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‘I spent everything I had. And now, Mamta has made that struggle worth it’
Every house has a story to tell. Theirs is scrawled on the turret of their double-storey building in one of Rohtak’s newer and plusher residential colonies—a pair of hockey sticks locked in an embrace. This is the home of Mamta Kharab, the 25-year-old captain of the Indian woman’s hockey team. ‘‘Hockey has given us everything. So we chose that sign on the facade, not a symbol of a god or goddess,’’ says mother Kamla, 60, with a sparkling smile that reminds you instantly of Mamta.
The Kharabs moved into the new house only two years ago. But their journey began in 1986 when Haripal Kharab left his village Giwana in Sonepat district with eight-year-old Mamta and his six other children for a teacher’s job in Rohtak. Their home: a tiny, run-down house in Subhashnagar.
‘‘We have seen difficult times. There would be days when I didn’t even have Rs 100 in my pocket. I would often have to ride back 25 km on my bicycle with my wife to tend to the fields back home and reap the harvest,’’ says Haripal.
Despite the straitened circumstances, Haripal says he never flinched from encouraging his daughters to take to the sport. Mamta’s two elder sisters Sushma and Poonam too played the game—Sushma still does.
‘‘I spent everything I had. And now, Mamta has made that struggle worth it,’’ says the 63-year-old teacher with pride. In the eight years that Mamta has been playing for India, the family’s fortunes have changed. ‘‘We have a better life now. Look at this house. It’s thanks to her success,’’ he says before dashing off to meet Deependra Hooda, the son of Haryana chief minister.
Haryana is not known for stories of families backing their daughters to pursue their dreams. How did the Kharabs buck the trend? The move to Rohtak made all the difference, Kamla says. ‘‘Many of our attitudes changed when we moved to a town. There were fewer inhibitions for the children, especially the girls, to pursue what they wanted,’’ she says. But there were a few murmurs of disapproval. When her three daughters would traipse off to the nearby Jat College Ground for practice every evening, Kamla was often told that she was better off thinking about their marriage. ‘‘I brushed aside their reservations. Unko apni life banani thi. Why would I stop thepm?’’ she says.
Yes, the family has watched Chak De India—one of the film’s most lovable characters Komal Chautala is based on Mamta. Reel life, however, gave Mamta a far better deal. When she returned triumphant after her golden goal in the 2002 Commonwealth Games, there was hardly a murmur in Rohtak. After her name made its way into the columns of local newspapers, a few neighbours got together and feted her at a small function.
But the Kharab women are inspiring figures. Following in their footsteps is Pushpa’s 18-year-old son Vikram Sangwan. ‘‘Mamta is like a guru as well as a mom to him,’’ says Haripal. ‘‘In fact, when Mamta comes home on a holiday, the sisters get together on the courtyard for a game of hockey. Their mother joins them too sometimes.’’ The spirit of the game is now a family legacy.

‘I sold the only gold our family had—a little earring—and bought him football boots for Rs 410’
I don’t know if we could have done more for him,’’ says Savithri, adjusting the plastic sheet strung across to keep the rain from pouring into her unfinished three-room home, the one she begun building with the Rs 28,000 that the local Moolamattom panchayat in Kerala gave her. ‘‘I only wish my son had to suffer less,’’ says the mother of 24-year-old NP Pradeep, the Indian football team’s best young midfielder in many years—the one who gave the country its first international football title in a long time with a stinging left footer into the Syrian goal during the Nehru Cup final in New Delhi last month.
All these years, 45-year-old Savithri had been carrying boulders on construction sites. Her late husband Pappachan worked on village farms. Savithri completed her class X but says she couldn’t get a job even through the quota for Dalits. But she wanted to see her kids ‘‘become something’’. She succeeded. She has made her son Pradeep a national footballer and put two younger daughters in college.
When Pradeep was in school and thought and talked only about football, she would look up newspapers for coaching camps in neighbouring towns and urge him to try them out. ‘‘He was timid,’’ says Savithri. Whenever the family couldn’t arrange the fare to town, Pradeep would work in the mornings in a grocery shop. He spent much time sewing the only pair of football shoes Savithri could buy him, until it wouldn’t hold together anymore—and that was just when he was called to the district coaching camp.
‘‘His father had broken his leg and was in hospital. I could not go to work either, and we did not have money even to pay the hospital bills. Pradeep cried a lot that day, said he was giving up football. I sold the only gold our family had—a little earring that belonged to my youngest daughter—and bought him a pair of football boots for Rs 410,’’ says Savithri, who was an athletics champion in school.
Later Pradeep joined the Kerala Varma College in Thrissur. By then, 18-year-old Pradeep was already getting noticed at the state level. When he had to report for the India under-19 team, his family had no money to pay for a passport. His friends paid for it. The State Bank of Travancore team picked him soon after and later he moved to Mahindra United. A few months ago, Pradeep got a phone installed at his home. Every morning, Savithri now waits for her son to ring up—before she goes off to carry granite boulders and laterite stones.

‘We come from a village so we never complain about infrastructure. We just want our children to succeed’
India’s star bowler Rudra Pratap Singh’s winning run on the field has bestowed instant stardom on his family—and an additional work profile. His father Shiv Pratap Singh is an operator in the technical wing of the Indian Technical Institute but now Rae Bareli wants him to don another role. They want him to take their bijli-sadak-paani woes to higher authorities.
But Shiv Pratap is not really fretting over the town’s dismal infrastructure. In his native village Purebala in Barabanki, things aren’t any better.
‘‘My village does not have any cable connection and if Doordarshan does not show the cricket match, then the villagers are deprived of seeing Rudra on field,’’ he says.
It was in 1990 that Shiv Pratap moved with his family to Rae Bareli. ‘‘Since we come from such a background, we hardly complain about anything,’’ he says. His wife Girija Devi agrees. ‘‘All we want is the success of our children.’’
Living in a two-room house with his wife and three children, Shiv Pratap made sure his children didn’t lack anything. Recognising his son Rudra’s keen interest in cricket, Shiv sent him to Guru Govind Singh Sports College, Lucknow, in 2000. ‘‘It was a risk to send him to a sports college. I knew little about cricket before he started playing,’’ says the father. At present the family is soaking in the moment of the Indian cricket team’s victory. Shiv’s youngest daughter Akansha who studies in the Government Girls Inter College in Rae Bareli—the other daughter Deepa studies at a private dental college in Lucknow—is waiting impatiently for her brother’s return. ‘‘This time I expect him to return with a good camera phone that I have been demanding for a long time,’’ says Akansha.

‘All the good schools were in Borivli, so we left him with his grandparents’
His job in a transport company took Rohit Sharma’s father, Gurunath to Dombivli in the late 1980s. The eldest of seven brothers and two sisters, Gurunath had little choice but to part from an otherwise tightly knit joint family that continued to live in Borivli. With wife Poornima and younger son Vishal, he left for the distant Mumbai suburb and continued to live there in a rented accommodation for 17 long years before Rohit, bought his parents a luxurious up-market apartment in Gorai.
However, for all these years when the Sharmas resided in Dombivli, Rohit never actually lived with them. The struggling parents had decided to leave him—then only two and half years old—in the hands of his grandparents and uncles. ‘‘All the good schools were also in Borivli and he liked it there. So we decided to let him be with them,’’ says Rohit’s mother. Rohit was busy growing up in the care of his uncles, especially Ravi Sharma, the fourth of his father’s six brothers. The young boy hadn’t yet grown enough though to understand that his parents in Dombivli were missing him. He wouldn’t have even known that in a few years to come, they would be dependent on him. Rohit’s father was working in a transport company that was about to be closed down. But that was much later and by then, Rohit had already celebrated his 17th birthday, preparing to pad up for the India Under-19 team. Until then though, Ravi remembers, ‘‘His idea of home and parents used to be going to Dombivli once in a while, spending time with mother, father and brother Vishal and returning to Borivli. It took a while to understand the intricacies of how the financial condition at home was.’’
Here, Rohit’s coach, Dinesh Lad, has only praise for Rohit. ‘‘As he grew up and began concentrating more on professional cricket, he also grew mature enough to understand that his parents needed support, his brother needed good education. For him, going out to bat was fast becoming as much a routine as going out for a day’s work can get,’’ says Lad. The day he became an India A player—in 2006—Rohit bought his parents an apartment in Gorai. As his career progressed, he made sure that his father came to the stadium to watch him bat in a Honda City. Now, after donning India colours, he wants more for his family, everything that’ll wipe out their 17 years of staying in Dombivli. ‘‘Some day, I'll buy a flat in South Mumbai,’’ he tells his friends.

‘We sent her with Rs 15,000, borrowed from a friend’
The mud floors and walls and the corrugated tin room say it all. The house of M Tonpa (48) and his wife Akham (38) may be modest but what sets it apart are the podium-finish photos, anti-AIDS posters and calendars that cover the walls—all centring on three-time world women’s boxing champion MC Mary Kom. Little wonder then that there’s an aura of quiet pride over the couple, and when they talk, signs of the inlaid steel that made sure their daughter was never found wanting while pursuing her pugilistic dreams. After all, Tonpa was just a farm labourer and a marginal poultry farmer in the Kom community village of Kangathei, about 45 km from Imphal, when Mary won a local boxing meet—her first—as a teenager. At that time, forking out Rs 600 per month to enable her to stay and train in Imphal seemed an atrocious expenditure.
“But Mary was adamant. That’s when I decided I’d do all I possibly could to help her,’’ he says, a small farming machete strapped to his waist. When Mary went to Bangalore to slug it out at the selection camp for the Nationals some time later, the financial problems cropped up again. The proceeds from his poultry farm and from Akham’s weaving didn’t top Rs 4,000, and there were the needs of Mary’s younger siblings—two sisters and a brother—to consider. ‘‘There is no government funding for women’s boxing events, so everything from food to travel to kit has to be paid for by the boxer. We sent her with Rs 15,000, borrowed from a friend. Then, she called from Bangalore asking for more money. Even after pawning Akham’s sister’s jewellery, we could raise only Rs 10,000,’’ he remembers.
As Mary went from strength to strength in the ring and got to try out in Haryana for her first international meet in Bangkok, disaster struck. At the pre-meet camp, all her belongings, including passport, money, kit, were stolen from her dormitory. ‘‘She called up, crying, saying she felt like dying,’’ says Akham. Then the steel came through. Using all the resources he could muster, including a civil servant relative, Tonpa got her a new set of everything, including passport. But the experience left Mary traumatised and she didn’t do well at Bangkok. That she rallied around the next year and went on to become India’s only world champion in an individual sport, and repeat the feat twice more, is glorious history.
After portions of her first prize money went into repaying loans, Mary made sure her parents were comfortable, getting them a small paddy field and doing up the house. This year, she isn’t boxing, and the only trophies she’s got this year are two-month old twin boys. ‘‘If you’re finished talking to us, I’ve to go to Imphal to help her take care of the babies,’’ says Akham.

‘We played with the damaged sticks our father passed on to us’
Twenty years ago, Dilip Tirkey was a tribal boy of Saunamara village in Orissa’s Sundergarh district, playing hockey with an improvised stick honed from twig of a tree and a ball made out of a block of wood in his village wasteland. Son of a CRPF jawan, he never imagined he would ever play outside his village. But he did and the credit of all that goes to his father Vincent Tirkey.
Vincent was a farmer but a keen hockey player who represented Orissa and later joined the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF). So, for Dilip and his twin brothers Anup and Ajit, their father was the role model. ‘‘I had never thought even in my dream at that time of becoming a national player. I was so happy when my father used to pass on his damaged sticks to me,’’ says Dilip, former captain of the Indian hockey team and his brother Ajit. Vincent coached Dilip, Anup and Ajit when they were children. All three of them got admission to Panposh Hockey Academy at Rourkela run by the Sports Authority of India (SAI). Their sister Jyoti, who is doing LLB in Utkal University, Bhubaneswar, was also picked up by SAI for hockey but her father insisted she studied further. The only non-hockey person in the family is Dilip’s elder brother Francis who joined the CRPF in Assam.
But in Saunamara, hockey rules. It has even changed the face of this village with many of its hockey players getting government jobs. ‘‘We all used to share a two-room thatched house. But now we have a pucca house. But, our father still lives in his old house,’’ says Jyoti, who works with the Indian Airlines in Bhubaneswar and lives with Dilip. Vincent and his wife continue living in the village, looking after their land.

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