2023 marked the year I stepped back onto a tennis court for good. It feels strange to commemorate it as though it was a momentous return; it wasn’t. Much like writing for the past eight or nine years, tennis has been a constant in my life since I was about six years old, though its frequency and relative importance has ebbed and flowed. Even after years of regular coaching, which came to an end towards the business end of school, my racquet was never too far from sight, and ever since, tennis has always featured in my numerous plans to return to peak fitness. Against the run of play, tennis tapered off during my college years in Jodhpur, owing partly to the lack of suitable facilities and reliable partners, but mostly to an irresistible tendency to indolence which I developed during that time. I still played now and then, even competed in a couple of law school tournaments – quite well (though never ultimately in a winning cause) on some occasions, but rather poorly in my last outing at home in my final year, where I suppose my place in our tennis team was based less on outright ability and more on the efflux of time and a queer respect for my seniority.
Even in the working years that immediately followed, I continued to play from time to time, chuffed to discover that I could stretch my tennis horizons by utilizing my paychecks – buying a sports club membership, two new racquets; even a tennis bag the likes of which I had seen only on the backs of the more exalted, or wealthy, young players at the coaching centres or tournaments that I had been to. I played on, never improving much, but always able to call upon years and years of muscle memory to hold my own, and to elicit the odd appreciative remark from the opponent or a spectator. Tennis – a classic example of one of the (many? not sure any longer!) things I think I am good enough at to induce a surprised nod of interest or acknowledgement, but not so publicly accomplished at for appreciation to transform into enduring admiration in another, or into any form of enduring success for myself.
I owe my determination to give tennis its rightful place in my life to a serendipitous summer read – Carrie Soto Is Back. That it is an uplifting story of an intriguing former champion makes it an unputdownable read for anyone; but for me, it opened up the world of tennis afresh. Not necessarily as an enthusiastic follower of the professional circuit – something I was never too much of even in my regular playing years (barring a love affair with Federer, much too late, in his waning years) – but of the beauty and intricacy of the sport itself, which I imagine I either took for granted as a young pupil, or was simply too small to appreciate. It also opened my eyes to the rich world of tennis coaching to which I was never exposed (understandably so, since I always remained an amateur though long-term player), and to the pedagogy of tennis that I had never encountered. I was seeing a sport I had played all my life in an utterly new light, all thanks to a novel whose writer herself was not a serious player. Halfway through the book – and smack in the middle of a longish summer vacation with no prospect of accessing a court anytime soon – I knew I had to plot my own return to the sport: and to do so in a formal, structured manner that would keep me honest even amidst the chaos of working adult life.
In what was to be one of my most decisive and rewarding moves of the last year, soon after my return home, I tracked down a tennis academy nearby with a fairly flexible schedule for adults, and, amid the occasional washouts caused by the torrential rains of the monsoon, I was finally back: to my chagrin – older, rotund-er, slower than before, but to my boundless delight – once more a student of the game I had not realized I loved and needed so much.
Stay tuned for Part II – to come soon!