Back to the game

There were medals, once

There is a drawer at home with school medals in it. Badminton, football, a couple of others. Almost four, if you count the way I count, which is generously.

That was a version of me who played something almost every day and did not think of it as exercise, because it was not exercise. It was just what the evening was.

Then it stopped, and I did not notice

Nobody quits. That is the thing about it. There is no day you decide to stop playing. There is a term that gets busy, and then a laptop, and then a job, and at some point you work out that the last time you ran for anything was to catch a metro.

It took me years to notice, and the way I noticed was climbing two flights of stairs and having an opinion about it.

Now it is most weekends

This is not a story about one good Saturday. It has become the shape of the week: something most weekends, and which thing depends entirely on who answers the group chat.

Enough replies and it is football. A court free and it is badminton. Nobody free at all and I go for a run on my own, which I have stopped thinking of as the consolation option.

The hall

Badminton at Siri Fort

The way back in was a court booking somebody else made.

Siri Fort is a proper stadium: twenty-four courts laid out across the floor, tiered seating for a crowd that is not coming on a Saturday morning, and lights bright enough that the shuttle never disappears into the roof.

Yonex mats over a wooden floorSiri Fort, from outside

The first game was humbling in a very specific way. The hands remember. You still know where to stand, you still know the shot to play, and then your legs arrive about half a second after the shuttle does.

That has got better. It took about six weeks before I stopped being the reason a rally ended.

Mid rallyThe net

Twenty minutes into the first one I was breathing like I had done something serious. We now play for two hours and argue about stopping.

Still uprightLast ones off

And the part I had forgotten entirely, which happens most weeks now: being the last two people in a hall that big, while somebody waits to turn the lights off.

Football is harder than you remember

Badminton you can bluff for a while. Football you cannot.

The turfThrough the fence

Delhi has turf grounds squeezed into gaps between buildings, which is the only way a ground survives in this city. Five a side, floodlights, a fence that keeps the ball in and the rest of the neighbourhood out. That is the weeknight version, and the one we fall back on when the park is booked.

The better version is the park on a Sunday, on grass, under trees old enough to have opinions. Bigger pitch, worse surface, no lights, and an entirely different game. Nobody is keeping score properly. Everybody is arguing about whether that was a goal.

Under the trees

The park pitchThe courts next door

The running was the surprise

Running was meant to be the boring bit that made the other two possible. It has quietly become the part I miss on the weeks it does not happen.

Delhi is close to unbearable to run in at four in the afternoon and close to perfect at nine at night. The parks stay open, the paths are lit, and the temperature finally drops a number worth having.

Night lapsAfter the rain

The best one so far was in the rain, on a path that had gone to mirror, with nobody else out. There is also a stretch where you come round a corner and there is a six hundred year old tomb sitting in the middle of the park with a light on it, and you have to decide whether to stop. I stop about half the time.

The one you slow down for

And there is a cycle, for the days when the legs have voted against running but still want to be outside.

The cycleThe road home

The actual reason anybody keeps going

I would love to say it is discipline. It is not discipline. It is that after a game there is food, and food after a game tastes like nothing else on earth.

Noodles and wings and a cold coffee on a cafeteria tray, eaten by four people who have not stopped talking about one particular goal. This is the fixture. The sport is close to being the excuse.

Earned

And some weekends it is not even sport. It is whatever is on at nine, with the same people, for the same reason.

Nine o'clockA new dawn will break over the darkened world

Where it has got to

Badminton most weeks. Football when enough people reply. A run on the weekends neither happens, which turns out to be often enough that it is now its own thing rather than the fallback.

What has actually changed is smaller than I expected and better than I expected. I sleep properly. Stairs are just stairs again. And the weekend has a shape to it that is not a screen.

What I would tell anybody in the drifted-away version of this: you do not need a plan, or the right shoes, or a month of preparation. You need one person to book one court. The rest of it turns out to still be in there.