How chess helped me understand grief

"On a splendid November afternoon in Goa, I watched something familiar unfold on a chessboard. The Indian grandmaster Arjun Erigaisi, world number six, was destroyed by his Chinese counterpart Wei Yi. Erigaisi was playing on home soil and was a favourite of the schoolchildren who had crowded around his board in pin-drop silence. He moved his pawn to the centre of the board, pressed the button on the dual-timer chess clock, and the game had begun."

"In this country where chess was born, grandmasters rise as effortlessly as the coastline grows coconut trees. The game enters a child's life early, slipping through the cracks of classrooms, kitchens, and cramped, overworked working-class homes, teaching them to strategise or, more likely, to endure. That, at least, was how chess entered mine. My brilliant Periappa (uncle), without money to pursue higher education and with a temper that kept him between jobs, often ended up babysitting me."

"I must have been six when, during one of those days, he gave me my favourite inheritance: the game of chess. All these years later, I still remember Periappa holding a chipped, toy-sized plastic knight in front of my face and declaring, These are my favourite. They are deadly if you master them. I knew I'd tasted something I would always want. Chess entered my life not as a pastime, but as a sensation. My relationship with chess was a pheromonal one."

On a November afternoon in Goa Arjun Erigaisi, world number six, was defeated decisively by Wei Yi while schoolchildren watched in pin-drop silence. Chess permeates Indian childhoods, entering classrooms, kitchens, and cramped working-class homes, teaching strategy and endurance. I learned chess at six from my uncle Periappa, who presented a chipped plastic knight and warned of its danger if mastered. Chess became for me a visceral sensation and a lesson in hard truths: no mercy is offered, only strategy; in chess one either learns a lesson or teaches one.

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