Off-side: To my mother and sister, who shaped my interest in sports, thank you

“Everything I am started with her prayers and her strength. My Aai has always been my anchor,” Sachin Tendulkar once said about his mother. Rajni was a quiet presence behind his rise, worrying endlessly, praying constantly, embodying the archetypal Indian mother. So strong was her superstition that she never attended any of Sachin’s matches except his final one at Wankhede Stadium, and that too only because he insisted.

That emotional, protective, sometimes superstitious, even irrational love is familiar to every Indian child. Mothers experience our journeys from somewhere deeper, where worry seems to travel faster than joy.

In our family, my Maa had her own sporting credentials. She played hockey as a full-back for her school in Delhi and later at the district level. At our paternal home in Bhatpara, about 40 kilometres from Kolkata, a collection of brass cups and medals sat as reminders of her sporting exploits. They had travelled with her from Delhi to this sleepy mofussil town, as cherished as the cartons of books that made the same journey.

Those trophies, incidentally, were also the only sporting silverware I ever laid claim to, thanks to my heroic make-believe World Cup run chases staged in the long, narrow second-floor corridor with a dozen cousins. Their purpose did not end with imagination. Some were later repurposed as extremely convenient ashtrays by my father and uncle. My mother, though, never complained.

My first brush with real sporting celebrity also came because of her. One sultry Kolkata afternoon, she took my then-best friend and me to St. Xavier’s College Kolkata for a meet-and-greet with Kapil Dev, who had just retired after overtaking Richard Hadlee as the highest wicket-taker in Test cricket. She waited patiently in a packed auditorium as Kapil ran late.

All that effort paid off, though perhaps not in the way she expected. Amid the melee, the two of us 10-year-olds managed only to touch Kapil’s backside, solid and unyielding after years of toil in the field. Kapil may have interpreted it as harassment. We saw it as achievement. You must remember the height difference.

I have never told Kapil this story, despite meeting him a few times since. My mother, however, had never missed an opportunity to tell her version at family gatherings, each retelling generously embellished and always ending in a hearty cackle at my expense.

She followed cricket keenly, but sentiment never clouded judgment. Poor shots were denounced without mercy. Neither Sachin Tendulkar nor Virat Kohli received exemptions for momentary lapses.

My urge to write can also be traced back to her. She was a voracious reader, and one of my favourite childhood memories, when we lived in a rented house in Ballygunge, was our weekend ritual of visiting the old bookstores near Cornfield Road. We read everything, from Tintin to the classics Little Men, Little Women, the American adventures of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, then Enid Blyton and much later Ayn Rand.

My sister, always the overachiever, read faster and batted better. She hit enough sixes onto neighbouring rooftops and later became the patron of our annual inter-para cricket match, buying us chewing gum and Limca with her modest private tuition earnings. She was also a devoted fan of Sanjay Manjrekar after his heroics against West Indies and Pakistan in the late 1980s.

During the winter of 1991, she would wake me early to follow India’s tour of Australia on the radio. Sanjay, unfortunately, lost form on that tour and never quite recovered. My sister’s devotion, however, remained unshaken. She fashioned a locket with his black-and-white photograph and, for reasons that remain unclear, a black marble in a cut-out polythene pouch, strung together with black thread. I was given one too, which I quickly discarded, much to her chagrin and Maa’s amusement.

Years later, at a Sportstar Aces event, I narrated the story to Sanjay. He seemed faintly puzzled, perhaps struggling to reconcile it with the sight of a greying-bearded man claiming to have been a schoolboy when he was facing Malcolm Marshall, Wasim Akram and Imran Khan. Sanjay, however, had once sent my sister a signed postcard photograph in the late 1990s, finally responding to years of fan mail.

Looking back, my relationship with sport was shaped less by the heroes on the field and more by the women I watched and played it with.

Published on Mar 08, 2026