This essay, by my friend Rajeev Purnaiya, is a reminiscence of games from his early school days at Bishop Cottons.
What is a game? The world may tell you that a game is an organised activity governed by rules and played with dedicated practitioners, but a Cottonian of some vintage will tell you that games were an all-day affair occasionally punctuated by classes. Often, games and classes lived a peaceful coexistence, each never being aware that the other was happening in the same classroom. To understand this state of equanimity, we need to understand the world of an young Cottonian who has just entered the threshold of boyhood or the fourth standard as it was known.
To be in a school that seemed as vast as Cubbon Park where everyone was bigger than them was daunting to every new boy. As the world around us swirled with new teachers, new rules and new loyalties to Old Houses, the first friendships were forged around games. I say ‘games’ and not ‘sport’ because of the spontaneous and democratic nature of a game. All it took was a few boys and whatever could be fashioned into a club or a bat or a what-not.
Most popular of them all was French cricket. A game fashioned after a lynching-mob seemed to resonate well with us. Surrounding the immobile batsman and hurling the ball at his feet seemed to be just the thing for settling slights and fights. Mention must be made of the French cricket colossus, Abhinav Jayaram, whose illustrious grand-father, B. Jayaram, an Old Cottonian, had played first class cricket in England for one of clubs—‘Authentics’—in the early 1900s. Abhi, as he was referred to, was a prolific scorer who tormented every team he played against. The hereto informal game saw two new roles being introduced— an umpire, whose sole job was to gaze at Abhi’s feet to ensure that they were not parted when he was in the circle and a score-keeper, who kept his eyes transfixed around Abhi’s mid-riff to count the revolutions the bat made around the said mid-riff. It may be safe to conjecture that the scorekeeper may have had a rewarding career as a book-keeper in later life! So strong was French cricket’s nostalgia that a group from the 1985 ICSE batch had a 25th year reunion centred around a game of French cricket.
The more diffident of the boys took to book cricket. This game combined the comfort of being left alone with vagaries of chance with the added advantage of being nearly undetectable during a particularly enthralling class of history. The only tell-tale sign of a game in progress were boys riffling earnestly through their texts which was happily misinterpreted by the masters as a sign of scholastic interest.
With passage of time, the boys began to feel emboldened to move from the safety of team-centric games to individual skill-based games. Marbles and Tops. They were played during different terms and one never saw both games played at the same time. Who made up the top season and the marble season one never knew but like real seasons they came and went.
Marbles and tops were more than games—they were a gentle introduction to what later life would hold for us. The first stirring of material attachment was felt when one won a prized ‘milky’ and the first depth of despair was plumbed when one’s top was ‘gunna-oed’. One could not blame anyone but oneself for his triumph or conquest. New social order and fledging commerce started to emerge from this primordial soup. No recollection of marbles can be complete without mentioning the marble mogul, Sanjay Johar. Possessed of the keenest business sense and an uncanny understanding of the human psyche, Sanjay traded his way to become richer than Croesus himself.
The rules and argot that went hand-in-hand with these games would do the Indian bureaucracy proud. Who could ever forget terms such as ‘pills’, ‘kai-goli’, ‘spans’, ‘gunaa’, and ‘jaati’? We even had an undo button before any software application—‘reals’ or ‘simples’. If quantum physics could bestow quarks with flavours such as ‘strange’, ‘top’ and ‘charm’, we Cottonians could surely elevate marbles to ‘milky’, ‘brandy’ and ‘soda’.
Around this time, some boys tapped into their inner hunter-gatherer and started laying grass-traps in the dense foliage around the old basket ball court outside the junior school block. Two tufts of grass were knotted to form a small arch that could catch an unsuspecting lad’s shoe and bring him tumbling down. Many patient minutes were spent watching from a distance to see if one succeeded. Only later did I realise that this too was a game when I came across the short story ‘The Most Dangerous Game’ by Richard Connell.
More dangerous than this was the seventh standard version of darts. The joy of geometry was expressed by hurling dividers at a makeshift dartboard (usually an upended chair) at the back of the classroom. Some boys deemed this too tame and started using the sharp end of a divider to rapidly jab at the spaces between their splayed fingers. The one who could do this the longest and the fastest without impaling the divider naturally had all the bragging rights. I am glad to report that there were no serious self-inflicted injuries from this game (although some of the desks got the worse of the deal and came out pock-marked).
Calm returned when some overseas boarders returned from vacation with playing cards. Not the club variety but the Top Trumps game cards themed around racing cars, military aircraft and warships. Every player hoped he’d drawn the ‘Black Bird’ card or the ‘Nimitz’ card and pretty soon, many of them had memorised the arcane statistics and animated discussions about the ‘best’ could be heard around the third-elevens at short break.
When ninth standard loomed, the old urge to inflict minor injuries returned—only by this time, it had dawned on the boys that it could be done unto others.So started the scourge of the paper pellets. From simple wet blobs of notepaper blown from a refill-less pen to sleek waxed paper pellets launched from thick elastic bands, we had them all. For a brief this activity assumed such proportions that an enterprising classmate launched a paper pellet munitions factory and supplied pellets on the condition that he not be targetted.
The closing months of the ninth standard brought us a game that we could only play on one day through our entire schooling (and only an hour-or-so at that!). The annual game of prefect dunking. Over the years, we had watched ninth standard boys gleefully chase their classmate prefect designates after the morning assembly announcement and carry them to the ‘pond’ for the ritual dunking.
The exact provenance of this tradition is unknown, but it was the perfect antidote to the bitter fact that your own friends could lord over you as prefects the next year. To recognise this angst and allow the boys to release it harmlessly in their own way was a gesture only a true humanist could make (in this case, our incomparable principal Mr. A.T. Balraj). Every year, after the prefect names were announced in the morning assembly, Mr. Balraj’s appointment dairy would indicate an important meeting that would take him out of office for two hours. Without fail. That was enough. Thank you, sir.
The only other event that we looked forward to with greater anticipation than the prefect dunking was the ‘Socials’. No games here.
Our ISC XI was a transition period between principals. For a few months, there was a faint air of ‘Lord of the Flies’ to the Science Block. With some flux in teacher assignment, we’d find ourselves with a bit of free time. One past time (surely brought in by the new boys from other schools who joined ISC) was gently lobbing a shoe at the ceiling with the aim of leaving a perfect shoe print. A second bonus prefect dunking (this time with some egg smashing thrown in) happened at the end of ISC XI.
By the time we were in ISC XII, the more competitive boys had put away their games and were running full tilt at the books and exam prep stuff. The informal camaraderie was now being suffused by a more serious air. Notes were exchanged and previous exam questions were unearthed and shared. Mention must be made of my dear friend Manohar Vittal. A most helpful chap. He’d dig up differential equation problems from decades-old ‘IIT exams’ and pass them on saying that these gave him trouble but he was sure that the others would not find them too taxing. These problems were so complex that many felt intimidated by the prospect of the coming exams. It later transpired that Manohar was conjuring all these unsolvable problems on his way to school. Even a Ramanujan would have little luck in tackling them. Cottonians had moved from mere games to mind games. We were ready to face the world!
Only decades later would we fully realise that our lifelong friendships with our classmates will never turn boring because of the years of shared plotting and laughing, triumphs and losses. For this we have to thank the games we played.