…usually when Mummy and I arrived, dusty and tired, at Adipur station, the family would be assembled in full strength to greet us. Granddad would tend to stand aloof and regard me from a distance, and with circumspection, observing carefully the son of that husband of his daughter. As time passed we would deflect off one another, and perhaps over the course of a fortnight we might have three or four conversations, one possibly more probing than the others, but that was usually all, and even these he would conduct like an interrogation – penetrating, judgmental and alert. But generally he seemed satisfied, if not altogether pleased with the product of his genes.
I did not dislike him, but I also did not seek out his company. One day, however, I happened to walk out onto the veranda of his home, and there I found him sitting alone at a table with a chess set laid out before him. The veranda still lay in the deep and cool shade of morning. And he was sitting there looking at me, as if he had been patiently waiting for a long time.
“Sit down!” He instructed me at the moment I appeared, with neither greeting nor preamble. “Today I will teach you chess.”
My heart sank. I was seven years old. There would be three usable hours in the morning before it was too hot, and I wanted to play. I told him I had friends waiting. He nodded, but dismissed the matter with a flick of his wrist.
“That’s fine.” He said. “It’s okay to have friends, but today I will teach you chess. Sit down.”
I sat down, and he commenced. I listened as he began a detailed explanation of the components of the board, the powers and limitations of each piece and the multiple permutations of strategy. At length he leaned back in his chair and looked at me.
“Do you understand?”
I nodded without much conviction. At that, with a grunt, he expressed his satisfaction, and we continued.
Soon it was hot, and soon Granddad was wrapping wet towels around the cage of the electric fan, and for a minute or two each time a chill wash of damp air cooled the sweat on my neck. This he repeated every half an hour or so. In the meanwhile we continued to play. We played in silence until noon. As we played he offered me no advice or direction, and he commented only when prompted. At noon he leaned back, swept the board and packed away the pieces. Then he stood up and congratulated me.
“Well done Haresh.” He said. He was smiling.
“Is that it?” I asked.
“For today.” He replied, glancing at me, still smiling. And again my heart sank.
And so unfurled the pattern of my visit of that particular year. We played chess together every morning for a fortnight. As soon as Mummy and I arrived back in Bombay, and Daddy asked me how the trip had gone, I grumbled passionately that Granddad had forced me to learn chess. Daddy looked at me curiously for a long while, and I slowly began to apprehend that I had made a terrible mistake. I could normally predict that he would sympathise and reject any regime imposed on me by my maternal grandparents, but not this time.
At length he simply remarked: “You will continue to play chess.” With that he turned away, picked up the newspaper and sat down in a chair. As usual there was no argument or debate. I stood for a while pondering this new reality before I walked away. It thereafter became an established fact. I would continue to play chess.
And so the next day I set off to inquire in and around the colony to find a companion with whom to play chess, which was not at all easy. The Navjivan was a working class neighbourhood and no one played chess there. There was also no chess club at school. But when Daddy desired it, such was his will, and such it would be. So I scoured the surrounding community which eventually led me to the door of a bright, fourteen year old youth by the name of Suresh.
Suresh belonged to a poorer class of Sindhi than those who lived in the colony. He was a shanty town dweller, and one of a very small number of outside Sindhi kids who the gurkhas allowed into the colony to play with the Navjivan kids. His parents were educated and the family had known better times before the partition. He had been playing chess since he was a child, and so obviously, as a beginner, I would be no challenge to him at all. But I suppose he also suffered from a lack of companionship in the quarter where he lived, and an opportunity to play was worth something, so he agreed to play, and even to teach me.
In the beginning I rebelled, and did the very least that I had to do to satisfy the criterion of playing chess. I had determined in advance that I did not like chess and I worked very hard to sustain that. Suresh very quickly appreciated this fact. He understood my circumstances, and realised that I fundamentally did not want to play. But if you have to play, he put it to me one day, then why not just play? Give it a bit of thought, he said, experiment with strategy. Just try, you might as well, and you never know, you might like it?
And so I did try, and strangely I found that I did like it. With that realisation a key unexpectedly turned in my head, and I began to develop as a player very quickly. I began to carefully think about it, and as I thought I began to rationalise, and then to strategize. I found to my surprise that I could quite easily begin to plan first two, then three, and then four, five or six moves in advance. It became startlingly simple, and I realised fairly quickly that I had a natural feeling for this game; not only for the multi-dimensional spatial concept that a chess board represents, but for the deductive reasoning that it requires, and for the mental concentration and creative application of acquired knowledge that embellishes the experience. This was no less than an epiphany to me.
Years later, I would appreciate how much that early formulation of computational and analytical ability would enhance both my medical and business sensibilities, in the same way I suppose that Daddy’s insistence that I learn to speak English well removed so many obstacles in my life when I emigrated. I found that the necessary level of detached critical thinking seemed to come naturally to me. These days it is understood that teaching a child chess brings all of this together, but then it was not so well understood, and certainly Daddy would have known nothing about it. But he simply sensed that it would advance me, and it did.
Once I had computed all of this, and harnessed my abilities towards it, I began to play in earnest, and I began to play very well. Soon enough Suresh found himself having to play more diligently himself, until in due course his back was against the wall, and then, one day, I beat him. He had seen it coming, and he accepted with excellent grace, and in fact he claimed some part of the victory for teaching me, which was quite justified. I was eight years old and he was fifteen. From that moment we played as equals. As I reflect back on my life I realise that I owe that boy a great deal. I have no idea what became of him, but his karmic ledger was improved by what he did for me.
But by then I was already thinking about Adipur, and that year, as school broke up for the summer holidays, and as Mummy and I climbed aboard the northbound train to Adipur, for the very first time I found myself unreservedly looking forward to it. Granddad met us at the station as usual, but this time he cocked his eye when he saw me. He was a year older, but still as sharp as a knife, and he could sniff a change in the air as soon as I took my seat in the back of his car.
Our first game was a warm up, but he knew upon my opening move that he had a fight on his hands. The second and third games were tight, but on the fourth, after a long, tense and unforgiving battle, I beat him.
When the moment of checkmate came, Granddad sat back in his chair, put his hands behind his head and stared sternly at the board for a very long time. Then his face broke into a smile, and he shook his head.
“By God.” He said, not once but several times. He pushed back his chair, stood up and walked into the house. “Mama!” He called, as he stepped through the door. She answered, and the story was told, and thus it spread. Haresh had beaten his grandfather at chess.
The next day there was an audience on the veranda. This time I was facing Uncle Moti, thirty years old and hot tempered. Uncle Moti was known to be a very good chess player, but he was cocky and overconfident, and I realised that his was his weakness. And indeed, after a tense thirty moves his king was trapped. With darkened face he stood up and angrily swept the board and all of the pieces and threw them out into the yard. Then he ordered me to gather them up again as he stormed into the house for a glass of water. This I did, quietly and obediently. I laid them out once again and sat down ready to play. But by then Uncle Moti was gone, and I did not see him again that visit.
