Look in her eyes

When the score got to 17-0, we decided to leave. Brown University, my alma mater, was beating up on the University of Stony Brook. Not even a line of fans of all sexes, bare torsos painted S-E-A-W-O-L-V-E-S -- the Stony Brook team name -- could spur a measure of competitiveness. It was fun to see Brown score, but it was getting tedious watching SB's incompetence.

Still, it had been a spectacular show. The Brown mascots, two students dressed in bear costumes, roamed the stands for photo-ops. Kids swooned in delight. Cheerleaders in skin-tight short dresses did their peppy routines -- twirls, kicks and smiles -- to pump up the audience. Adults swooned in delight. The SB marching band staged a precision halftime show to Paul Simon tunes, though Late in the Evening might well have been Too Little, Too Late in the Evening as an oblique reference to the efforts of their struggling team. Their cheerleaders were, let it be said, nowhere near as svelte as Brown's. Then again, the Brown band was nowhere near as slick as SB's, though a deliberate scruffiness has been a long-standing Brown band tradition.

Thus did several alumni spend a sunny September afternoon in a football stadium in Providence, reliving memories of carefree campus days. Me, one of those alums, back at Brown after years.

In the States, college football is a fall tradition. Standards in the Ivy League, where Brown belongs, are pretty abysmal compared to the national powerhouses of the game, and if Brown was beating up on SB, that's a sign of SB's own standards.

Still, something about fall in New England and Ivy football has always grabbed me. Part of that is because the Ivies try to hold on to what college athletics should be about: a pursuit that's an adjunct to academics. Part is because my fellow computer science students -- bright, motivated and hard-working all -- would on a whim throw aside assignments, pile into someone's car, and spend a day driving country roads to gasp at fall foliage. I joined them often, never tiring of the orgy of pinks, yellows and oranges as the trees shed the sedate greens of summer.

It became a computer science rite, this drive. Except Saturday afternoons, when not even the foliage kept us from cheering on Brown's footballers. Or maybe we were really ogling the cheerleaders, who knows.

This time too, the stomping of SB was one stop in our September romp through the fall colours of New England. Every day on the road, more trees turned aflame. Driving along, I found myself often bereft of words, able only to extend my index finger in the direction of the latest brilliant stretch of foliage, hoping my wife would look and gasp too.

Fall memories. And wandering through Brown, others too: struggling to finish programming assignments; camaraderie in the lab as we slogged into the night; reversing onto Irving Avenue, straight into the back of another car doing the same but from the other side of the Avenue.

And of the time, too -- speaking of sports -- when I fought hard to win a game from friend Nancy, member of Brown's squash team.

Game after game, Nancy had been steamrolling me, and as I succumbed in still another, I sensed a resigned scorn in her: "Why won't this guy try harder?" Even all these years later, I remember telling myself, "Win one! Just one!" Scrambling after every shot, I did that -- I won the next game by three points. Nancy looked at me with new respect, then shifted gears. She returned to beating me, but at least it was never again as one-sided. She was never again scornful.

It was a lesson that stuck, and remains one of my favourite Brown memories. That afternoon at the Brown stadium, how I wished SB could find some of the fight that I'm still proud I dug out of nowhere, that changed the look in Nancy's eyes.

Safely in goal

One evening in a STD booth in the Naseem Bagh area of Srinagar, I have to wait several minutes for a pretty thing to finish her hushed call. Waiting with me are two tall young men, Firdous and Mansoor. All friendly curiosity, they lean over to ask me where I'm from, what I'm doing here, how I like Kashmir and its people (very much), have I watched the football tournament at the University, where am I staying, will I come home for some "a-one" wazwan food?

They also fill me in on their lives.

Mansoor actually laughs as he tells me of the time they were studying at Delhi University, staying in the hostel. When their hostel-mates learned they were from Kashmir, they assumed some bizarre things. One said to Mansoor in all seriousness, I thought you'd be carrying guns and bombs! I mean, you're from Kashmir, aren't you a terrorist?

And Mansoor and Firdous laugh some more.

Meanwhile, the pretty thing is taking her own time with her call, giggling nonstop. I finally give up and leave. As I say goodbye to my two new friends, Firdous says: "Next time, you're staying with me, OK?"

At DU, they thought this guy was a terrorist. Oh yeah.

The football tournament features university teams from all over the North. When I get there to watch, Kashmir is busy making Bundelkhand look like nincompoops. Every time Bundelkhand kicks off, a Kashmir player steals the ball. A few passes and slick moves later, it nestles safely in Bundelkhand's goal. In five minutes that I watch this disaster, Kashmir scores four times.

On the next field, Jamia is playing Lucknow. More even, this match, but marred by a peculiar commentary. The man behind the mike practically fawns on the Jamia team. "They are showing the real guts!" "I am positive Jamia will score first!" "They will definitely win this game!" "Lucknow has floundered [sic] another chance!" "That was a magnanimous [sic] effort by Jamia!" -- and he didn't mean that Jamia was generously turning the ball over to their opponents. That skill being Bundelkhand's monopoly anyway.

So odd is this fount of words that in the audience, we begin looking at each other, baffled and amused. But magnanimous or magnificent or something else, the match ends in a tie and is decided by a penalty shootout. Jamia takes the first shot and scores, which causes the loudspeaker to erupt: "I TOLD YOU JAMIA WOULD SCORE FIRST!"

Only minutes later, a Jamia player kicks too high and his team loses the match. This brings some introspection: "We are not biased in favour of any team, we just want to see good football."

And we just want to hear reasonable commentary.

Black Cat League

Sikkim must be one of the few spots in the country where cricket is not the major sport. In every town we passed on the drive up, holiday football matches were in progress, little stadiums crammed with colourful and noisy spectators. The speck on the map called Melli echoed emptily as we rumbled through: pretty much all its residents were at the match. Several exceptions took the long range view, watching from the highway. As we did, for a few minutes.

Tumbling along far below, gray, silver and foaming white, is what separates the stadium from the highway, the Teesta river. So this was truly long range spectating: from across a river that's already, in these its upper reaches, formidable. But there's more. At Melli, the Teesta forms the border between Sikkim and West Bengal. So the fans on the highway were actually watching the match from another state. A generation ago, they would have been watching from another country altogether.

Those thoughts lingered through an evening spent sipping wine and chatting with a civil servant. On his balcony that looked out over the lush Gangtok hills, fragments of mist floating about cotton-like below us, he spoke sadly about travelling in other parts of India. "Many people treat me as a foreigner," he said. "When I say I'm from Sikkim, they have no idea where or what that is."

We considered apologizing for our fellow countrymen, us ignorant non-Sikkimese. The moment passed. But there was soon another glimpse of how deeply this attitude towards Sikkim affects him. We turned to football talk, and he mentioned the upcoming Governor's Gold Cup football tournament. Some big Sikkim teams are expected, he told me. Also, he said without irony, "all the big teams from India: East Bengal, Mohun Bagan, Mahindra, all of them."

***

Gangtok's cantonment is some way out of town. The regiment stationed here calls themselves Black Cat Eagles, which imposing name is painted everywhere. There's the usual, and welcome, cantonment spit-and-polish: spruce driveways, tended flower-beds, stones piled up neatly to hold a pot for a plant, that sort of thing. There's a "Black Cat Eagle Mobile Veg Shop" -- an enormous Army truck selling veggies to villagers.

But why this soldier standing on the road wearing a track suit with "Ek Dam Fine" on his back? Looked around for "Do Dam Not So Fine". No luck.

But rounding a curve in the road, sharp bellowing from above. Look up, to see two sentries saluting smartly, still shouting, as a sleek black Ambassador passes. It winds down the driveway and onto the road, only feet from where I stand. I expect some high-powered General-type in the car, some uniform that would command the saluting bellows.

Instead, there's a flash of colour. In the back are two women, respectively in dazzling yellow and red saris. A child sits in front with the driver. That's all. It's possible one of these four is a General. Possible, but somehow -- forgive any chauvinism -- somehow I have my doubts.