Flashbacks 2010 World Cup’s Called to me

The World Cup has been the talk of the town for a few weeks now. I watch the matches on a twenty two inches’ colour TV sitting or lying or whatever way comforts me in a lounge in my lounge room.  This has the nymphs of my dead days‘ reminiscence dance before my mental  eyes. When I was in Bhutan, the country of my origin, I had heard about the World Cup and some of the then famous players like Pele and Maradona. I got an opportunity to watch the World Cup match in 1994 after I headed off from the hills of my birthplace among which I grew up to Nepal for refuge. I was made bid a goodbye to my native land by the autocratic and anarchic regime which is today heedlessly blowing its own trumpet of melodramatic Gross National Happiness.

I and my buddies had made some acquaintances in the local village near the refugee camp we had been rotting in for a couple of years and a half by then. So it was through our friendship with them we had managed to see the game.

The final match between Brazil and Italy was the first live telecast I have ever watched. A fourteen inches’ black and white TV was swarmed around by some twenty heads in a six by five metre room. It was seventeen July’s hot and sudorific midnight. There was no scientific device to chase the heat away. Everyone but the owner’s family members sat with his legs crossed on the uncarpeted wooden floor which had us hold our head high in that the position of the TV was set to the convenience of the ones sitting at the back on the chairs. I want you to imagine about the rest of the pains we had to put up with throughout the spell of the extravaganza. I was as pleased as Punch to see the game as I was quenching two thirsts with a drink then. It was not only my first World Cup but also my first TV watch. This is what had made me more excited and elated than ever. Actually I was forcefully doing the third first thing of my life: watching a movie. Jeevan Rekha was on the other channel. I didn’t  get my teeth into it though it’s my first movie. The TV owner had the remote in his hand which he could press the button of at the call of his heart and at any time for anything of his interest. I wished I had a TV then but it’s not in my fate. Who said man is the captain of destiny? To me this lives in lines not in lives. I left no stone unturned during my destitution but I got nowhere. What I achieved out of it is my wife and two children. I had no idea TV had been something that I would have the possession of after leaving the camp, along with my next and two kids, for keeps. I didn’t know there would be fourteen years between my first TV watching and the first TV of mine. I hadn’t either thought that I would have measured the distance from the biggest continent to the smallest before I hear my son say, “Do you know I love this TV show, papa?”

Sports and games have been a topic of great interest for Bhutanese no matter wherever they are and whatever situation they are caught up in. Most of them irrespective of their age, sex and profession are found fonder of football than any other games to which I am no exception. Pecuniary penury has never stood in face of their will to derive pleasure from football.

If you chance to call at Bhutanese refugee camps in eastern Nepal where they have been stagnating for a couple of decades or a Bhutanese hamlet, it’d be your pain or pleasure to see a story that you might have heard happening. The story that is being talked about is of the young ones who are football buffs. They gather tattered clothes and wrap it around by plastic and tie it with what thread on earth comes handy so as to get it turned into a football shape and call it so and go ahead to exploit it on the ground. Some of them use socks for the purpose instead. First they insert the ball into a sock. The sock is tied at a point in such a way that the ball exactly fits in. The remaining part of the sock is then turned over and the step is repeated until the sock changes its shape into a ball. Finally the end of the sock is sewn. This is their industry to make reality of their desire to play football. I fall in this category, if I call my childhood to come back. It’s the children’s duress to hunt after plastics and rags since they don’t get chance to play a machine-made football. The only opportunity they had sometimes to play it is in games period in school. Though it’s the property of school, only seniors could play it. If a word’s raised against the unfairness, another injustice, a verbal attack and threatening or physical thrashing, had to be mutely borne.

My love for football had been a nuisance several times.  It invited many a sticky wicket. Two of my maternal uncles used to study in Banaras, a well-known education centre in India. During their days off from study, they used to come back to their place as all and sundry who studies at a distant place does. It was compulsion for them to get home via Surey, our hamlet, if they wanted to cut the long walk short. They comprehensibly would like to. They had to catch a bus around 3 pm from Geylegphug, the nearest town which is some 35 km from Surey. The journey is of around an hour and a half. As our house was but a stone’s throw away from Surey bazaar, the first main bus stop for the bus, they would prefer to stay the night with us. The patients generally feel all-in and woozy in that they have to go past many rises, mountains and bends. They have to submit themselves to a lot shifting elevation and atmospheric state.

On one occasion, one of the two uncles had been our caller. I was in seventh heaven not because I’d get some pocket money as usual but because he had a pair of long new socks. After a while or two, I grew little upset. So I took some time to think. Consequently I took a long deep breath of relief for I had made up my mind to steal only one of the socks. If I stole both, I would certainly be the suspect for my brothers were too small to lift things like that, in one hand. On the other hand, he had not got wind of his nephew’s likes. Finally I behaved. There wasn’t, at all, any hazardous plot. I did it just to make a football and that’s that about the stealth. If I acted thus with father’s, I had to either run away or bear the marks of cane stick on my calves to school. He never touched my other parts. My teachers would ask me the following day about it. I would get into hot water for the second time for the same cause. The problem was I hadn’t got the first pair of my trousers and socks until I came across the eleventh bleak winter of my life. Had I got my socks, I’d not have lengthened my arms to my uncle’s sock. On his way back to his school, one of my brothers who was a big mouth, revealed the secret theft to my uncle. This time I had to miss his favour and see my brothers enjoy my share. To my amazement, I got a real ball when he returned home next time.

Every year, in late June or early July, there used to be knock-out football tournament on the ground of Surey Primary School. The players would be from a school-goer teenager to a farmer who’s in his forty’s.  This is one of the two busiest periods of the year for the farmers of the village. The venue was a five minute walk from my cottage. The finale, one year, and our paddy planting day had coincided. As I was assigned, after school and lunch, I had to cut grass for 2 cows, their calves and a pair of oxen, who were employed from can see to can’t see in the field, for their evening fodder. The cattle or paddy were, for me, not a penny more than the match. I could not stand the days between the matches.  I was fevered with thoughts throughout the day. What would be the situation if I were to play it? I could not let the match pass at any cost. And I didn’t. I had to skip the dinner and escape from my home to my paternal uncle’s that evening.

I had to rest my armpits on crutches for a month in 1995 as my right foot fractured due to football. I am until the end of time indebted to Mr. Vinod Dahal who lent me his crutches. Had he not been so courteous and considerate to me, I would have been a total bed-ridden mortal for one month. He had met an accident in India and had been seriously injured. After all, I am not a good footballer but certainly a fan I am.

Tags: Bhutanese Literature Yati Raj Ajnabee