The Tennis ball

‘Life is a balance of holding on & letting go’ ….one of those quintessential Rumi quotes. This was my ‘well thought over tagline’ to share on my forthcoming short talk on Sufism at a unique platform in Bangalore called Human Library, and I got shortlisted to play a human book waiting to be chosen by a reader, later this month. Yesterday being a Sunday, I just prepared my topic, with the quotes & anecdotes. Only thing I wanted was a fresh short story which can be easily related to Rumi’s quote above and shared with my audience. Had a relaxed day with family and friends, by the time it was evening I could not come up with one, thought to park the story for a later date. I and Aprajit (my brother and neighbor) had purchased two Tennis Rackets & half a dozen tennis balls complete with two sets of wrist-band on Saturday. We decided to figure out the game all by ourselves, with no coaches involved. At 8.30 in the evening, we landed up in the neighborhood Tennis Court proudly with our newly acquired stuff to find three people already in the court trying to master the game with full fervor, so we decided to wait at the sidelines. One of them invited us to play, not knowing our current TQ (read Tennis quotient), and very soon they left the court. Then we had an entire tennis court with floodlights to ourselves…what a luxury! I started serving from top like a pro & succeeded on most of the occasions, but my forehand returns were pathetic, one in eighty would have crossed the net. Backhand strokes were reasonable, while Aprajit had picked up most of the strokes with a few repairable service glitches. By the time it was past nine-ten, we rushed our game a little to return home. As a result, couple of our shots went a little ‘over the top’. One of them landed up straight in the nearby graveyard, across the boundary wall. This morning when I woke up, the first thing I did was to look out for the tennis ball from my balcony (with an aerial view of almost a km). I spotted it within first few minutes and decided to retrieve it during my morning walk. I entered the lane leading to the burial ground through a makeshift exit gate next to a construction site in our apartment complex, mostly used by the site workers from the neighboring villages. It was actually a thin crack on the wall, only could accommodate a person of my width at the most. I walked almost a kilometer to reach the rusted gate, closed with a heavy bolt. It had a smaller door in the entire frame which allowed one person to enter at a time. I squeezed myself in through the small gate. Twenty-odd steps inside, next to a mound of freshly dug soil, near a small tombstone, under a clump of trees, a child was playing catch with my tennis ball. No more than seven or eight, clad in a pajama and an old kurta, a skull cap and a pair of rubber slippers. I pointed at the fluorescent yellow ball, ‘it’s mine, give it back.’ He tossed it to me. I pitched it back to him after checking the logo, it was the same one we had lost the previous evening.

I smiled at him & said in Hindi, ‘you can keep it.’ He looked at me and smiled. I covered my head with a handkerchief, and recited a short prayer near the neat row of graves with my eyes closed, and started towards the lane outside the graveyard to return to my jogging trail. I turned back to see the child playing happily with the tennis ball, throwing it often to the boundary wall, it ricocheted & came back to him every time. He was quite a smart catcher compared to his age. When I was back home, I shared this incident with my daughter. She asked, ‘where did you find him, and your lost tennis ball?’ I pointed to the spot exactly from my 16^th. Floor balcony. She got curious and brought her binocular to get a clearer view. Suddenly she clutched my arm saying, ‘Dad…look at that.’

Next to a mound of freshly dug soil, near a small tombstone, under a cluster of trees, there was a fluorescent yellow tennis ball, lying peacefully.