Krishna plays chess

A story from my life

Dr. Krishna ____ was my mother’s uncle, her father’s elder brother. He was a surgeon, a professor, and a connoisseur of cricket. He had a life before me, but I never knew it. To me, he was always Krishnajja.

“Ajja” means grandfather in Kannada. When I was born, he was 72. I could not imagine him young, handsome, with a head full of hair. The photos of his younger self hanging on his bedroom wall felt alien. I only knew the smiling, shriveled old man with translucent white skin who covered his head with a skullcap because the morning breeze gave him a cold at times.

Krishnajja taught me to play chess.

He didn’t teach me the rules. Neither did anyone at home. Chess was a mythical pastime my father whispered about in dreamy tones, as a way of remembering his father, who had passed when I was six years old. My father and his brother played chess at times, but I didn’t learn the basics from them. I don’t remember if I ever asked them. I tried and failed silently against the black-and-white Windows 95 system that would veto wrong moves without tsk-tsking in my face. Sometimes, I would watch the grown-ups play, but the activity seemed forbidding.

I must have been 9 or 10 years old when Krishnajja took me under his wing. His house in Rajajinagar, Bangalore, was an alcove of serenity – a small apartment next to a mayflower tree that bloomed bright red in the summer. I saw him play chess with a friend, probably, or he offered to teach me. The details are unclear. But one summer, when I had traveled from Ooty to Bangalore for the holidays, he made it his project to teach me chess, without explicitly telling me what he was doing. I was his experiment but also his joy.

Krishnajja’s house was a museum of small beautiful things – green glass paper-weights and snowglobes in a glass showcase, a bronze plate hanging on the wall depicting a dancing Nataraja from Thanjavur (where he’d taught at the Government Medical College), wicker chairs in the living room, a quaint old radio that he kept by his bed, and an adjustable back-scratcher he had made himself. He hacksawed the handles of ladles and spatulas in the kitchen, cutting them to the size of the surgical instruments he was used to handling. He cut little labels using white chart paper, which he then cellotaped to the sides of flat cuboidal boxes in which he stashed away knick-knacks and loose papers. He labeled them with a black marker – “Bank documents,” “Medical Reference books,” and my favorite, “Gajet matter,” in which he kept manuals for his TV remote and a couple of other electronic items. I corrected the spelling once, which he acknowledged but never changed.

One of those cardboard boxes contained his chess set – a chessboard that was aquamarine on the uncheckered side, a translucent plastic box, and a green polyester pouch. In the pouch was one set of chess pieces, solid and classy. The white king in this set had a broken crown. The other set in the plastic box was flimsy and cheap, with hollow pawns and razor-thin knights. I once broke one of these knights by sitting on it. He promptly fixed it with super glue, without uttering a word. His lack of annoyance annoyed me. It also annoyed me that he always preferred the cheap set when I pushed for the classy one. I needed a reason for his preference, but he never gave me one.

Endless summer afternoons were spent in the liminal space of Krishna ajja’s small apartment: nibbling on kulfis that my grandmother made, falling asleep on the cool stone of the grey mosaic floor, shooing away stray lizards that somehow entered the house despite Krishnajja’s vigil, eating mangoes with juice dripping down my forearm, watching all five days of test match cricket, drinking strong coffee that I can smell as I type, listening to the same songs over and over on his FM radio… and slow, slow games of chess. He moved slow and I moved even slower. Our games continued for hours, and we would leave them undisturbed to return to after lunch or dinner. Once, somebody upset a board that we had paused this way. That sound of clattering pieces was an audible tragedy.

I’ve played many people after Krishnajja. He wasn’t the best player I knew, but he did have a useful quality for a teacher – getting down to the level of his students without patronizing them. At first, he offered to play “handicap” matches by removing his queen from the board, but when my stubborn ego refused, he just played with more gentleness instead of crushing me like a fly. When you’re starting out playing chess, you’re like a child learning to walk. Sure, you know how to move your legs, but you don’t know the terrain of the board and you’re stumbling in the dark. It takes someone to pay attention to your every move and realize that what comes naturally to them is a foreign language of patterns you haven’t yet learnt to speak.

It needs somebody to care enough to waste time that way.

Krishnajja had taught surgery to medical students, and he would still explain the mechanics of the human body to anybody who had an aching stomach and an afternoon to kill. He would prescribe medicines to his younger brothers, who were all doctors themselves. The same didactic tone carried over to our games of chess. He would watch me make suicidal mistakes moving random pieces when the action was elsewhere, and he’d nudge me:

“Hold on a second. Take a look at all your pieces. What’s going on in every part of the board?” If I didn’t understand, he would ask, “If you do that, what do you think I’m going to do next?” If I still didn’t get it, he would make a clever move without rubbing in my mistake and act like it was his intention to teach me something new. “You see, when one piece is attacking two at the same time? That’s called a fork. You’ve got to watch out for the knight because if you don’t see it coming, you’re in trouble.” I think he never let me win a game out of pity. But he did lose sometimes to his brother-in-law, Mr. KK, who would visit on some afternoons. Watching these defeats gave me hope that beating him wasn’t an unimaginable feat.

Chess is all about the win, isn’t it? How fast, how brutally, how efficiently you can dispatch your opponent and bask in your superiority. That’s how I saw it when I was learning to play, and it was the wrong goal to have. But even wrong goals can serve as useful crutches en route to a better goal. I don’t remember how old I was… 15? 17? The first time I beat Krishnajja felt like graduation. But he was just getting started. After years of boxing with one arm tied behind his back, he could finally let go. Without the pressure of having to win, chess also became much more enjoyable for me. I started seeing personality in the way he moved his pieces, and I surprised myself with how I played.

There are people who commune with the chessboard. For them, the game is a sacred process. I am not one of those people. I was a reckless player then, and I’m a careless player now. I didn’t want to win as much as I wanted to see some action. I hated closed boards where I was suffocated for space, and victories earned in such games didn’t mean much to me. I didn’t want opponents to be stifled into submission – I wanted to silently coordinate an ambush in plain sight and then engineer one grand moment which would make Krishnajja say “Heegella Maadbedi ree…” (Don’t do like this and all, sir). I wanted to surprise him with a “Knight to H3” gambit like Ron Weasley, though he had never watched Harry Potter and never would.

His style of playing was stoic. He was engrossed with the board till he made his move, and then completely disinterested, watching whatever was on TV or staring at the ceiling fan till I prompted him for the next move. If I played impulsively, he countered it with patient, meditative maneuvering. “No unforced errors,” he would say, drawing a metaphor from the tennis match running in the background. Now that I had started beating him, he didn’t volunteer any more tips. He would rarely offer a draw. He wanted to either say the words “Checkmate” or hear them.

Sometimes, he would resign though.

Games where he resigned tasted flat, like a cold bowl of tomato soup. Making him resign was easy because he had a special rule. If my pawn reached the opposite end and got “promoted”, he would resign. It was “unbalanced” according to him, and he felt it was no fun to play on, even if he had a fighting chance. So when I played with him, I had to maneuver with that in mind.

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I began playing with other opponents around 16. This time, it was back home at Ooty.

My P.T teacher had ignored me for the first 10 years of our shared existence except while thwacking my palms with a cane for being late to morning assembly. He became my best friend when he discovered I could play chess. He wanted me to play in the zonal competition, and I was somehow the de facto coach, despite not being the best player on the team. I spent a lot of time arbitrating matches that I could have spent playing instead, though I didn’t really mind because I enjoyed watching the drama. I saw snarky players who trash-talked constantly, bovine players who just didn’t care if they won or lost, silent killers who only smiled after they won, excitable ones who gave away their best moves by glancing nervously at the wrong parts of the board, pedants who were just waiting to yell “touch-piece!” and loafers who showed up at practice only to bunk class. I’m not judging them now, but I did back then.

Nobody at school was much fun to play with, but I had found a new opponent at home – my uncle, my dad’s elder brother. Playing with him had been pointless until then because I never stood a chance. But after beating Krishnajja, I thought maybe I did. Since I wasn’t getting to play much at school, playing against my uncle was also the best way to practice for the upcoming tournament. He was an undefeatable mystery. Losing wasn’t new to me, but losing in humiliating new ways without learning a single thing got on my nerves. It felt like I was on a sinking ship, trying to plug holes while new ones continuously emerged from nowhere. Chess infected my obsession-prone mind. Time at school lacked meaning. All I looked forward to was getting home, gulping down lunch, and trying to beat my uncle.

My uncle was an unusually silent chess player. He would squeeze his lower lip with his fingers, grimace, conduct an imaginary orchestra with his fingers, let them hover in mid-air, and then flick them before making some terrifying move that upended all my plans. Unlike Krishnajja, he was also reasonably fast. “You’re not going to have all the time in the world in the tournament, you have to move faster!” he’d say as a parting remark after the game ended. I kept searching for the magical pivot around which games with him turned. I didn’t find a thing. He just seemed to be a really good player.

I began to read books. I learned algebraic notation, as if naming the squares on the boards with alphabets and numbers would let me glimpse some inscrutable solution that I was missing. I tried memorizing openings with set sequences, and I blinked when he went off-script. My dad would sometimes stare at the board with his hands behind his back when we were playing, and then walk away, chuckling and shaking his head. Weeks passed and nothing changed at home.

But things did change at school. The more I lost to my uncle, the more people lost to me at school. The more I won at school, the more boring it got. It stayed that way until Sethuram showed up.

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My P.T. teacher called me in early during recess one day (which was a terrible thing for me because I’m a slow eater and I’d just gotten started with lunch). “There’s a new kid at school, Sethuram. It seems he’s a national-level player. I want you to test him out,” he said. I was curious. I was in the 11th grade, and the kid was in the 5th. Half my size and bespectacled, he looked like Harry Potter from the first movie. “This is Adhithya, our best player. Do you think you can beat him?” asked my teacher. The kid looked up at me, smiled, and said, “Yes.” Huh, how about that. We walked to the sports room, set up the board, and started playing.

The game seemed alright at first. Predictable and rational. Within the tenth move, the kid exchanged queens. In a few more, he had exchanged a couple more pieces and was aggressively pushing his pawns forward. I could feel the tempo changing. He wasn’t even looking at me. It was like he was living among the pieces on the board and relaying instructions back to his physical body. I was growing desperate. I scrambled for an opening and saw some chance for an odd gamble that seemed too blatant to try. My only hope was that when I did something unorthodox, he would mistake the bizarre nature of my moves for incompetence and let his guard slip. I moved a couple of pieces and waited to see how he would react. He hadn’t caught on. I sighed and shook my head, pretending like I was carelessly giving away pieces. He was moving without a pause, thinking the game was over.

Now, I could pretend like I remember the exact move I made in my moment of glory, but I only remember it had something to do with the top right corner of the board. I have a terrible memory for chess positions. What I do remember is his face after I said “Checkmate.” He was an emoji with an open mouth, and with his eyebrows raised, it was the only time he looked his age during that whole game.

“How’s our player?” P.T.Sir asked him. “Good,” he muttered and left sullenly.

Every day after that, I played Sethuram. Every day, I lost. One game was all he needed to take my measure, and he moved fast. I sometimes lost to him outright and sometimes on time. I wasn’t used to playing with clocks because I complained that they “took the fun out of the game.” But he was trained on clocks before he learned to write, probably. He thought on my time, which is what chess players are supposed to do. He played to win, not to have fun, but I could see that he was having fun winning, and I was having no fun losing. Maybe the concept of fun was invented by losers as a compromise for not being able to win.

My friends watched with folded hands as I kept losing game after game. Then one day, a game came down to just three pawns apiece, and I felt like I had him. He offered a draw and I turned it down. I moved a pawn, and then he made a move which looked illegal, removing my pawn from the board and moving his pawn elsewhere. “En passant capture,” he said. I had read about this special move in books, but I had never seen it used before, and have never seen it since (which probably means I haven’t played enough chess).

He won that match too, seized it from the jaws of defeat something-something.

The day before the zonal tournament, I was excited. I thought I was going to show everyone. Show what exactly, I didn’t know. But I’d show them. Though our games had gotten longer and more drawn out, I still hadn’t been able to beat my uncle. But I had never come across anyone else on the level of either Sethuram or my uncle, so I was hoping things would go my way. I called up Krishnajja and told him I was going to a tournament. “Just have fun,” he said. “Play your natural game.” With eleven other students and a teacher, I went to the Kendriya Vidyalaya at the Aruvankadu Cordite factory, a gloomy and dark place in my memory, where hundreds of us were paired with each other and given dual clocks to punch. I won my first game and thought I was a God. I pitied my mortal friends who had lost. I lost my second game and realized I was a pitiable human too. Sethuram was in the junior division, and he won both games. The next day, I won 1, drew 1, and lost 1. Sethuram won 2 and drew 1. He advanced to the nationals and continued to the next level, SGFI. My story ended there.

After the tournament, there was no more practice at school. There was still the matter of beating my uncle, though.

One day, much after the tournament, with something running on the TV in the background on a sleepy evening, I realized my uncle was playing like he had missed a possibility. He wasn’t hovering his hand over the board like he was conducting a symphony, flicking his fingers, and making sharp moves. He had overlooked something. I sat up without making it obvious that I had found something. Looking like I was struggling to find a good move, I pushed pieces trying to create a decoy that would lure him away, and I hoped he would make the wrong move. He did. I moved the rook to the back rank and hesitated. “Check.” Surely, I hadn’t just won? There had to be some catch here. He seemed to be thinking the same. For what seemed like an eternity, we both sat frozen over the board with our chins resting on our palms. Then he extended his hand and said, “Good game.”

I was a bad loser. But I was an abysmal winner. I ran the length of the corridor in my house, screaming as if I’d just won the war, which in a way, I had. For the next two days, I told anyone who wanted to listen and everyone who didn’t how I had finally defeated my uncle. It meant nothing to anyone else, but it changed something in me. I was never in awe of any chess player after that. Everything felt like a beatable challenge.

I left my school a year later, and I entered the zonal tournament one more time, with similar results. In that time, I played Sethuram many, many times. I never drew a single match. I never beat him again. I don’t know where he is now because I didn’t see him on the news like I expected. We didn’t have Internet access back then, we couldn’t stay in touch, and I sometimes wonder what happened to the boy who looked like Harry Potter and played like Ron Weasley.

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There were other places, other players, and lots of games. But we need to get back to Krishnajja’s story.

Around the time I got into college, Krishnajja turned 90. His birthday was the day before mine. I would wish him in the evening, and he would wish me the next morning. We were separated by just 71 years and 364 days. When he turned 90, there was speculation about whether he would “hit a century.” I don’t remember if I talked to him about it, but my cousins and I were fascinated by the possibility that somebody could live that long. Somebody we knew.

And it seemed like he could actually do it.

To me, he was a mystical figure like the Hindu god after whom he was named, a man who looked like he could never age, ensconced in his magical abode that always looked the same. He didn’t have children, no external markers of time, and every time I visited him, it felt like I was entering a time capsule that had remained the same while the rest of the world had changed. He watched the same TV programs, listened to the same singers on the radio, preferring female voices to male voices, ate mangoes, and played chess with me. After watching the Wimbledon match, he would call his brothers and discuss Federer’s performance. When I sang through my nose on purpose to annoy him, he would patiently hear me squealing and say “Apaswara” at the end with a poker-face. Cacophony.

A year later, he started to take breaks between games of chess. While I lay by his side, he would tell me stories. He would tell me about Shivaji’s guerrilla tactics against Aurangzeb. Or the time he and his brothers ran down a rat snake and touched the tired little reptile to their screaming sister’s hair because there was a myth that this would make her hair grow long (it apparently worked). He told me about the time some politician had asked his friend, “Why do all these people need religion? I’m doing fine without it, aren’t I?” and the friend had replied, “That’s like asking someone with a broken leg, why do you need a crutch, I can run without one, can’t I?” I couldn’t tell if Krishnajja needed religion or didn’t. He never told me what I should believe, and merely hinted that it was possible to accept people who went either way.

Some time around 93, he began to play only one game of chess a day, and he stopped winning. The stories became about his childhood. His brothers, his father, the village he grew up in.

My favorite story was about the time he almost drowned in a well when he was 9 years old, and I would muse that this 90-year saga could have been cut short in minutes. That’s a story for another day.

I can’t say I saw his death coming. I was still delusional about him hitting a 100. It feels a bit cheap to have wanted him to live that long because I wanted a good story to tell, but come on, he cheated death for decades, so why not a few more years? And maybe his presence calmed me, told me that while things would change, they wouldn’t change right away. That there was still time, that my childhood wasn’t over yet, even after I had graduated from college, because my life with Krishnajja was still the same. But one day, after I moved to Bangalore, when I visited him, I asked him, “Shall we play a game of chess?” He shook his head, turning me down for the first time, and my grandmother said in a low voice, “He doesn’t play anymore, even with Mr. KK. He gets tired.” I told myself it was a phase and that he’d eventually ask me for a game himself. Instead, he lost his hearing next. My off-key singing left him unperturbed. He began sleeping more, talking less… and faded away gracefully even before he died.

Nephews and nieces who loved him took care of him till the end, and neighbors kept dropping in. People cried over his death whom I’ve never seen cry – but when people spoke of him months later, it was with happiness that there existed a man like him in their life.

He was 97 years and 4 months old when he died. His body went to a medical college for research, as one last act of charity to the profession he loved.

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Krishnajja was one of a handful of people who took my writing seriously when I was a kid. He read all of the stories I showed him, and he gave me criticism only if I asked for it. Once, when someone had called me a plagiarist and I spent an afternoon whining about it, he gave me some unsolicited advice.

“Do you know that you wrote this story by yourself?”
Yes.
“Then what does it matter what other people say?”

For years, I didn’t write anything about him.

A few months ago, my cousin A asked me to teach her to play chess. While we were sitting on the sofa and I was taking her through every move, telling her to watch out for what I would do next, and questioning her choices, I said, “You see, when one piece is attacking two at the same time? That’s called a fork. You’ve got to watch out for the knight because if you don’t see it coming, you’re in trouble.” As I was saying it, I heard Krishnajja’s voice.

And I was a boy of twelve again, back in Rajajinagar, listening to this man who had taught me so much I needed to know, through stories, through silence, through moving flimsy plastic pieces on a board of sixty-four squares.

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