The last decade of the last century was a fine time for a young Englishman with sterling to be travelling around India with his school friend. We were eighteen, in between school and university, and had agreed on an ambitious timetable involving a one-month tour of the north, a one-month tour of the south and a rest on the Goan sands sometime in between.
I recall a helter-skelter of trains, rickshaws and the occasional elephant—mad rushes up station platforms, night stops to the incessant chant of ‘chai, chai, chai’ and exploding seat cushions in buses. Only once did we require rescuing and that was when we missed a connection— failing to show up for a night’s stay with a family friend in Ooty—resulting in frantic worry amongst the proper grown-ups back at our Mumbai base.
Those were days without cell phones when the Internet had not yet emerged from military silos. I should add, we were footloose and fancyfree— rebellious enough after many years cooped up in an all-male boarding school to miss the occasional checkin, whether distracted by a day at the races or beguiled by the fluttering eyes of local maidens. For so many hours spent travelling. there simply had to be games.
“Twenty questions” was one of the best, could be played anywhere and kept one’s grey matter sharp, although one soon deciphered the tricks of one’s travelling companion and ran out of famous people to guess. Chess ate up some hours but my friend was in the school team and I have never had much interest in chess so soon got bored of taking a pasting. Backgammon was our favourite— since, played properly, it is a game of chance, we played the best of two hundred and I recall a dramatic 99-99 decider in a hotel room in Jaipur.
For long waits, the Scrabble board would make an appearance as it did after we arrived by bus very early one morning in Coimbatore… We were several hours too early for our train and decided that we didn’t need a hotel room as we’d slept well—for a change—in the overnight bus. We’d save our rupees for a night out in Mumbai when we returned to base. So, we adjourned to a nearby park and leant against our rucksacks on some concrete steps, sipping on tea and munching on biscuits in the morning sun.
My friend, the superior wordsmith, started the game soundly and—as always when he was on a roll—took great pleasure in keeping the score. After a few rounds I was down rather more points than I had hoped, but that morning the gods were on my side: I had chosen to sit with my back to a large concrete terrace where, when I looked up, I was startled to see hundreds of eyes staring back at me.
A large crowd had organically gathered in the park that morning to watch these young Englishmen play Scrabble and they could see which letters I possessed while my friend’s letter collection remained obscured to them as he sat facing them from a lower step. Looking back, we were not that surprised by this sudden flash-mob. Play Scrabble in an English park and perhaps a pigeon will come to watch. Do anything in public in India and—we had come to learn—people emerge in their hundreds from nowhere, like waves in a mighty ocean. “Chutzpah” I heard in whispers from behind me.
“Chutzpah”. I turned to see who was feeding me the word but could not distinguish my newfound aide from the growing masses. “Oboe”, then “anaemia” soon followed. I looked round again but saw just smiling faces and eyes. I was well ahead! Before long my friend was getting irritated with my sudden inspirations.
“Borax”. “Grrr” the scorer cursed. “I always play better in front of a crowd,” I told him, “Odd, isn’t it? It’s the same with rugby and cricket.” “Quinine” my friend found highly annoying. He had still not worked out from where my inspiration heralded and had no idea that he was playing a word wizard from Coimbatore. And then the clincher: “Maximized” with a “z”. “Oh no, you must spell maximised the English way was with an s, we are playing English rules,” my friend objected. “Best check the dictionary?” I suggested.
Spending so many days together one after the other, occasionally we needed mutually acceptable referees to keep the peace. And so, my friend kindly leafed through the Oxford English Dictionary we had dragged around India. And there it was. I have no idea what version of the dictionary we had with us but in 1884, the Oxford English Dictionary decided to list the -ize spellings of maximize before the -ise versions. “You must be joking!” my friend spluttered.
Victory was complete. We were out of letters and words. The crowd cheered and some locals danced a jig. My friend sulked. Victory, despite the divine interventions, tasted so sweet. Once the crowd had dispersed— and I never found or could thank the fellow who passed me those winning words—I bought my friend a cool Limca at a nearby kiosk and offered him a game of chess.
But I was careful this time to locate a discreet place in that park underneath a palmyra tree where no crowds could gather to witness the inevitable humiliation. The confession came later after some beer.
Dominic Wightman is a British businessman and political adviser. He is the Editor of Britain’s popular Country Squire Magazine which launched an Indian edition last year.