The Last Gambit

by Om Swami

  It was a matter of great prestige to play against a white guy. If a brown person made impressive wins, he would be pitted against a white. He was then allowed to play in the hall reserved for whites. In any case, even if we made to the other hall, we were not allowed to partake of their refreshments. In fact, we could be jailed if we made any such attempt.

  For a chess player, all of this was okay, even bearable to some degree for this was how things were at the time. What was painful though, was a violation of the spirit of the game. When playing against a white person, we would always get the black pieces. Normally, you get white in every alternate game but not in a tournament where firangis played. They would always get to open with white.

  Anyway, starting in the brown hall, I got black in the first game. I knew nothing about my opponent. None of us had a chess clock. I won the first game within minutes of the bell going off. It wasn’t a smothered or a fool’s mate. I did not win it because he was an idiot. I just managed to find a powerful mating attack. We went to a room where the organizers sat to register our result.

  Game number two, I was white, my competition was tougher this time. I opened conventionally and played carefully. I made every move with extreme caution. It was my first big tournament, so I took my games very seriously. ‘I won this one too, not as easily as my first game, though.

  Game number three, I was black. I managed to build a fork with my knight after offering a gambit. Four moves later, I had his queen. He struggled and tried for the rest of the game, but I was in no mood to lose. We were the first ones to approach the bench to register our result. The person at the bench, an elderly man, smiled at me.

  Game number four, I checked the lists and found that I was playing James Patterson in hall number 1. My heart thumped. A game in the main hall. Against a firangi! I’d never spoken to a white man ever in my life. Reluctantly I went into the main hall and took my seat. Exactly as I’d heard, this was a luxurious hall. Ceiling fans, marbled floor, polished furniture, uniformed servers.

  A man approached me and said, ‘Anand Sharma?’ I nodded.

  ‘Come with me.’

  Not knowing what the matter was, anxiously I followed him. I was scared, I surely didn’t violate any rules. I hoped I wasn’t being punished. I remember fellow players at other tables darting glances at me, casually, as I passed them. He took me all the way to the organizers’ room where four Indians sat on a bench, behind a desk. Another man, a tall white man sat in a cushiony chair.

  The man who had smiled at me earlier reconfirmed: ‘Anand Sharma?’

  I nodded.

  He said, ‘Hello, Anand. You had a pretty good run. Your next game is with James Patterson. You will play in this room against him. You are black. Good luck.’ He pointed towards my back. I turned around to see who it was.

  ‘A handsome guy, his golden hair well-oiled, fairer than Shweta, our whitest cow, wearing a bright shirt, a tie, blazer and grey trousers was sitting gracefully. His polished shoes shone like a mirror. I had never seen such a well-dressed person in my life. He must have been twice my age, and on his table was a bottled drink. His eyes gleaming with confidence, he had ‘winner’ written all over him. Brand-new pieces, shiny, carved out of wood, sat elegantly on a board made from rosewood, with a wooden clock on the left.

  ‘I’m James,’ he said. He did not shake hands – this was not unexpected. I looked at him. He had beautiful blue eyes.

  I just shook my head. I forgot to introduce myself. What did I have for introduction anyway, other than my rustic look and clothes? I had the complexion of freshly tilled land – dark brown. To protect me from the cold, my mother had sewn me a shirt from bed linen. It felt thick and warm. Over that was a multicoloured sleeveless sweater that had no set pattern, and which my mother had knitted between tending to cows and preparing our meals.

  I was in slippers, I didn’t have a chess clock, my chess mat and pieces were old and pale. I felt like a page boy in the presence of a prince.

  ‘Do you want to play with or without clock?’ he asked.

  My lips remained parted in awe of the grandeur he exuded. My heart was pounding and I was nervous. I kept nodding in response to whatever he said. Here I was, a green bean, from a village, first time ever in a city. How dearly I wished that my father was there with me.

  I felt lonely and cornered in that room. I was reminded of a tiny paper boat floating in a flooded river. It was only a matter of time before it would go all squidgy and sink to the bottom.

  He’s not just a firangi but a special one to get such preferential treatment, I thought. My mouth was parched. If I could, I would have run away then. ‘Dad, can I have a straw?’ he asked, looking towards the white man in the chair. That man cast a glance at the organizers’ desk where four Indians sat. One of them immediately got up and handed James Patterson a straw.

  ‘Oh! So his father is the chief!’ I thought. I wish my father was here too, committee member or not. I only ever saw him working in the fields, but he loved playing chess too, with an old ragged chess set he had inherited from his father. They often played under the village banyan tree, mostly after the harvesting was done. My father was an affluent farmer who owned acres upon acres of land. Tens of people worked for him. Then again, no matter how wealthy or honourable a villager might be, among the well-dressed and English-speaking folk, he would be no more than a ‘villager’.

  ‘Ready or what?’ James said, interrupting my thoughts.

  I was not ready, of course – I did not know how to operate a chess clock. I had never used the kind of scoring sheets he had on his side, details filled out, with a sharpened pencil resting on it. I was unprepared and under pressure.

  ‘Umh.’ Nothing else came out of my mouth.

  He asked me to press a button on the clock to start the game. Nervously, I did. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick, my heart was racing faster than the clock; the red flag on the clock looked like a guillotine to me, waiting to drop freely on my neck. I was trying to look composed but my hands were not listening to me. He opened with the king’s pawn. With a trembling right hand, I picked up my king’s pawn to respond with the same move. It dropped out of my hand, fell on the board and rolled away on the floor.

  ‘Oh you clumsy Indians!’ he said, throwing his hands up in frustration.

  I said sorry and bent down to grab the pawn and completed my move. He waited for a few seconds, looking at me.

  ‘Do you even know how to use a clock?’ he asked, disdain clear in his voice.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Why am I not surprised! You must press the button after making your move; otherwise your time will keep ticking. You’ll lose on time and then you’ll accuse us of playing unfairly. Plus, you must press the button with the same hand that you make your moves with.’

  ‘Hmm.’ I nodded.

  My eyes were brimming with tears. Only my heart and my hands knew the state of my mind. Throughout, I forgot to close my mouth. Four moves later, I was a piece down. Another five moves, and it felt like I was playing reverse chess, as if I was handing him pieces out of reverence and devotion.

  With each move, I got more nervous. Every time he lifted his piece, my heart pounded because I thought he would just announce ‘checkmate’ any moment. But there was no end to my suffering as he continued to butcher me and capture my pieces one after the other. I could have resigned and ended the game, but I was so nervous that I forgot I even had that option. After each move, I wiped my sweaty palm on my pants. I kept my hands under the table as much as possible.

  When my time was ticking, I was doing everything other than focusing on the game. He must think I won the earlier three games by fluke, I thought. What must the organizers think? I wish I were like him … His clothes must be expensive. He cleared his throat and I returned to the present moment. I wasn’t sure what was more pathetic: my situation in the room or my position on the boar
d.

  I reminded myself to focus, but the game had deteriorated into a joke that had cost me a point and my self-esteem. He won in a matter of minutes where every minute had felt like an hour to me. I should have just not played from the outset. It would have looked more graceful, I felt.

  My world had reached its end of time. I approached the bench to report the result. He stayed seated. Besides, everyone in the room knew the result anyway. My heart was no longer pounding; my thoughts were not racing any more. I was numb.

  ‘0-1,’ I mumbled with my head down.

  I ran to the parking lot, got on my bicycle and just rode back as fast as I could. I did not have the courage to play the rest of the tournament.

  I parked my bicycle on the unpaved road near our fields, leaving it unlocked, and ran over the ploughed land like an abandoned cow in a neighbour’s farm. Father sat squatting, sowing the seeds. I threw myself at him and started crying.

  ‘What happened? What’s the matter? Are you okay?’ he asked.

  I just kept weeping, wetting his neck with my tears and snot. He started frisking me to make sure I wasn’t hurt or injured. He ran his soiled hand through my hair to check if there were any wounds.

  ‘Why are you crying? Did someone hurt you?’ I started crying even more loudly.

  His hands touched my bag. He could feel the chessboard and chess pieces inside. ‘Did you lose your bicycle?’

  He separated himself from me using a little force, and put his hand under my chin to make me raise my head. I was sobbing. He wiped my tears.

  ‘Tell me what’s wrong, Nandu?’ He called me Nandu affectionately.

  ‘I lost.’ My sobbing got louder.

  ‘Okay, okay, calm down. In a game, one of the players has to lose.’ He held me by my arm, lovingly, and took me to the nearby peepal tree. There was a raised platform around the trunk, which is where he and other workers in the field ate their lunch every day.

  ‘Tell me now, what happened?’ He sat down cross-legged, facing me, while I sat on the platform with my toes scraping the raw ground.

  ‘I lost. He was a firangi. His father was the chief. He … he had a special room. He was drinking cola too … with a long pipe. He was very rich. He was dressed very … very nicely. He had a brand new chess set. He had a chess clock with shiny glass. He had all the things I didn’t have!’ I said all this, choking, in a single breath, adding, ‘Why didn’t you come with me?’

  Taking my hands in his big hand and caressing my head with the other, he said, ‘Did he play with golden pieces?’

  ‘What do you mean “golden pieces”?’ I thought he was teasing me. ‘I was black.’

  ‘So, he played with white?’ ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which means you did not lose to a firangi, you did not lose to some handsome guy, a prince or a king. You simply lost to white. He was playing on the same chessboard as you, with the same rules. It doesn’t matter what he looked like or who he was. You were not playing against those things, you were simply playing against white pieces.’

  Suddenly, I felt calm as well as incredibly stupid. I could not even understand why I’d felt the way I had at the tournament. It seemed unimportant now, immaterial who he was, what he was wearing or where he was seated.

  ‘Promise me, Nandu, you will never let anyone intimidate you. Ever. No one is going to come and wipe your tears out there. It’s a rough world. Whatever the gimmicks, ultimately, the player who plays better wins. There are no two ways about it.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Be a lion. All right?’

  ‘What’s that on your shirt?’ he pointed at my chest. As soon as I looked down he began tickling me. My laughter rang across the fields and I begged him to stop. He called out to one of the workers to carry on with the cultivation. Holding my hand, he took his bicycle and we walked until we were out of the fields. I sat in front, on the bar that joined the handle and the seat. His thighs would lift me one way then the other as he pedalled. The nearest shop was six kilometres away. We had cold jal-jeera and father got my favourite savoury biscuits with fennel seeds in it.

  It wasn’t for another four years that I met him again – James Patterson. The James Patterson. In all those years, I had already devoted a few thousand hours to chess. I was more confident in facing James. It was in the seventh round, that time. I could not win, but I didn’t lose either; it was a draw. We had a face off again in the final round. I went all in. The fight was long and the tension nail-biting, but I was not prepared to lose. I too had a bottled drink on the table this time. His clothes, his white skin, his demeanour, polished board, the shiny chess clock, nothing mattered today. Managing to find a powerful line of attack, I triumphantly watched signs of anxiety emerge on his face. His game, just like his drink, was losing fizz as I continued to cement my position, eventually having the last word: checkmate.

  Even though I would win many tournaments in the future, the feeling I experienced that day was like no other. It was as if I had banished a ghost from my past. It wasn’t just winning against James Patterson. I felt I had won against my dark side, my own fears. I felt like the bird that just broke through the hard shell of an egg and caught a glimpse of a new world. I never played a major game without a soft drink on the table. Lemonade at first and then cola.

  ‘ANYWAY, THE LESSON my father gave me that day, I pass on to you today, Vasu,’ Master said most seriously.

  ‘You ready?’ I nodded.

  ‘Never let anyone intimidate you. Ever,’ he said. ‘You have as much right to your dreams as anyone else. You have as much claim over victory as the greatest out there. Never let anyone take that away from you, Vasu. Don’t you ever let anyone intimidate you! You understand?’

  I knew what he meant and I understood it too. Truth be told, a part of me was still intimidated. Glancing at his books alone, I thought it was impossible to win against someone like him. I felt like a tiny snowflake in front of a giant glacier. In fact, today I felt more scared than ever before. But I felt confident and secure as well. Not because I thought I would perform miracles, but because I just knew that I had found the best teacher there could be. And, sometimes, that’s what makes all the difference – the one who’s by your side.

  SUCCESS BY DESIGN

  IT WAS AN easy class – drawing. I didn’t particularly like it though. I took it up only because I had to choose it over physical education. Why be out in the scorching sun and run around like a new recruit in the army when I could sit in a quiet room, like a sarkari babu, and doodle to my heart’s content?

  ‘Draw a winter landscape,’ the teacher instructed. ‘Today is a surprise test.’

  How I hated those surprise tests! Not that the contents of a test that was declared in advance surprised me any less.

  We called him Taklu – our bald drawing teacher. There was nothing artistic about him other than the neat baldness of his round head. And I never saw him laughing or talking nicely with anyone. Except with our general knowledge teacher, who was probably half his age.

  I drew a wave with three swells. These were the mountains. Next came a semi-circle in the middle. My sun, hiding behind the mountains, of course. Underneath, I drew a little hut with a chimney sticking out like a sore thumb.

  To add realism to my landscape, I tossed in some more circles to make a stone hedge for the garden. And then I sat there gazing at the circles.

  Soft and fresh circular chapattis came to my mind. I was hungry and it was going to be lunch break after that period.

  I didn’t realize Taklu was standing over my shoulder, staring at me while I was running around in circles about my circles.

  ‘Are you in grade three?’ he bellowed. I got up immediately.

  ‘Sir?’ I mumbled.

  He picked up my drawing book and repeated the question. ‘Is this what you draw in ninth grade?’ The decibel level rose.

  ‘You c
all this a landscape?’

  For some reason, he always signed with a sketch pen. He pulled out a red one and drew a circle on my sheet.

  ‘Zero,’ he scoffed, slapped the drawing book on my desk and walked back to his.

  I felt like jumping at him like a baby monkey and whacking his bald head with my drawing book. This visual disappeared when I realized the significance of zero.

  One – the number of subjects I had failed in in the last six months. Two – times my father had been summoned by the principal. Three – warnings I had received for not paying attention in class. Four – subjects I barely passed. Five – ‘get-out- of-the-class’es I got from various teachers. But, above everything else was the persistent zero.

  Zero – the number of times I had hung out with my friends in the past few months. Zero – the number of days I had missed chess. Zero – weekends I just slept in. Zero – wins against the master.

  Cipher. The sum total of my feelings and existence.

  I knew the major openings like the back of my hand. King’s pawn, Queen’s pawn, Ruy Lopez, Gambits, Nimzo-Indian, Bird’s opening, Semi-slav defence, Caro-Kann, Reti, Queen’s Indian, Sicilian, French, Grunfeld, Petrov, I had mastered them with the major lines of offence and defence.

  But did this mean much, if anything? No. I still hadn’t won against the master.

  Even after thousands of games, I hadn’t been able to get into his head. Even in my most carefully planned moves, he would seep in like water through the cracks. I couldn’t predict his moves or counter his attack; the truth was, I couldn’t do shit when playing against him. This wasn’t just humbling, it was humiliating.

  If chess was an ocean I was a castaway. The island, trees and shells in the form of attacks, exchanges and gambits in chess – none appealed any more. I felt like a drifting coconut bobbing up and down with waves as they carried me away from the island of my dreams into the muck of reality.

  This blue ocean of chess was no longer beautiful but intimidating, a threat. My eyes were docked at the horizon, at some ship that would come to rescue me. But every ship my master sent was a pirate ship. Currently, the only thing I wanted more than a girlfriend was to win at least once. Just once. This would be the only way to rescue my fast-corroding motivation.