The Games That I Played
Childhood for me has always been synonymous with bruised knees and elbows and an occasional chipped tooth and broken ankle though I was a big time couch potato, watching almost every other movie on our dear old Doordarshan while guzzling copious amount of biscuits dipped in tea but nevertheless I was a restless kid, running hither and thither, pedaling and more often than not pushing my bicycle around the serpentine streets of our locality, playing and always inventing some new and equally unplayable games like the one which I christened to be The Grass Race wherein you have to cover a distance on your bellies and that too in our park which with foliage thicker than Amazon resembled a wildlife reserve. Well, my dream of taking my little games to an Olympian height never actually took off; more so because one of my friends got bitten by a snake and another got overrun by a herd of sprinting pigtailed girls and owing to this and similar incidents the association of stay at home moms (which according to my mothers was a nexus of abeyant and fat ladies who knew nothing better than to pickle mangoes and plan for there kitty parties) banished their kids (who were, again according to my mother, butt ugly) from playing with me but then I was the kid with the Cricket Bat and a Soccer Ball, so in the end I always got to not only play but also lead my own team and I don’t remember anyone having any problems with that because it was either this or snooping around some construction site and playing hide and seek or making sandcastles for those poor kids. Come to think of it, childhood’s a bitch because the neighborhood kid with all the nice toys and a Playstation always happen to be the one you aren’t allowed to play with and luckily for me, I was that kid.
I never made many friends though more so because there weren’t that many kids around, just a bunch of us brown, freckled and scrawny kids, zooming around the sidewalks in our shorts or half-pants, playing our own version of baseball with a cricket bat and tennis ball with an utter disdain for the streetlights and neighborhood windows. The auntie whose living room windows always lay along the descending trajectory of our tennis ball was the one who always dreamt of tying us all to that eucalyptus tree and having her way. She sadly never got her heart desire because pretty soon our park which was more of an empty plot was barricaded on all sides erecting a wall between reality and a childhood dream of playing into a glorious sunset.
That was the end of my lackadaisical sports career and also the starting of a phase that was marked with a string of failures as I dabbled, trying to find a perfect sport for me. I loved cricket but only till I was the one yielding the bat, my efforts at fielding and bowling left everything to be desired more so because I never believed in stopping or catching anything if it wasn’t directly coming towards me but then there were always some desperate times which always called for desperate measures, so I not only quite often found myself in the team but got to bowl as well and just before I was given the ball my captain always whispered to the batsman to try and keep the runs under 20. I played a bit of basketball as well but as every other kid grew up, my coach who was the only one to see through my pencil legs and wrists asked me play along with the girls in the school team and since when you play with girls basket ball is the last of all bouncy thing that you want to concentrate on, I never could make my name in the basketball and the world missed its next Michael Jordan. Failures never deterred me and I just moved on from one sport to another but then everything has to come to an end and my love for Martina Hingis proved to be my nemesis for as I watched the blood oozing out from my bruised knees and my ankle as it turned a deepest shade of purple I realized that the hard cemented floor of our badminton court was meant for just one thing, morning assembly and prayer service. I finally decided to call it quit, choosing a less illustrious and an unsweaty path with nerdy guys and pigtailed fat girls standing on the sidewalk as I rode myself to an awkward and zit ridden adulthood.
Games simply stopped being fun for me since then, hard to find fun in your ineptitude I guess, and I finally settled for playing far more subtle games, the ones that you play within the realms of your mind and I bet had there been an Olympic for these, I would have sure won another Gold Medal for my beloved motherland.
