After more than a year of biting dust in the
top shelf of my cupboard, my squash racquet has once again seen the light of
day.
I developed a knack for this sport in school
but it took a back seat after I left Chandigarh. I haven’t been able to play
regularly, mostly due to unavailability of time, a second player and most of
all, a good squash court (Gurgaon's public sports infra is almost non-existent
and one can get a squash court constructed and recover the cost sooner than get benefits of the unreasonably expensive private clubs here).
I still remember the first time I set foot
inside a squash court. Post dinner, clad in white kurta pyjamas and floaters, a
friend had showed me the squash racquets the school had so generously issued to
us hostelers (which I thought were thinner varieties of a tennis racquet).
The first few games I played weren’t as peachy.
I couldn’t make proper contact with the ball, was too scared of being hit by it instead and it got so stuffy inside the court after a
while that I almost swore never to set foot inside one again, dismissing squash as a boring, indoor variation of tennis.
But soon enough, I happened to set foot inside
the court’s viewing area during school hours when the school squash team was
practicing (which included my classmate Abhay Sood, a hosteler 6 years my
junior, Rannvijay and Harinder Pal Sandhu, who is currently India’s 2nd
ranked squash player). Their games almost resembled an art form, quite like fencing
but without the armor. The way they hit the parallel shots, placed their drops,
never ever came in the path of the opponent’s shot and the most satisfying part,
never got hit by the ball.
That caught my eye and little by little, I started
playing the game in my free time. Being in the school cricket team, most of my
afternoons and evenings were reserved for net practices or matches but living inside a boarding school has its perks when it comes to playing sports, even at night.
I played, I played and I played. I could hit
some parallel shots, hit serves with 100% accuracy and defeat almost anyone in
the hostel, Rannvijay too (The other school squash team players were
day-boarders). I started loving the game and was used to be found, almost
always, in those courts which I earlier deemed as "stuffy".
At that point in time, the thought of
quitting cricket and taking up this sport never hit me. I was a good squash
player coz of a lot of practice and sans training, never learned the tricks of
the trade. Finally when that thought actually crossed my mind, it got sidelined by the board examinations and college admission forms.
A bachelor’s degree and 2 years into a
consulting career, here I am again, picking up where I left off.
I bought new non-marking court shoes, am thinking
of buying a new racquet, maybe also a kit bag and was completely content about where this was
going. Until yesterday.
Yesterday, after
playing squash at the Siri Fort Sports Complex for an hour, which is our weekly routine now, our court was
booked by ‘Gaurav Nandrajog’, a professional squash player. Seeing him play brought
back those memories when I fell in love with this sport, 10 years back. And those
memories also carried along the regret of not pursuing the sport back then.
I’m not saying I could’ve
become a pro or that I can’t take up some training and start playing like an amateur now but that missed
chance, that late realisation of how much more I preferred squash over cricket will
take me back to those days for a long time to come.
