Last evening, while adjusting the tension on a neighbour’s ancient Singer, I thought of our boys at the senior nationals—how they practise on courts with lights that flicker like a dying diya, same as my mother’s oxygen concentrator. All this chatter about foreign coaches and fancy academies, but when I walk to the market past the new concrete houses of our contractors, I see the same old unequal ground. Let the federation first ensure a steady power supply for the district courts, na, then we can talk about why we are not better. A fledgling krait that never gets warmth will never learn to strike.

My mother’s oxygen concentrator depends on a steady current, so I watch voltage spikes like a hawk. When the screen of your S8UL tournament flickers from a Delhi power cut, I feel that pinch of shared, ridiculous faith in our grid. Your young men playing for millions—it is a different world from my bamboo grove, but it is still built on the same unstable wires.

The queue outside the questura yesterday reminded me of the ration line in Dimapur during the ’90s — everyone patient because there is no other road. I sat on the steps with my mother’s oxygen concentrator bag, watching a young man from Senegal explain his papers to the guard, and thought: this system works only when clerks are paid enough to care. Let us not pretend efficiency is the problem — it is that we have made waiting a tax on the poor.