Football and other things

I did not expect him to ‘surface’ the way he did. It took me by surprise. In fact, it frightened the shit out of me.  As my grandfather Camillo’s clock struck the twelve chimes for midnight, the guy was right there, a foot behind me.  With me standing there, his tough alto voice hitting me near my legs would have definitely be worth at least a stroke.

And I had just switched the TV off with some pleasure, I may add.

I mean, how long can you take Liverpool play Chelsea in a much-touted match, trumpeted at least a week before – and  which just ends up being exactly like two dogs sniffing their behinds for ninety minutes. Just that for ninety minutes…sniff-sniff, sniff-sniff like a slow fox trot. Add to this a dynamic German coach – whom I actually like – and an Italian coach, who tries to be too ‘cute’ in front of a camera. Like he’s been given a well-written speech that’s been written by a PR person. Give me Arsene Wenger any day. Or watching a match at the ground in Kirkee, the suburb in Pune that had a long history of football behind it.

And the contradictions and paradoxes. Like watching an English league match played by an incredibly talented group of players, at least half of which are not English, sitting here in Pune as the midnight hour begins the chimes on Camillo’s clock. This is about people paying bucks to sell football like some people sell onions, and making even more bucks, while I keep the TV on and life goes on, and while football makes its grand entrance in Pune, and I am saying ‘retirement’ is a serious issue. I need therapy.

A model, film star, industrialist’s wife, cricketer, pop singer, whoever, just has to chant one line, before the match in Pune: “Let’s Football”. Everybody who once played in Pune with great distinction, to keep a tradition going from World War II, are either dead or mad, or both. Football in Pune is being reinvented.

And the real root of my misery is the sad, sad truth that I’m addicted to football. If I’m walking on the road and I see a bunch of kids kick a ball around, I will stop and watch. These days I don’t join in but I hang at the edges and hope that the ball comes my way, so I can stop it, feel it, switch it between legs, dribble the first kid that reaches me, and kick the ball back to them.

My problem is serious. If this was about sex I’d have to go to a special clinic to be rehabilitated. And all I really want is to watch a match where both sides ‘play’ the beautiful game for ninety minutes and bring with it moments of sheer magic that linger long after the match is over. It is a fact that football gives us a tradition that has seen players recorded from the 1950s, going above colour and creed when this wasn’t so fashionable, all playing football to keep the ‘style’ intact, and taking ridiculous risks which, if they worked, made the stuff of memory, if not, the player was left to feel stupid. His strength lay in the faith in his footballing skills and that he would pull it off the next time.

Imagine him with the ball at his feet, cocooned by three guys from the opposing team. He can kick one of them on the shin, another felled with an elbow to the jaw, the third, kneed in the testicles.

Or, there’s the beautiful way that shuns violence. The proper but tame way would be for him to pass the ball to someone in the zone of play cutting the players’ and getting into a place to receive the ball back – or, as the case may be, sent off in another zone. The team still plays. One does not paw, elbow, head-butt or maim. One plays the beautiful game, so that even the most vociferous of opponents, both players and spectators applaud. Football is a celebration. He will receive the ball back, take twenty paces and shred the net.

Within this minority who believe in the beautiful game, there are a band of modernists, across the centuries, who, like jazz musicians, are more daring. One of them will take on all three and run rings around them, and then pass for someone else to blow the net. And yet, it’s more than just style. It’s paying one’s dues to the essence of what makes football ‘beautiful‘.

Like one of the legendary 1958 Brazilians noted: “What defence you talking about? If the other guys score a goal, we just score another one!”

Given the way my retirement goes – stuck in front of a TV set – I protest silently. I switch off the bloody TV and see what the unknown may bring. Never mind that with the birds chirping, or snoring, I’ll open The Guardian and check the match report of the Liverpool and Chelsea match.

I turn around, back to the bedroom, read for a bit, sleep, get up in the morning and head for the coffee makings….

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It’s the voice that got me. I was not imagining it. Koko always gave the impression he was going to talk in perfect English. This time it happened!

“Why did you put the TV off, man?” he asked me. Even more bizarre, he had a voice like Eddie Murphy’s and an accent that would place him in West Africa, Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana, Congo, Mali, Burkina Faso…any one of those countries!

I was so frightened, I screamed. Actually it was closer to being a squeal, a loud one – the sound made by a nice, plump pigling in Goa who realises with dread that it is destined for a Christmas meal. Without looking back – the bloody dog ghost may still have been there – I  sheepishly scampered to the bedroom door to see whether the wife had heard me and was sitting up in bed wondering if she had heard right; and whether she ought to get out of bed and see whether her senior-citizen husband had dropped down dead as a dodo.

Her husband squeal? What would that do to my tough image??

I needn’t have bothered. The book was open on her chest, the bed-side light was on and she was sleeping like a baby. I saw the book: by Arturo Perez-Reverte. I bought it as as a present for her in Goa so I could read it first (then gave it to two other people before it got to her). Bought it at the aptly named Dogears Bookshop in Margao,  a lovely little place with a big heart and the books to go with it; so just as a matter of interest I also bought one of Hennings Mankell and two of Jo Nesbo (all of which were read by two other people before they reached the wife with appropriate fanfare).  I put the book away, tucked her up, and switched off the lights.

*********

Of course I was worried! Seeing a dead dog come to life? And speaking like Eddie Murphy doing the pachanga? Was it true what they were saying at home that I was finally losing it and had to check into an old age home??

You must understand that I was still under the impression – cold, empirical fact, if you wish – that this dog was buried under, what in the neighbourhood is now known, as Koko’s tree. Not an ordinary tree as you may have now surmised, largely due to football – a tradition that grew in Koko from the time, he was small enough to fit a small rubber ball in his mouth or tap it from one leg to the other to get it away from you; to the time he graduated to a Size 5 match-ball that he could paddle away between his legs while all the players chased him to get it back.

(If you didn’t know, Monsieur Bernard Koko died at the ripe old age of 16, a couple of years ago, with great style. He put his head on the wife’s knee after his evening walk the minute she sat, grabbing her attention, gracefully accepting his head being scratched, licking her hand, moaning to the sheer nonsense she said; then walking to his mat and lying down; the last thing in sight being the brightness in his eyes as he locked his gaze with that of his mistress.)

All the kids in Bangalore whom he played football with, guests who were confronted with his bright eyes as he stood in front of them, ball in his mouth as if he was saying “Let’s football”, would agree with me – that he had an amazing snout. He didn’t talk though!

Eyes wide open, able to see in all directions, he could tuck it his snout under the lip of the ball and snoot it over the opposing player as neatly as Jay-Jay Okocha, legendary footballer known for his tricks, who played for a country in a region of the world where this aforesaid mutt had his own roots – but, hey, give me a break – to use this delicate snout  to burrow from his animal netherworld, past the roots of the champaka we planted over him, through the two feet of rich, fragrant alluvial soil that held them – and straight in my bloody face??

When he died, we took out the champaka tree from the big pot it was planted in when we got Koko in Bangalore. It followed us with the dog, was about six feet high, and not complaining. Not too many people know that the beautiful Graphium doson uses the leaves of the champaka as its larval plant, so if you’re lucky to be trapped in a grove of champaka trees after the sun has just risen, when the butterflies come to life, you are in for a wonderful sight. It’s a great tree, there for the long haul. Lovely flowers – second cousins to the beautiful magnolia blossoms; much loved by the majestic and temperamental hornbill to wage their internal bickering, willing host to the common jay, used in traditional medicine – it would make Koko a wonderful companion in the afterlife.

So, dispassionately viewed, Monsieur Bernard Koko was dead.  Requiescat in pace. End of story. Not so…

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Seriously, if you told me this would happen, I would have laughed in your face. I’m a rationalist. Pushed further, I’d say Indian materialist. Basically an atheist, often an agnostic view of the world placing little value in mumbo-jumbo. Ancient materialists for instance taunted the Brahmins with their variants of anti-sloka slokas, when they saw food left for the dead in a grand ceremony because it paid the Brahmins well. “If it can bring back the dead, why not keep a man on top of a pillar and ask him to eat the food kept on the ground below?”

Like the nasty Diogenes, they were not popular. Historically, their views found no favour among the established religious and social authorities. Changed since then? A Lokayukta  materialist I may want to be, but I don’t know about ‘animism’…In fact, I am not too sure there may not be a African connection, with Koko, its triumphant herald.

I didn’t come out of the bedroom, and see whether he was at his usual place, his head on one of the cushions. I left that to the wife. If she screams and runs to the bedroom, it means we have a serious problem…

Will Koko surface again?

(Hartman de Souza is a senior citizen with lots of problems in his life, from coping with a wife who comes close to booting him out of the house every third day to ignoring two children trying to pack him off to an old age home.

To compound matters, he is responsible for the health of thirty potted plants of all shapes and sizes, stuck with several shelves of books, a quasi-flat screen with too many channels, a temperamental lap-top, a kitchen that he obsesses over and a resurrected African hound with a passion for football who visits him at will.)