Gully sports exist in a realm of their own. We devote ourselves to mimicking our idols, imagining the narrow driveway to be the field at the Bernabeu, and the teenager dribbling through a crowd to be a Zidane or Kaka. Indeed, I grew up wanting to be Maldine, trying to adhere to his philosophy that when you make a tackle as a defender, you’ve already made a mistake. In my apartment complex, while certain driveways played the role of cricket’s Meccas, the gravel playing field at the complex’s far end played the role of Wembley, or the Nou Camp, or Anfield, (or to my singular fancy, White Hart Lane). Once the lights came on – at 6:15p.m. – we trudged in, emerging from the palm fronds that ringed the field as if exiting the dressing room tunnels at those glittering Meccas of football. The evening prayers at the temple behind the ground served as our crowd ambience, their lilting chants reminiscent of our teams’ best songs.
I didn’t choose to be a right-back. At least, I don’t remember choosing that. I guess because I was small and scrawny for years, I was left behind to play defense during games periods at school- because as children, who wants to be a defender or goalkeeper? – and it just kind of stuck for a while. So now, here I was, excessively one-footed, and largely incapable of trickery. My normal role, when playing on larger fields – get up the pitch, on overlaps, cross the ball, fall back and defend narrow. Simple, right? Well, that wasn’t how it worked at home, where the ground was a forty-by-forty square. Full-backs don’t exist in five or six-a-side football. Strikers, dribblers, close control experts – those are what you need, and those are what I wasn’t. So, when the time came to pick teams, some of the guys (who were better in the dribbling and close control divisions than most of us) banded together, leaving the rest of us misfits playing together. The results, predictably, were often one-sided.
Why am I sitting here and telling you all this? Well, when you’ve just been thrown out of your third class in a row, time seems to stand still. And talking to someone, even a figment of my imagination, is better than focusing on the sweat dripping off my eyelashes and wondering when it will fall into my eyes. That, and maybe the Chennai heat, is making me delirious. I can’t be sure. One of these days my teachers are going to put their heads together and decide to just leave me baking out in the hall for the whole day, because there was no way I’d have done my homework for their classes.
A pat on my head broke me from my thoughts, and I found myself staring into a blue-shirted chest, with another one close next to it. Two guys had stepped out of class and in front of me, with the rest of the class filing out behind our Maths teacher. I hadn’t heard the bell go off, signalling the end of the day. I looked up into the faces, grinning like the wicked foxes you find in children’s tales.