The House Where I Played Wimbledon
“The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.” ~ M.K. Gandhi
It weighs at least three pounds. It says it has four levers. I don’t know. The levers and the cover have encrusted and locked into timelessness; the key lost.
The photograph of the house is melancholy. Not only is the paint peeling and the bricks exposed, but the frangibility of the construction is also ominous. If I blow hard on it, will it crumble?
Both the padlock and the house were once kinetic and buoyant, a comforting presence in my life. I lived in it for seventeen years. See the shutters on the top left? Those were the windows to my room. Behind the shutters are vertical metal bars. I can recollect the details of the room, the views from the windows, the unadorned furniture inside the room, the floor with its artful mosaic inlays.
The shutters unbarred onto a brick courtyard lined with hibiscus, the redolence of jaba phool and rain-soaked banks of the pond beyond. Coconut trees ringed the water, the trunks gnarly and inhospitable. I’d see a bony, sinewy, bare-chested fellow with a tightly wound loincloth, his ankles fastened onto homemade coir stirrups used to shimmy up the trunk to dislodge clumps of coconuts with masterly swipes of his machete.
My bed was next to these windows, narrow but enough of an expanse for me to conjure up the chimeric pool of water, where I “practiced” my diving, propelling my four-year-old frame from the head of the bed.
The courtyard corner, against the righthand wall of the house is where the center court at Wimbledon was anchored. At around age seven and eight, it offered the faultless contours for my forehand volleys and backhand spins. I spent hours playing, sweating, and musing silently about the reigning paragons of Indian grass courts---Ramanathan Krishnan, Premjit Lall and my own house captain, Jaideep Mukherjee, who was the junior Wimbledon runner-up when I was ten. By then my shoulders stronger, my legs longer and my swings having outgrown the Lilliputian realm of my very own center court, never to be reconstructed again.
Mine was a childhood, happy at times, confused, often full of giggles and equally often under a dark and tangled blanket descending over me, draining the hope that disentangling was a mere few long years ahead.
Now in my seventh decade, thousands of miles from that house and the padlock, the recollection is muscular, not acidic and harsh. The actuality that none of this matters to anyone in the world other than myself is a signature of humility. And why does it matter to me so? The home and the fervency of a young life that I so keenly wanted to leave behind, has circled back. The completeness of a life is never without furrows and corrugations. Each life is a steamer trunk full of flounderings and fumbles. I did know that at one level; my father spoke of it often, with himself in the starring role. I, naturally, regarded the lessons lightly, centering more on the eventual successful endings.
The unambivalent and unforced metaphor of the house and the padlock needs a slightly further extension, an anamnesis. It is memory and remembrance that makes me human. The one with episodic memory. A creature not simply reactive and instinctual. A human being who is reflective, forgiving, and capable of asking for forgiveness.
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Photo credits courtesy of author. All Rights Reserved.