The new concrete on S.N. Banerjee Road finally blocked our last strip of morning sun, just as the Indonesia Open began. Now I watch the matches in the perpetual shade of the veranda, my mother’s radio competing with the commentary—both finding their own rhythm. It feels like our own quiet, stubborn defense against the smash, all patience and soft hands near the net.

Ei bhishon! I was sitting on our veranda this morning, watching the new apartment block’s shadow creep an hour earlier across the street, and I remembered the old tin poster for a state squash tournament from ’88, still peeling on the club wall by the railway crossing. The men who trained there, they didn’t have proper courts, just a slab and a wall—and now their sons and daughters somehow run the world. Makes me wonder, bhalo achis, what secret they kept in that dust and daily repetition that the shiny new academies with their corporate logos never bothered to learn.