On a splendid November afternoon in Goa, I watched something familiar unfold on a chessboard. The Indian grandmaster Arjun Erigaisi, world number six, was destroyed by his Chinese counterpart Wei Yi. Erigaisi was playing on home soil and was a favourite of the schoolchildren who had crowded around his board in pin-drop silence. He moved his pawn to the centre of the board, pressed the button on the dual-timer chess clock, and the game had begun.
In this country where chess was born, grandmasters rise as effortlessly as the coastline grows coconut trees. The game enters a child’s life early, slipping through the cracks of classrooms, kitchens, and cramped, overworked working-class homes, teaching them to strategise or, more likely, to endure. That, at least, was how chess entered mine. My brilliant Periappa (uncle), without money to pursue higher education and with a temper that kept him between jobs, often ended up babysitting me. I must have been six when, during one of those days, he gave me my favourite inheritance: the game of chess.
All these years later, I still remember Periappa holding a chipped, toy-sized plastic knight in front of my face and declaring, “These are my favourite. They are deadly if you master them.” I knew I’d tasted something I would always want. Chess entered my life not as a pastime, but as a sensation. My relationship with chess was a pheromonal one.
I was a difficult, friendless child, prone to sulking when Periappa sat me down for a game. I expected to win it. Because what kind of adult takes pleasure in beating a six-year-old? Everything I knew about life insisted on that point, that Periappa would throw the game because he loved me. But his was not that kind of love. And chess is not that kind of game. There was no mercy in either, only strategy.
He taught me my first chess lesson: no one loses at this game. You either learn a lesson or you teach one. I, of course, was ready for no lessons. I threw a fit, then threw the pieces, cried for a bit and never got into chess. If I had a chess career, it was short. I recall winning a local tournament in my neighbourhood, and then getting distracted by school, boys and life, drifting away from both my uncle and chess.
By the time I returned to chess, he had died.
Perhaps it was his death that brought me back. A chessboard became the only place where I could still be near him. This time I stayed. In fact, when the pandemic washed ashore, the chessboard was my only refuge between reporting and the uncertainty of life. It meant grappling with myself, with his voice in my head.
When you start feeling strongly about chess, sooner or later, you develop a style, the same way writers develop a voice. Bobby Fischer was famous for his love of bishops. Garry Kasparov’s rook activity in the middlegame was deadly. Magnus Carlsen, one of the current greats, is known for his extremely active king in endgames. Erigaisi is known as the “madman on the board” because he is one of the few players who play without caring too much about results. It makes him reckless and dangerous, precise as a German sniper. But that is only when things go to plan.
They did not. In the Erigaisi–Yi match, with one minute on the clock, Erigaisi blundered his rook. From that moment on, he made moves that steadily weakened his position. Sitting in the playing hall, between two rows of spectators, notebook on my knee, I watched him lose piece after piece, the way an animal is stripped to the bone, layer by layer, with no escape.
It was a theatrical affair of the kind that keeps devotees hooked.
My decades as an amateur chess addict have taught me that the addiction rarely comes from the game in its entirety, but from a fragment, like the exacting, disciplined violence of the Erigaisi–Yi match or an obsession with a single piece. For Periappa, it was the knight. For me, zugzwang is the spell that binds. It is a kind of endgame in which a player must make a move, but every move they make weakens their position. They cannot pass; they cannot skip a turn. The board offers choice, but no relief. I have spent years trying to understand zugzwang, hoping it could make sense of the ending of my relationship with Periappa.
When I was a child, we spoke easily, the way people do before life complicates the board. But growing up changes the geometry of closeness, and I started seeing his flaws. He was quick to temper, a difficult husband and father, and his opinions about my education, boyfriends, and even chess became unwelcome. There was no single moment of rupture, just a slow accumulation of unreturned calls and postponed visits, until we had fewer and fewer things to talk about. Our relationship ended with me watching him in incredible pain in a Bombay hospital, with nothing left to say or do. By the time he died, we had slid into separate corners, like pieces drifting into an endgame, locked into an emotional zugzwang of our own making.
After he died, I studied zugzwang obsessively, in the hope that I could tie a neat bow of chess wisdom over the ugly turn of events. I can spend hours watching and reading about the 1923 game between Aron Nimzowitsch and Friedrich Saemisch, known as the “immortal zugzwang”. It is one of the most celebrated games in chess history because, in the final position, white is completely tied up: every single legal move makes his position collapse. It is total, board-wide paralysis, as if Nimzowitsch wrapped Saemisch’s pieces in invisible wire. There is no checkmate, no need for the obvious humiliation of defeat. The game ends without spectacle, only inevitability.
After Periappa died, the grief did not sweep in; it percolated. I regretted never telling him that mastering the knight had become my personal Mount Everest. I regretted that he died without knowing that I loved knights for no reason other than the fact that he loved them. That the knights had curled up in my brain and nestled in some deep, reptilian part of it, where my childhood lives. That this one small preference, passed down casually, had endured longer than our conversations ever did. It has no secret meaning. In fact, I suspect it has no meaning at all. Perhaps that is what remains of relationships: useless details that lodge inside you, like unused charging cables or expired email accounts.
Every time I return to zugzwang, it teaches me new lessons. These days, the lesson that haunts me is about deep endgames, when every choice hurts. Zugzwang becomes a mirror, and in it, I still see the outline of a chipped plastic knight, held up to my face, asking me to choose.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
