I was clumsy as a kid. Skinny legs, short height, round spectacles, and an undying obsession for books. Seychelles wasn’t exactly the place you wanted to be if you were any of those things. Seychelles was a place to play football, swim, run, and dance — everything I absolutely sucked at. When it came to football, the usual order of things was like this:
- Go into the school ground during lunch
- Get picked last during team creation
- Screw up horribly on defense (or worse, make a self-goal)
- Resort to reading during lunch-time
- Feel bad about not being good enough and repeating step 1…
As if that wasn’t enough, the teachers would stand up for me and help me out whenever I had a problem (since I was new and foreign and didn’t know Créole at all). That meant I was branded a “teacher’s pet”.
Sometimes I’d feel like bringing a cricket bat and ball and showing everyone that I could play cricket twice as better as they played football, but I was half afraid of someone stealing the bat, and half afraid of someone hitting me on the head with it.
So I decided to play football in the least destructive of ways. I would stay back near the goalkeeper, swing my legs at the passing attacker (as usual — miss) and pretend to have tried really really hard by showing the required amount of emotion. Watching Bollywood movies helped a lot with the acting part.
That served my purpose and I began getting picked more often during team creation (on the premise that I would at least try). Life would have been all nice and peachy if it hadn’t been for a particularly aggressive kid on the opposite team. He would fly in with the football, shove me aside and score his goals.
On a fateful day, I put some logic to use and resorted to swerving out of his way and diving with my legs forward to tackle him while he was about to take a shot. Miraculously, that one time (and only that one time), it worked. I think I caught him off guard, because he definitely hadn’t expected me of all people to dive and defend.
It was my moment of football glory — four seconds of a goal-blocking dive during a 45-minute lunch break. It felt brilliant.
Imaginary fans applauded for me and I distinctly remember going home that day feeling like I was on top of the world.
Things didn’t change too much after that. I couldn’t read anything more than a fellow seven-year-old’s football tactics of course.
But that moment of glory felt like I was beginning to get the hang of living on an island in the middle of nowhere. I was beginning to feel at home for the first time in months. The trick wasn’t to try to be good at everything. It was just to try and tackle things the best way I could.