the crimson pool around her head seemed to seep out endlessly. 

She woke in horror, trembling uncontrollably. It took her a minute to compose herself as she looked around to find Abhilash sleeping peacefully next to her. Sridevi couldn’t believe that despite the absurdity of it all, she hadn’t realised that she had only been dreaming. She looked down at her hands and saw that she was still clutching her half read copy of “Misery”. She threw the printed horror under the cot and swore to herself to never fall asleep reading another Stephen King. 

The Rail Revelation

 Of late all her travels had been by air - including that one time she flew off the cliff; oh right, that had been a dream. As she walked into the railway station holding her son’s wrist – a tad more tightly that she usually would, she was unmindfully scanning the station for the baggage check-in counter. “Samosaeee, samosaeee” the hoarse cries of the turbaned hawker snapped her back to reality. She looked up at the huge LED display and skimmed through it to find her train number. Argh! Telugu script! By the time she had struggled to read through the first 3 letters on row 1, the display thankfully changed to English informing her train would depart from platform 5 in half hour.

She walked ahead trudging her luggage along. And climbed the almost-vertical staircase yanking her son by his arms. He was still counting the wagons on a freight train exiting the station lazily. She smiled sadly remembering that her little daughter was only a few months old when they last took a train. She tried to imagine what it would’ve been like if her daughter had been with her now. She sighed audibly and kept walking/dragging on till she reached platform 5. Her train was already there and she wouldn’t have to wait on the platform next to the deafening drilling going on in the tracks – what a relief! She located her coach, helped her son up and climbed the coach pulling up with her, her mysteriously weighty trolley – she had only packed in 3 days’ worth of clothes and a couple of towels. She could have sworn the bag gained a few thousand grams with every step she took.

Her son had been grinning bright-eyed, ever since he whiffed the heavenly aroma of ‘bajjis’ as they’d walked past the pantry car. As soon as they plomped down on their seats he darted up to the upper berth (upstairs, he called it). A sweet-looking woman, about her mother’s age, all pink in her face, walked into her compartment, urgently ushering her porter to drop her 3 huge trolleys, get paid and get off the train – he had just under fifteen minutes before the train started! The weak-looking porter kindly offered to arrange her humongous bags below the seats, reassuring her that he will indeed manage to get off the train on time. The Plump Aunty (let's call her PA to ease up on the pronouns) smiled up at her son who was tying the string of his shorts to the safety rails of his berth. “What are you doing beta?” she asked him fondly. He answered her that he is making himself a safety harness in case he falls off. PA chuckled and turned to her “Is he yours?”. She nodded, smiling. “How old is he?” “6, aunty”, she said. 

By the time the train departed, her son had already made over 6 trips between the ground floor (as he called it) and upstairs. And had devoured 2 bajjis, washed it down with one frooti and finished over half of all the snacks he’d carefully chosen for himself at the supermarket last evening. And his every move seemed to amuse PA. It must be the ‘Grandma-gene’, she thought to herself, as she recalled how his own two grandmothers adored him and pampered him to legitimate ‘brat-hood’. But he had always been a well-behaved, soft spoken and sweet little boy – both her kids had been so. And she had always been a proud mother – like every other mother in the universe. 

She heard a child chattering nonstop from a few compartments away. She remembered her own daughter asking her a zillion questions on their walk back home from her school. She missed her like she missed a limb. Her baby girl had gone too soon. Three was the age to play on the swing, sniff at wild flowers, explore nasty looking insects, secretly chew on crayons and cry bitterly on your mother’s shoulder hoping to avoid playschool. 3 was not the age to die of pneumonia. The cold reasoning voice in her head reminded her “Almost a third of all pneumonia victims are children younger than 5”. She had read it up. She knew a lot more about pneumonia than she liked. The comforting voice in her head gently reminded her that whilst the grief will always be with her, life will inevitably grow up around it. She only had to put one foot in front of the other for now, take it one day at a time. 

She blinked away her tears hoping her son hadn’t caught sight of it. She didn’t want to keep reminding her son that he had lost a sibling who had adored him. She looked up and saw that PA had now joined her son upstairs and they were both uttering random gibberish and giggling. It was very sweet. Upon inquiry, she learnt that they were inventing their own language. After a few games of ludo, rock-paper-scissors and uno, and with the snacks bag considerably lighter, her son announced that he was sleepy and was going back upstairs. Soon enough he fell asleep to the rhythmic rocking and swaying of the train. 

She was touched by how much PA genuinely doted him. “What do your children do, aunty? '', she asked. PA smiled at her, “I don’t have any, beta. My son and husband passed away in a car crash when my son was only 7 – about his age” she said beckoning at her son who was now slightly drooling. “And that was over 22 years ago'' It felt like a blow to her gut. And she couldn’t stop her sobs. 

“I’m so sorry, aunty. I truly am. I lost my 3-year-old daughter only a couple of months ago. Life has become a complete wreck.”, she said, struggling to hold back the tears. Before she could stop herself, she had narrated everything from her daughter falling sick to getting admitted to the hospital, to her brain death. PA reached out and held her hands softly in her own wrinkled warm hands. “It’s ok beta. Death is a part of life.” 

“When I lost Sriram and his father, my life was nothing but darkness and turmoil. I was crippled with grief. One day my friend who had lost two of her babies in late pregnancy showed me the two quilts she’d made in memory of her children. She asked if I’d be interested in learning something new. I was willing to give it a go.”

“Gradually the creative process gave me a purpose, an opportunity to chat through thoughts and feelings as my friend and I worked together. As I worked on the quilt, I remember finding the sensation of the quilt on my knee physically comforting. It took me 3 years to finish my first quilt – it was not a quick process! It still hangs on the wall of our house. I hope it remains in the family, perhaps through the generations. I find reassurance in the thought that their memory will live on that way.” PA appeared pensive, eyes glistening with a hint of tears. 

“Birrriyani chapathi, Birrrriyani chapathiiiiii” the spiritless cries of the pantry car vendor reminded her that it was almost dinner time. And just like that, in a beat, PA had bounced back to her former cheery self and was now chatting away on the phone to another beta. 

After making sure that the ‘Biryani’ cries had drowned in the rhythmic rumbling of the train, she woke her son up. She didn’t want her homemade parathas to go waste in all the Biryani frenzy her son would be driven into. He rubbed his eyes and groggily informed her he was starving. She rolled her eyes. He had gone to sleep only thirty-five minutes back and had had a big cream bun just before. She helped him down and unpacked his favourite Paratha-jam combo. In under 4 minutes, he had gobbled down his dinner and was licking his fingertips. 

PA now took out a crumply plastic package from her bag and unpacked it carefully. It caught her son’s attention who was now eagerly expecting the aunty to offer him some of her own dinner. Much to his dismay, the stainless steel dabba consisted of 'boring curd rice' and a soggy Mor-Milagai and the humble dinner was not offered his way. She secretly suspected her son would’ve still liked to have a bite or two of it. When she looked around, she found that he had a scowl of disapproval plastered on his face, as he continued to glare at the aunty’s dinner distastefully, subtle as a gun. She smiled to herself. How was it possible that she loved her son more than she did just half hour ago? She also knew she would love him a little more tomorrow than she did today. 

PA finished up her dinner, and put away the dabba carefully back inside the crumpled plastic cover and into the bag. Eager to entertain him a little more, PA started telling her son the story of how lord Ganesha got his elephant-head. And he was asking why lord Shiva had not magicked a child’s head, what with Him being God and all, instead of beheading a poor elephant calf. PA laughed out heartily and caught her eyes, smiled reassuringly and wordlessly conveying that life would eventually get better. Pain was inevitable in everyone’s life – just like in both of theirs.

Losing a loved one can evoke intense emotions and pain one would’ve never fathomed possible hitherto - having to choose the dress they would be buried in, having to tell a last bye - one last kiss, having to deal with their possessions after they pass, trying to hold on to the memories of their last days, trying to remember every little detail of their lives fearing it would be forgotten forever, desperately trying to remember what they sounded and smelled like, the fear of being stuck in the past and the dread of moving on without them and grappling with the heart-wrenching grief. 

But everything in this universe comes with an expiry date – one likes it or not. And until then, life is all about making calculated choices to become better than we were yesterday. To transform our pain into something meaningful – to be kind and empathetic, to grow through the grief and realise that today is never coming back.