The Girl Who Played Alone
The house I grew up in was built around a square courtyard, open to the sky, every room's door facing inward toward it like an audience. Most children would have called it a courtyard. I called it a racetrack. (Zoom, Zoom, Zooom!!)
I would ride my bicycle in tight, furious loops around that square, wheels skimming past doorways, my mother's voice sometimes rising from the kitchen to warn me off a corner I'd already leaned into. I didn't need a park. I didn't need a street. Four walls and a strip of open sky were enough to make me feel like I was flying.
The veranda had its own game. A white wall ran along one side of it, and I would prop one edge of the table tennis table right up against that wall, paddle in hand, sending the ball forward and catching its return before it hit the ground again. No partner, no waiting for someone to be free. Just me, the wall, and a rally that never had to end unless I let it.
That same wall did double duty. My father had bought me an air gun, just for me, and I'd chalk a circle onto the white paint and stand there in my white kurta shalwar, one long braid down my back, taking aim like the house had made me its own quiet marksman. I don't remember him ever telling me to be careful. I remember him watching, and smiling, like he already knew I would be.
When the walls weren't enough, I threw a tennis ball against them instead, again and again, catching it on the bounce, inventing rules as I went, changing the game the moment I got bored of winning it. A skipping rope did the same work in an empty stretch of the courtyard, counting my own turns, keeping my own score, needing no one to clap or cheer for me to feel like a champion.
Water was the one game I couldn't build myself. For that, I had to wait for Wednesdays. Our community had an Olympic-size pool, grand and blue and usually far out of reach for a girl my age, except on Women's Day, when the gates closed to every man in the city and opened wide for us instead. I would count the days until Wednesday the way other children counted down to a holiday, and when it came, I swam like the whole pool belonged only to me.
Looking back, I think I was training for something even then, though I couldn't have named it. Every solo game was its own kind of proof: that I didn't need an audience to play hard, didn't need a partner to win, didn't need permission to turn a courtyard into a track or a wall into a teammate. The wall never let me down. It bounced the ball back every single time, patient as a friend who never once said no.
Even now, when I close my eyes, I can still hear it, the soft slap of a bicycle tire against warm stone, the paddle's crack against a rubber ball, the splash of Wednesday water closing over my shoulders. That little girl didn't know she was building something that would last a lifetime, a quiet confidence, a joy that asked nothing of anyone else. I carry her with me still, in every room I ever walk into like it's mine to fill, in every quiet moment I turn into something worth smiling about. She taught me that happiness could be self-made, and I have never once forgotten the lesson.
I am my own Cheeky Da (Dame Amore).
