Games we played

In our boyhood days in Shimla, father didn8217;t encourage us to befriend many boys for fear of our falling into bad company. The few frien...

In our boyhood days in Shimla, father didn8217;t encourage us to befriend many boys for fear of our falling into bad company. The few friends that I and my elder brother had were all handpicked by him. Another commandment of his was that we must go out together only. Father8217;s diktat and circumstances thus brought us, the two brothers, very close.

We sometimes did get into skirmishes but truce was declared soon, certainly before the afternoon was over. We would never forego our rendezvous at the nearby corporation park every evening. The escorting servant bearing our father8217;s stern instructions would look the other side in return for a toffee or two. We would romp around, take our turn at the swings and play with boys who didn8217;t figure in father8217;s approved list.

At home, father encouraged us to play indoor games saying that they sharpened the intelligence. Quite early, we were initiated into the intricacies of chess. Another game in which he himself participated was the 8216;8216;spelling maker8217;8217;. Each one of us had to add one letter by turn to form a word. The one who completed a word with a wrong letter was the loser.

Our chessboard was made of cardboard. One day it was reduced to near pulp when I used it to ward off my brother8217;s blows after he lost an argument. For some days we had to go without chess, but we didn8217;t miss it much. It was father we were more worried about.

His discovery of the way the chessboard was damaged beyond recognition would not be very pleasant for us. We were therefore frantically looking for a replacement. That literally descended on us one day from one of the windows of an apartment block adjacent to the park.

We stared at the object 8212; a hard cardboard cover. I picked it up and hid it inside my shirt. Reaching home, we stealthily got down to work on it. In a couple of days the chessboard was ready and we resumed our contests.

As our horizons expanded, we outlived chess like other childhood pursuits. Time rolled on. We remained close, though circumstances had reduced the physical togetherness.

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Later, on achieving his Chemical Engineering degree, my elder brother got married and went away to England and eventually to the US for specialisation in his field of research. Tragedy struck as both my brother and sister-in-law died in an accident. My brother was only forty-two then.

My parents passed away. I was left with an abundance of memories.

The other day while browsing through some old papers I came across the chessboard we brothers had carved out of the discarded cardboard cover over fifty years ago. A generation has bowed out but our chessboard lives on to transport me back to a lost era that has changed beyond recall.