On the eighth day of the Rio Olympics in August 2016, Kanji Bhaliya sat down in his living room in Kodinar, a town near the coast of the western Indian state of Gujarat, and turned on the evening news.
“Once again we are ravaged by a kind of drought,” the TV anchor said.
“We are high and dry. Thirsty in a vast wasteland of dashed hopes. There is not a drop of hope for a nation of 1.3 billion people.”
In Kodinar, rain banged on the metal rooftop and plastic curtains flapped in the wind. Pakoras sputtered in hissing oil and teacups clattered inside the kitchen.
“Not a single medal in sight,” the anchor went on. “Who is to blame for this betrayal? Is it our athletes who don’t get as much as decent sport kits, or is it the Sports Authority of India that has been caught napping on the job once again?”
Bhaliya put down his tea and sat on the edge of his sofa. He watched in silence, like a mourner at a graveside, as politicians, sports analysts and athletes debated the poor state of his nation’s sports infrastructure.
Bhaliya was the sports development officer for Gir Somnath, a district that covers 345 villages and a vast forest reserve in Gujarat’s southern tip. At 39, with a receding hairline and a large collection of tracksuits, he was the district’s senior-most official of the Sports Authority of Gujarat.
He knew that the casual taunts and insults showered at sports officials around the year always acquired a flammable quality during world championships. But this time, it felt as if his country was shaking with rage, inching forward like a living thing.
Days later, India finished 67th at the Rio Olympics. Despite sending its largest number of athletes to date - 118 in total - the country had won only two medals.Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government at once began funneling money into sports bureaucracy in an attempt to restore the wounded national honour. Among the first programs launched was Khelo India, a nationwide program to identify grassroots talent through village and district level scholarships and competitions. Modi also announced a new Olympics task force to groom talent for the next three Games, and revived an existing scheme that entitled a small group of elite athletes to opportunities to train abroad. Privately, the prime minister expressed hopes that India might host the 2036 Olympic Games, and early drawings for a proposed Olympic Village in the Gujarati city of Ahmedabad began to circulate.
Across the state of Gujarat, where Modi had served as chief minister between 2001 and 2014, the sleepy offices of the state’s Sports Authority were suddenly jolted awake. Consultants in crisp shirts and dress pants flew in, filling the decaying rooms of government offices with the minty scent of hair gel. Proposals that had yellowed inside cloth bundles were dusted off and sent to the headquarters in Gandhinagar for prompt approval. Local newspapers were filled with half-page advertisements announcing government jobs in revenue administration, railways, academia and the armed forces for those who returned home with Olympic medals.
One morning, glancing over the newspaper a second time, Bhaliya perked up and took a last gulp of milky tea, sensing a fortuitous windfall. He was reading a snippet about Ruth Jebet, a Kenyan-born long-distance runner and steeplechase specialist, who had broken the world record and won a gold medal for the Gulf nation of Bahrain at the Rio Olympics. Bahrain’s track and field team was made up entirely of elite athletes born in Africa; every medal that the country had won was earned by a player from an African nation who had been paid to change his allegiance and citizenship.
Bhaliya sat down at his laptop, his tongue sticking out with intense focus and his fingers thumping on the thick plastic sleeve that covered the keyboard. He was trying to find out why Africans dominated track and field events. He soon learned that an average Kenyan’s legs were 400 grams lighter than those of their European-born counterparts, which meant that less energy was needed to keep running. He found an academic paper by the evolutionary biologist Daniel E Lieberman, who claimed that running barefoot gave athletes an edge over those who trained with shoes. He discovered that people who lived in high-altitude environments, where air was thin and oxygen scarce, had increased lung capacity - a bonus for sprinters and endurance athletes. He studied the distribution of white and red muscle fibres in East and West African bodies, and found that it predisposed East Africans to excellence in long-distance running and West Africans to short-distance running.
Bhaliya slapped his laptop shut. A decade earlier, while training as a young athlete at the Sports Authority of India’s hostel in Gandhinagar, he had lived with an athlete from the Siddi tribe, a community of Indians with African ancestry. The Siddi athlete had tight coils of hair, a hulking frame that looked like it had been cut from storm-dark teak, milky eyes, and a divine gift that took him flying to the finish line.
“Do me a favor,” Bhaliya said into his cellphone. “Make a list of Siddi villages in our district.”
***
Weeks later, before the sun came up, two silver Maruti Suzukis climbed up the dirt roads winding into the Gir National Forest Reserve, India’s second-largest national park, once the private hunting grounds of the powerful Nawabs of Junagarh. The darkness was deep on both sides beyond the shoulders of the narrow road. It could be hiding tussocks of shrubs, wild boars, mango orchards, jackals, dry riverbeds, steep cliffs, lions.
As streaks of pink cloud tore through the sky, the team of officials from the Sports Authority joined a stream of motorcycles and bullock carts. Soon they turned off for Talala, a town set along a sluggish river on the boundary of the forest reserve. This was where the Siddi settlements began. Wooden carts with unsteady pyramids of kesari mangos crowded the market, smoke from a detergent factory curled upward, and flat-back trucks packed with day laborers lurched fitfully along.
The sports officials stopped in a cloud of dust at a corner shop. Across from them was a river choked with vegetable peelings, egg shells, tattered slippers, plastic bags, and crumpled bottles. They were waiting for their appointment with a team of headmen from the Siddi tribe. A woman with sun-bleached cornrows squatted in a frothy rivulet, washing clothes and singing to herself. Young black men, foreheads glistening with sweat, walked in packs, throwing sideway glances at the outsiders. A group of elders, sitting in plastic lawn chairs, watched the neighborhood swirl around them.
The Siddi tribe in Gujarat traces its lineage to ancestors who are said to have arrived from East Africa on Portuguese ships in the early fifteenth century and were presented as slaves to the Nawab of Junagarh. Many of them rose through the ranks of the kingdom, occupying positions of power and respect, leading the nawab’s conservation efforts to protect the dwindling population of lions in the Gir forest and laying the foundation for a railroad in the state. The word Siddi is derived from Sayyid, an Arabic honorific for someone descended from the Prophet Muhammad.
In 1947, with the dismantling of colonial occupation and the partition of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan, the princely state of Junagarh joined the Indian Union. In the years that followed, the country transformed from a primarily agrarian economy to one focused on manufacturing and services, trends that were accompanied by large-scale migration and urbanization. Alongside these came other changes: consumerism, aspiration, entrepreneurship, and the rise of a middle class.
Such promises of opportunity did not trickle down to the Siddis. Today, they are a tribe of some 150,000 people, brutally dispossessed, mired in poverty and illiteracy, who are still navigating their status in a society ravaged by casteism and colorism. In India, skin color and social status are tightly intertwined, with the depiction of upper castes with lighter skin and lower castes with darker skin. The Siddis, a tribe of dark-skinned people of foreign ancestry who predominantly observe Islam, are at the very bottom of the social hierarchy.
For generations, the Siddis of Junagarh have subsisted on temporary and insecure jobs, working as laborers, masons and farmhands, reluctant to follow opportunities that lead them out of their villages for fear of being victimized on account of their dark skin and African heritage. News of racially-motivated attacks, with mobs chasing and attacking black people, calling them “negros” and accusing them of selling drugs or disturbing harmony, routinely trickle into Siddi villages, exacerbating deep-rooted fears.
In Talala, the sports officials sat across a rickety table covered in soft drinks and glucose biscuits as a delegation of Siddi headmen , elders in white shirts and dhotis, watched them with amusement.
“Your community has a God's gift,” Kanji Bhaliya said to the leaders. “And your country needs you.”
***
One spring morning in March 2019, the playground of a local school in the town of Chitravad resembled a fairground with tents, loudspeakers, booths, balloons, soap bubbles and flat-back trucks loaded with samosas and soft drinks. Cellphones buzzed across the roughly thirty-five Siddi villages scattered across the Gir Forest, reminding families to send their young boys and girls for tryouts. Today was the morning of the Siddi Khel Pratibha Kasauti, a Siddi talent hunt organized by the sports authority. The judges were looking for promising athletes who, if selected, would be enrolled in a state-sponsored sports enrichment program that would entitle them to free schooling, training and housing. For everyone else, it would be a day-long picnic with free food and games.
Crowds from the Siddi community, normally settled deep in the forest, had come together in a festive commotion. Mothers spread tattered blankets and sat down to watch their children sprint barefoot, traversing the red mud of the open field in big leaps. A group of elders played a game of cards in the shade of an ancient neem tree. Toddlers hung from clothing, sat on shoulders, mouthed their wrists. Young girls sat in a huddle, sipping on orange drinks, and watched a row of boys bend into squats.
Among the tryouts was Murad Sirman, a boy of 13 who appeared to be mostly calves, shoulder blades and keen narrow eyes. He had climbed into a minibus with a group of friends after hearing about the free snacks and ride to town. A team of officials in Sports Authority of Gujarat tracksuits were patrolling the field, recording time on their stopwatches and scribbling notes about speed, height and explosive force in the candidates.
At the end of a day of tryouts, and after enjoying awhat felt like a state-sponsored picnic, Murad dawdled back home in a rickshaw to the village of Galiyawad. Dusk was descending on the forest as shutters in the bazaar fell, like eyelids heavy with sleep, on shops selling diesel in soda bottles, bone-setting services, beard trimming, plastic dolls with blonde hair and blue eyes. The rickshaw stopped at the end of the tarmac road and the boys jumped off to walk the rest of the way, through red mud paths lined with shrubs and rugged hills. Someone hummed a Gujarati folk song and a black mongrel trotted up.
“Rascal!”
Murad’s mother Chaida appeared at the mouth of the lane, sashaying in her nightgown, pummeling him with questions as he walked home in silence.
“Where were you all day? Don’t need to inform your mother? Where should we go looking for you? Do we have no other work?”
Murad washed his feet and stretched out to sleep.
Murad was the kind of boy who routinely bewildered and often disappointed his family.When Murad was a baby, he would get sick too often, leading the elders to conclude that an evil eye had been put on him. At home, he was renamed Kohinoor, after the world’s largest cut diamond, to ward off the spell. Still, his health did not improve and the family’s fortune dipped further, so he was sent away to a tribal boarding school in the hope that his curse would wear off.
For years, the plaster of the blue walls of the kitchen stayed blackened with cooking smoke. A trunk of valuables held nothing more than birth and death certificates, ration cards, and a brass dinner set. The same flickering electric candle at the doorway changed colors.
Recently, however, Murad had returned home to the one-room shanty in the forest where eight adults, two children and four toddlers bathed, cried, cooked, napped and argued. Like every male child in the family, he was expected to learn the community trade of masonry and to accompany his father and uncles in their search for daily work, going from village to village to plaster walls, lay rubble for floors and cover awnings in red tiles.
But Murad, whose mind often wandered in dreamy reverie, was prone to drifting through life in a haze of distraction. He was more inclined to hide and stretch out than pick up and go to work. Each morning, as the men of the house fastened their sandals, Murad would climb up to the roof and hide there until his uncles gave up looking for him. Or he would disappear into the rice fields to watch his grandfather work and hear stories about his childhood in the forest. During tourist season, when the village boys performed the traditional Siddi dhamaal dance at forest lodges, wearing strings of leaves around their necks and hips and singing the ancient songs of their Nubian ancestors in a creole of Swahili, Urdu and Gujarati, Murad would return home with no tips.
At breakfast that day, Murad’s father Kalu sat down in front of a plate of boiled eggs to grumble as usual about his son’s lack of interest in the family trade. Then the shrill ring of his cellphone interrupted his train of thought. An official from the Sports Authority of Gujarat was on the line, congratulating him on his son’s selection in the Chitravad trials.
The official told Kalu that, under the District Level Sports School Scheme of the Gujarat government, the state would sponsor Murad’s athletic training, education, housing and food. Beyond this point, the sports official said, the possibilities for Murad were endless. He could go on to play for the state or the country. He could travel abroad, win medals and cash prizes, and would receive a secure and lucratively pensioned government job on retirement from athletics.
“A government job?” Kalu interrupted. “Where should I send him?”
***
The next week, Murad made the two-hour journey by bus and foot to Somnath International School, a block of identical sand-colored buildings that was the site of the district-level sports school in the town of Kodinar.
His dorm room had four single beds pushed against pale yellow walls, where boys sat in a hum of ceiling fans and paged through their books. His roommates, boys with side-partings, floppy hair and faces that easily blended into the mosaic of Indian crowds, fell quiet when he entered the room. They spoke the same dialect and wore the same PE kit as Murad, but the color of their skin afforded them a casual confidence of belonging. An iron-grilled window opened onto a concrete roof encrusted with irremovable dirt. A damp towel hung from a hook. The wails of a Hindi soap opera drifted down from the staff quarters, where teachers shelled peas in their laps after school hours. Murad felt his differences sharpening—his dark skin, his full lips, his wide-set eyes, the weight of his tribe’s history that no one else in this school shared.
“You are Murad?” a voice called out. Shivam Upadhyay, the athletic coach in charge of the new recruits, was at the door. He pulled out a small comb from his back pocket to administer a flourish to his hair.
“See you downstairs in five minutes.”
Upadhyay, an engineer with an athletic build and a scraggly mustache, had grown up training on the streets of Kodinar as a young athlete and participating in district and regional competitions. Recently, he had married and moved back home after earning a diploma in athletics coaching from Asia’s largest sports institute the National Institute of Sports in the northern Indian state of Punjab. This was his first assignment for the Gujarat sports authority under the tutelage of Kanji Bhaliya.
During his time at the institute, Upadhyay had studied sports science in detail and learned how to apply biomechanics, kinesiology and anthropometry to sports physiology. He had watched closely as the Indian athlete Neeraj Chopra was nurtured into an Olympics champion in men’s javelin. He had been waiting for an opportunity to display his full potential as coach, and when the Siddi talent project came to him, he saw a chance to make history. From the jungles of Junagarh, he would find a diamond in the rough.
Out on the running track, Murad lined with up with the other trainees at their starting blocks. Murad was the only Siddi among them.Some of the boys swung their arms, some bent into side lunges, some jogged on the spot. Murad’s skin sizzled in the sun but he felt as if his legs had turned to ice. The red mud of the field appeared to be swirling in lunatic circles. At the sound of the coach’s whistle, the other boys dashed to the finish line. Murad looked down at his feet and saw that they were not moving. The second whistle went off, and Murad could still not bring himself to move. The stillness of the air was maddening.After the third whistle, Upadhyay asked him to sit on a bench and watch.
On the way home that evening, Upadhyay called Kanji Bhaliya for advice.
“This boy doesn’t speak a word,” he complained.“How am I supposed to train him?”
“I have observed the Siddis closely. They are a stubborn and impulsive people,” Bhaliya told him. “They are gifted, and you have to learn to deal with them in the correct way.”
Bhaliya went on to explain exactly how he felt the Siddis should be handled.
First, he told Upadhyay, the Siddis were to be kept away from each other. If two Siddis were put together in the same training group, they would become unruly and difficult to discipline. Second, they were never to be scolded; if they felt criticized, they would pick up and leave. The third and most important piece of advice Bhaliya offered was a reminder that ethnicity, religion, class, caste and appearance were irrelevant on the track. It was Upadhyay’s responsibility to make Murad feel valued.
That next afternoon, Upadhyay returned to the dorm to meet his protegé before training. They wandered the empty corridors of the school, lingering to read the motivational quotes that covered the bulletin boards. “Honest hard work cannot be defeated,” one poster said. “Rise above your excuses,” another read.
“Run like you have no worry in the world,” Upadhyay said to Murad as he thumped his back. “I know you can do it.”
It was the first time in Murad’s young life that someone had not given up on him. Upadhyay spoke to him with an affection that did not feel transactional, and he was suddenly filled with an urge to do to whatever the coach wanted him to do.
Out on the track again, Murad raced past the other boys. As he tore through the wind, his body steaming in the sunrise, he felt himself entering a meditative state, reliving the happiest moments of his childhood. He remembered his glee as a little boy swinging from a branch of the jamun tree outside his home. He savoured the taste of fried fish freshly cooked by his middle aunt. He smiled at the memory of tickling his sister until she dissolved into laughter. At the end of the race, he asked his coach for his score and scribbled it on his palm so that he could try to beat it in the next one.
With each race, Murad’s speed, strength, agility and precision improved. Upadhyay began training him in the track and field event of 400-metre hurdles. In this Olympic sport, athletes run in lanes from staggered positions and complete a full lap, clearing 10 evenly-spaced hurdles that are 36 inches high. Upadhyay made Murad practise with a wooden hurdle he had designed himself with the help of a local carpenter.
As the months went by, Upadhyay would turn up at the school cafeteria to make sure Murad was getting generous portions of protein. He would ask whether Murad had finished his homework, what his worries were, how his body felt and whether he missed his friends from the village. Murad and Upadhyay would sit for hours and discuss the structure, rules, fouls and tricks of 400-metre hurdles. “Rhythm is the most important thing for us,” Upadhyay would tell Murad. “Convert hurdling into speed instead of allowing the hurdle to break your speed.”
Whatever this experience was—the feeling of being nurtured, the sense of safety, the gift of purpose—it was the closest Murad had come to being parented.He contemplated the coach’s words late into the night Often, after the other boys drifted to sleep, he toppled his bed over and used it as a hurdle to practice his jumps. He scribbled world rankings on the walls of the dorm room and lulled himself to sleep with videos of Ayyasamy Dharun, a hurdler from the southern Indian state of Kerala who held the national record. As days passed, something within Murad seemed to relax.
But a year into Murad’s training, in the summer of 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi appeared on the television screens and, giving fourteen hours’ notice, ordered one of the world’s strictest pandemic lockdowns. Just like that, the district sports school was emptied out, the Siddi talent program was put on hold and Murad was sent back home to his family in the forest.
The next day, Murad found himself sitting once more in front in a plate of boiled eggs in his ancestral home in the village. He fastened his sandals, filled a sack with trowels, hammers, and chisels and followed his father and uncles to the bus stand, where they waited for a contractor’s van to pick them up for work.
***
Twenty-seven years earlier, in 1993, another Siddi boy had also been sent home from a Sports Authority of India program. Juje Jackie Harnodkar Siddi, a teenager from the village of Haliyal in the Indian state of Karnataka, had been identified as a medal hopeful under a flagship scheme called the Special Area Games, which - like the programme that succeeded it decades later - was created to identify and train individuals with “natural physical aptitude” in tribal, coastal and hilly communities.
In the late 1980s, too, Indian sports officials had travelled to remote villages across the country in search for grassroots talent. Tribal communities from Bihar and Rajasthan accustomed to bow-hunting were scouted for competitive archery. Fishing communities from the Andaman Islands were trained for rowing, kayaking and canoeing. Circus families from Kerala were recruited for gymnastics. And the Siddis of Gujarat and Karnataka were groomed for track and field.
Juje was taken from his home and sent to New Delhi for field and scientific testing. He underwent assessments to determine his reflexes, flexibility, endurance and speed, and was transferred to Bangalore for training in 400-metre hurdles. Bangalore was also somewhere he could pursue his studies in Kannada, his mother tongue.
Many of Juje’s friends dropped out of the programme. Some of them caught typhoid or jaundice, some of them could not keep up with the demands of training and studies, some of them ran away out of homesickness. Juje, however, was grateful to receive free schooling, three full meals a day, mentorship and the chance to compete in district and state athletic competitions. He bought his first pair of sports shoes, traveled to towns and cities for tournaments and earned money of his own.
Until one day, the program was suddenly called off. The idea of cornering state funds to train a small population deemed talented by an accident of birth was no longer popular, and the scheme had crumbled under political pressure. Overnight, the athletes were asked to go back where they came from.
Juje sat at his mentor’s desk and wept as the official suggested using the prestige of his sports medals as leverage to secure an office job in a government agency. Juje knew that the resumes of candidates without decent grades were cheerfully tossed out, but still he applied to state banks, revenue departments, railways and the postal services. By some miracle, he heard back from the Employee Provident Fund Office in Mumbai. For the past 25 years, he has worked there as a clerk in the government’s retirement savings scheme.
The further Juje went from the forests of Haliyal, the more rootless he felt. Even though he has lived in Mumbai for two decades, he is often mistaken for a tourist; he overhears racial slurs in Hindi, Marathi or Konkani from people who assume that he cannot understand them. On a recent afternoon, when I met Juje during lunch break, he appeared from a huddle of government clerks, towering above them with his tall frame, broad shoulders and waist-length dreadlocks.
Colleagues joke that if he touches them, his skin color will rub off on them. He routinely witnesses the faces of strangers turn pale and watches purses being tucked under elbows at the sight of his dreadlocks.
“I could not return to the forest after the Sports Authority program was called off because I did not want to go back to that desperate life,” he said. “But after all these years here, I can say that it is not easy living here either. For a black man, there are obstacles at every step of the way.”
Still, Juje brought his family to the city. His brother is now a teacher, his nephew is a legal advisor, his niece has earned a doctorate and his wife runs a talent agency to help Siddi children score parts in East African commercials. The family spends their vacation days back in the village in Haliyal, where Juje works with Siddi boys and girls to develop their endurance and speed.
“Sometimes, I want to shake the Indian authorities and tell them—you have struck gold with the Siddis, we are diamonds,” he said. “Why are you still struggling for medals, and why are we still struggling in poverty?”
***
Back in the Gir Forest, Murad spent his days thinking about his brief experiment with the grand notion of merit. During his time at the district sports school he had begun to believe that meritocracy might be the opposite of such hereditary systems as caste, class and tribe, in which social status was predetermined by the lottery of birth. Now he realised gloomily that the question of who succeeded was simply determined by luck. It was luck that furnished the circumstances in which merit could translate into success and, lately, he had been hopelessly out of luck.
The drudgery of his plastering work had turned into a form of suffering. The grumbles of his father and uncles grated against his skin. The passing hours felt like a cage closing in. The longer he stayed at home, the more he withdrew into himself.
The Sirman family had also decided to take advantage of the pandemic slowdown to find a match for Murad. He had recently reached puberty and the news of his selection at the district sports school had travelled across the Siddi villages. Marriage proposals had begun trickling in. As days became weeks and the prospect of returning to the running track seemed ever more remote, Murad allowed the arrangements to proceed.
One day he posted a photo of his bride to his WhatsApp status. His phone beeped at once with a message from Upadhyay.
“Who is that girl?”
“My fiancée, Coach Sir,” he responded.
Upadhyay called him immediately. Murad should stay focused on his training, his coach reminded him. The next morning, Murad was to go for a run in the forest and report to the district school after breakfast. The state had still not lifted restrictions on public movement, but the numbers of Covid patients in the district were low, and so Upadhyay had decided to train a small group of athletes privately.
For weeks, as the other boys of the village waited at the bus stop to be picked up by a contractor’s van and lingered around the corner shop to catch glimpses of old Gujarati movies, Murad took the bus out to Kodinar and worked on his stride pattern, race distribution strategy and stamina. On the dirt track, his entire body sparkling with sweat, he felt himself finally at peace. He lay down on the field, under the open sky, beneath passing clouds, filled with a pure and primal hope that his life would turn out to be different from those of the Siddi men he had grown up around.
Once the pandemic restrictions loosened, Upadhyay recommended that Murad be transferred to the Nadiad High Performance Centre,400kmaway, where the state’s elite athletes trained in world-class facilities. Trainees at the centre had won 95 medals that year, 12 at international events. It was half as many again as they had won the previous year. Athletes who succeeded there might be provided with advanced sports equipment, dedicated teams of coaches and sports scientists, and the opportunity to attend training workshops abroad. The state of Gujarat had also earmarked up to 2,500,000 rupees ($29,000) annually for each athlete with the potential to qualify for the Olympics. It was an astronomical sum of money.The only thing that terrified Murad about the move to Nadiad was that it would probably mean working with a different coach.
“Coach Sir, can’t you come with me?” Murad asked Upadhyay. “How will I run without you?”
Upadhyay draped his arm fraternally around Murad’s neck and promised that he, too, would ask for a transfer to the high-performance academy so they could continue training together. They sat down on a bench and watched as a group of athletes stretched down on the field, their limbs folding in and out like the moving parts of a pocketknife.
That summer, when Murad returned home to the village with news of his transfer to the centre in Nadiad, he found a groom-viewing party waiting for him. His mother and aunts skittered around the kitchen, their long skirts hitched up to their ankles, sliding puris into a pan of whistling oil. The girl’s aunts walked around the house, glancing inside and nodding good-naturedly. The elders sat in a huddle to discuss the nearest auspicious date to solemnize the wedding.
Murad felt a cold stab of fear. If he stayed silent and allowed the discussions to proceed, he thought, he would once again be swindled out of his promised future. Until this moment, he had floated through life in whichever direction he was pushed in, never willing things to happen, only accepting them. This time, he felt an urgency he had never experienced before.
“Coach Sir, please do something,” he mumbled into his phone. “My marriage is being fixed.”
Over the next hours, the cellphones of Murad’s father and uncles began ringing, one after another. Somehow Upadhyay managed to convince them to buy half a year’s time with the bride’s family. Their boy had a lot of promise, he said. If he was given a chance to realize his full potential, he could change his destiny and inspire other young people in the community.
“You named him Kohinoor,” the coach told them. “If given a chance, he can shine like a diamond in the field of sports.”
***
On a Tuesday morning in September 2022, weeks into his tuition at the high performance center, Murad sat down on the starting block of lane number five, waiting for his name to be announced. It was the 17th National Youth Athletics Championship in the central Indian city of Bhopal. A green-blue synthetic track stretched out before him, schoolchildren wearing sun hats bobbed in the stands, and a middle-aged photographer wandered around pointing his camera at the nervous faces of the athletes.
From Murad’s starting block, the scattered city seemed to collapse into a narrow frame, as if he was looking at the finish line with blinkers on and hurling his doubts, restlessness and worries over the edge into a vast silence. Crouched low, one foot braced against the block, he saw nothing but Coach Upadhyay, in his blue tracksuit, standing still, eyes locked on him, a quiet hand motioning—breathe. When the starting gun sounded, Murad tore through the wind, galloping over the first hurdle. Then the second. Then the third.
“And that is Murad Sirman of Gujarat who is pushing himself in front.” The commentator was on his toes, adjusting his pants around his waist, leaning forward to get a good look.
“From lane number five, Murad Sirman of Gujarat is well ahead…” he continued. “And from his right, Jerome Sanjay Nishanth is trying to catch up…”
As the finish line came into view, Murad leapt forward, as fast as as his legs could carry him.
“…And Jerome Sanjay Nishanth finishes on top.”
Nishanth, an athlete from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, spread his arms in victory and waved to the cameras.
Murad found a grass patch by the track and sat down to stretch, his mind racing, his heart thumping, his mouth so dry it felt like he had swallowed a fistful of sand. He watched Upadhyay walk toward him and waited to be told whether his result was good or bad.
Slowly, as Upadhyay spoke, it became clear to Murad that this had not been a defeat but a victory. He had finished second, earning a silver medal in a national meet, and had qualified to represent India at the Asian Youth Athletics Championships in the Gulf nation of Kuwait. Suddenly, he had become an international athlete.
When the news of his qualification reached the village of Galiyawad, Murad’s mother sat down to cry and beat her chest. In the capital city of Gandhinagar, officials from the sports authority were working their contacts to arrange an urgent passport so Murad could join the rest of the Indian contingent. But in the forest, when Murad arrived to visit the family, his mother gave up eating and drinking. How could she send her son to a foreign land, across oceans and mountains, to a place where the family knew no one? What if he got lost there? What if he went hungry? What if he fell ill?
At night, Murad rolled out his sleeping mat, but sleep did not come. Whenever he closed his eyes, his mother’s words swirled around his head, her worries taking root in his bones, forcing him to toss and turn until dawn broke. As soon as the sun came up, he called Upadhyay.
“I need you to come with me, Coach Sir,” Murad said. “How will I go to a foreign land without you?”
“Don’t you worry,” the coach told him. “You will have the whole India team by your side.”
Murad nodded, unconvinced.
“Do you know how it will feel when you put the India jersey on your back?” Upadhyay went on. “It will be an unbelievable feeling.”
***
A few days later, the Indian delegation to the Asian Youth Athletics Championship rolled through the streets of Kuwait City in a minibus. Beyond the press of traffic, the sand-bleached hotels and the towering buildings, Murad could make out a cloud of silver light suspended in the glow of dawn – the Ahmad Al Rashdan Track and Field Stadium.
Inside the stadium, Kuwaiti officials in starched ankle-length thobes and cotton headdresses surveyed the track. A cart with cold water bottles, fruit juices and energy drinks waited at the finish line and an ambulance was parked on standby. A large screen displayed alive feed of the competition.
Murad took his place at the starting block. Once again, he felt the glimmering city fit into a narrow view, if as he was viewing the finish line with blinkers on. Bent on all fours in the starting position, his foot tucked under the block, he imagined the face of Coach Upadhyay, watching him with a steady gaze, gesturing to take deep breaths.
“Do you know how it will feel when you put the India jersey on your back?” the coach’s words rang in his ears. “It will be an unbelievable feeling.”
At the pop of the starting gun, Murad sprang forward, legs unfurling like whips, soaring over the first hurdle. Then, the second. Then, the third. In the audience, a group of Indian migrant workers stuck their fingers into their mouths and whistled to cheer him.
When Murad returned to himself, he was being congratulated. He had won a bronze medal, coming in third, behind an athlete from Chinese Taipei and another from Qatar. When the huddle of photographers pointed their cameras at the medalists, Murad grabbed an Indian flag from the stands and swept it over his shoulders, spreading his arms wide to display the tricolor like wings.
“It was an unbelievable feeling,” Murad told reporters when he landed in New Delhi. He was standing at a podium in front of a cluster of microphones, next to the beaming face of a sports minister who shook his hand as though he was attempting to draw water from a well. Murad had been too keyed up to sleep since the race. His head buzzed, his heart ran laps and the words tumbled out of his mouth before he could catch them.
“You feel so good, really good, yes, too good,” he said. “I want a chance to play for the Olympics, at least once, just once. I want to keep going on and on till I get there.”
***
The next morning, Kanji Bhaliya sat in his living room in Kodinar, opened the Times of India, an English-language newspaper, and took a long sip of milky tea to savor a news item he had desperately waited to read.
“Siddi tribal laborer's son wins bronze in Kuwait athletics meet,” the headline read.
Bhaliya dialed his senior at the Gandhinagar office. Bhaliya had lobbied tirelessly with the officials in the capital pushing for a chance to prove the worth of the Siddi talent hunt project. Now, his effort had finally borne fruit. “Sir,” he said. “Did you see today’s Times of India?”
At the Somnath International School, the district-level sports school in the town of Kodinar where Murad first began training as a young athlete, a new hire was announced. Rabbani Chauhan, a self-taught football player from the nearby town of Veraval with an afro and temple shade, was appointed the school’s new PE teacher. He is the only Siddi faculty member in the school and works alongside two other instructors to coach the school’s football team.
“What our community needs is role models,” Rabbani told me. “We have a shortage of those.”
Rabbani remembered the day in his childhood that his father showed him a picture of the Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt in a newspaper. “Is he from our tribe?” the young boy asked. “Kind of,” his father replied – a message that planted a sense both of pride and distance in his mind. Now, Rabbani hoped that Murad might become the figure to close that distance for future generations of Siddi boys.
“Maybe when children see Murad on television now,” he said, “they will feel proud and think—if he can do it, what can stop me?”
***
Days after his triumph, Murad returned to Galiyawad for a victory celebration. He sat on the bonnet of an open jeep, his face swallowed in garlands, bobbing along the dusty village path as a crowd of prancing villagers trailed behind.
A neighbor carried a loudspeaker on his shoulder, blasting a Gujarati folk song. The headman waved the Indian flag above the crowd and village boys showered the path with confetti. Young girls formed a circle in front of the jeep and clapped . A man playing a barrel drum hopped on one foot. Murad’s father and uncles walked slowly and seriously alongside the village elders, but could not help themselves from bursting into little involuntary dances.
Under an ancient tree, the headman presented a cash envelope to Murad, a gift for bringing honor to the tribe. A row of mismatched chairs, borrowed from neighbors, faced the rope cots and tattered blankets that had been arranged for the viewers.
All afternoon, Murad stood by the tree, as relatives, neighbors and friends lined up to shake hands, thump his back, kiss his forehead and take photographs, as though they were at a wedding reception.
After the crowd dispersed, Murad sat once again in his family’s kitchen, in front of a platter heaped with fried fish, curry and potato fritters next to a jug of milk. A crowd of adoring relatives watched him eat. His medal was passed from hand to hand — examined, sniffed, held up to the light — before being hung on the blue wall facing the entrance, where guests would see it first. This medal alone would not lift the tribe out of poverty, but it was a small reminder that something good had happened to one of their own. If Murad could make it out, maybe others could too.
Since his victory in Kuwait, Murad had been bombarded with calls from private companies in Mumbai and New Delhi, wanting to train and support athletes who had potential to go to the Olympics. Each of them offered a fat salary, state-of-the-art sports infrastructure, a dedicated team of coaches, physiotherapists, sports scientists and nutritionists. Even though the offers were tempting, Murad turned them down, saying that he could not leave Upadhyay, his ‘Coach Sir’.
After the parade, and the procession of neighbors stopping by to see Murad’s new clothes, shoes and smartphone, the Sirman family grew anxious. All this attention, they feared, might invite the evil eye again. To ward it off, they insisted that Murad wear a black thread around his ankle at all times.
That night, after the village fell quiet under a soft blanket of stars, Murad stepped outside. He walked barefoot to the edge of the fields, where the wind moved through the crops and the scent of woodsmoke hung in the air.
All day long, Murad had carried pride like a suit too large. It felt stiff at the shoulders and loose at the cuffs, like something that was borrowed. He had stood in the center of the celebration like a guest. Now, in the stillness, whispers of fear rose within him. What if he was swindled out of his promised future? What if his sporting dreams were destined to shatter against harsh reality, like the athletic ambitions of Juje Jackie Harnodkar Siddi?
Murad’s phone buzzed with a new Facebook notification. Kanji Bhaliya, the seniorsports official of the district, had tagged him in a post announcing his medal.
“Congratulations Murad,” Bhaliya wrote. “This is just the beginning of the journey and many more to go. Proud of you!”
Whatever this feeling was in the pit of his stomach, it was something, Murad felt, that needed more practice. He smiled, not at the post, or the realization, but at the voice he heard in his head.
“Breathe,” Coach Sir had said.
And so he did.
