On a beautiful November afternoon in Goa, I watched something familiar unfold on the chessboard. Indian grandmaster Arjun Erigaishi, ranked 6th in the world, was defeated by Chinese grandmaster Wei Yi. Erigaishi was playing on his home field and was a favorite of the schoolchildren who crowded around his board in silence. He moved his pawn to the center of the board, pressed the button on the dual-timer chess clock, and the game began.
In the country where chess was born, grandmasters rise as easily as coconut trees grow along the coastline. The game enters children’s lives early on, slipping through the cracks of classrooms, kitchens, and cramped, overworked working-class homes, teaching them to strategize and persevere. At least, that’s how I got into chess. My brilliant pelippa (uncle), who couldn’t afford higher education and had the temperament to keep busy between jobs, often ended up babysitting me. I must have been six years old when one day he gave me my favorite inheritance, a game of chess.
Years later, I still remember Periappa holding a chipped, toy-sized plastic knight in front of my face and proclaiming, “This is my favorite. If you master it, it’s deadly.” I always knew I tasted what I wanted to eat. Chess entered my life not as entertainment, but as a sensation. My relationship with chess was pheromonal.
I was a difficult, friendless child who tended to sulk when Periappa made me sit at games. I expected to win. After all, what adult would enjoy hitting a 6-year-old? Everything I knew about life emphasized that Periappa would pitch the match because he loved me. But his love was not like that. And chess is not such a game. There was no mercy on either side, only strategy.
He taught me my first lessons in chess. No one loses in this game. You either learn the lesson or you teach it. Of course, I had no intention of taking lessons. I threw a fit, then threw the pieces, cried a little, but had no interest in chess. If I had a chess career, it was short. I remember winning a local tournament in my neighborhood, and then being distracted by school, boys, and everyday life, and distancing myself from my uncle and chess.
By the time I returned to the world of chess, he had already passed away.
Maybe his death helped me get back on my feet. The chessboard became the only place I could still be close to him. This time I stayed there. In fact, when the pandemic hit, the chessboard was the only refuge between reporting and the anxieties of life. It meant fighting with myself while hearing his voice in my head.
When you start to develop strong feelings about chess, sooner or later a style develops, just as a writer expresses an opinion. Bobby Fischer was famous for his love of Bishop. Luke’s performance in Garry Kasparov’s midfield was deadly. One of the greats of our time, Magnus Carlsen is known as a very active king in Endgame. Erigaishi is known as the “madman on the board” because he is one of the few players who plays without much concern for the outcome. That makes him reckless, dangerous, and as accurate as a German sniper. But that’s only if things go according to plan.
they didn’t. In the match between Erigaishi and Yi, Erigaishi missed a rook with one minute left. From that moment on, he made steady moves to weaken his position. Sitting in the competition hall between two rows of spectators with a notebook on my lap, I watched him lose one fight after another, like an animal stripped to its bones with no escape.
It was the kind of theatrical affair that kept believers engaged.
Decades of experience as an amateur chess addict has taught me that addiction rarely comes from the game as a whole, but rather from bits and pieces, such as the rigid, disciplined violence of an Erigaish vs. Yi game, or the obsession with a single piece. For Periappa, it was a knight. For me, zugzwang is a bonding spell. This is a kind of endgame, where the player must take action, but each time the player takes action his position weakens. they can’t get through. They cannot skip turns. The board offers options, but no remedies. I’ve been trying to understand Zugzwang for years. I hope I might be able to understand the end of my relationship with Periappa.
When I was a kid, we talked casually, and that’s the way people did things before life got complicated. But as I grew older, the geometry of intimacy changed and I began to see his flaws. He quickly became a hot-tempered, difficult husband and father, and his opinions about my education, boyfriends, and even chess were no longer welcome. There was never a break-up moment, but the returned calls and postponed visits slowly accumulated until we had less and less to talk about. Our relationship ended with me watching him in incredible pain in a Bombay hospital, unable to say or do anything. By the time he died, we had slipped into separate corners, like debris washed up at the end, trapped in an emotional vortex of our own making.
After he passed away, I studied Zugzwang obsessively, hoping to overcome this ugly development and properly connect the wisdom of chess. You can spend hours watching and reading about the 1923 match between Aaron Nimzowicz and Friedrich Samisch, known as the “Immortal Zugzwang.” This match is one of the most famous in the history of chess. This is because white is completely tied in the final phase. Any legal move will cause White’s situation to collapse. It was as if Nimzovich had wrapped Semisch’s pieces in an invisible wire, paralyzing the entire board. There is no checkmate, no need for the obvious humiliation of defeat. The game ends without any spectacle, just inevitability.
Even after Periappa passed away, grief did not overwhelm him. It has penetrated. I regretted not telling him that Mastering the Knight had become a personal Mount Everest for me. I felt sorry that he died without knowing that I loved knights. That the knights were curled up in my brain, nestled in that deep reptilian part where my childhood lives. That this small preference, casually expressed, lasted longer than our conversation. It has no secret meaning. Actually, I don’t think it makes any sense at all. Maybe that’s what stays in your relationships, the useless details that stay with you, like unused charging cables or expired email accounts.
Every time I return to Zugzwang, I learn new lessons. A lesson that has been bothering me lately is that of a deep endgame, where every choice becomes painful. The Zugzwang has become a mirror in which I can still see the chipped outline of the plastic knight held up to my face, asking me to make a choice.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
