Desi girl: revisiting an old favourite: carrom | The National (2024)

If I gave you a tin of talcum powder and asked you to make me a list of possible uses, you would always come up at least one short. Unless you are desi.

In addition to being useful in a range situations from soothing a baby’s bottom between nappy changes, to preparing sweaty palms for a better grip, talcum powder is a permanent fixture in any desi home that houses a carrom board.

“A what?” you ask?

A carrom board. It is a wooden square that brings families and friends together and then tears them apart.

Carrom is a game that is played throughout India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.

At first glance, it looks a little bit like a game of pool except that it doesn’t have cue sticks – there are tiny discs instead of balls, and it has four pockets instead of six. Much like pool, the point of this game for two to four people is to pocket all your pieces first.

The 29-square-inch board is laid with 19 tiny discs arranged in the centre: nine black ones for one player, nine white ones for the other player and a red “Queen”, set at the heart of the discs, which is open for taking by either. The players take turns flicking a bigger disc called the “striker” at the smaller discs called “goti” – the idea is to get the discs in one of the four corner pockets, scoring one point for each disc and three for the queen.

You’re probably wondering what talcum powder has to do with all of this.

Well, that’s what keeps the playing surface smooth. In the good old days, boric powder was preferred, but it has been classified as toxic and thus fallen out of favour. Cornstarch works well, too, but talcum powder is the smoothener of choice — it’s cheap and easily available.

Tin of talcum powder in hand, my cousins and I would sit cross-legged on the floor, the board balanced on a low table, or on the floor, and bruise our nails blue from hours of flicking the striker around the board. I never got to be as good at the game as did most of my cousins, but that never stopped me from playing. God help the unfortunate soul that happened to be in the vicinity when it was my turn, because the striker would inevitably bounce off the board and hit someone in the eye. Broken nails (mine) were a common occurrence, too.

All this was way back in the 90s. I don’t recall having been near a carom board for almost 15 years … until this weekend.

A visit to a newly opened cafe in my neighbourhood, Jus T Café and Restaurant, revealed that the sport is still alive and kicking — several carrom boards dot the tabletops there and the cafe already has a set of regulars who are hard-core carrom enthusiasts. Jus T is located in Karama behind the General Post Office and has helpful staff who happen to be experts at the game and will gladly share a tip or two. On Friday, the cafe will host a carrom board championship — the grand prize is a Lenovo 7” tablet.

A cool way, indeed, to spend a hot summer night.

The writer is an honest-to-goodness desi living in Dubai