Missed Translations - Sopan Deb Page 0,63

he said.

I answered in the affirmative. This was an item that had been on my list for a lifetime: to bond with my father over a sport. The anxieties of my childhood were mostly in the rearview mirror, but it wasn’t too late to find common ground on the clay court. I knew Shyamal was well trained at this point, having had a coach and playing three times a week for the last decade. The last time I played was in elementary school, and even that was brief. This would be a blowout.

“Oh boy, I’ll tell you, Sopan. I’m thrilled that I’ll play tennis with you,” Shyamal said, followed by his crisp chortle. He kept saying, “This is the dream of my life!”

“Yeah, it’ll be great,” I said warily. “I’m not very good. I haven’t played in many years.”

“All right. To play with your father, you don’t have to be any good,” Shyamal said. “I’m not good either.” He was being nice.

I’ve never been much of an athlete. Freshman year of high school, I tried out for the basketball team. I didn’t make it—not an easy feat, considering how atrocious the Howell High School basketball team was. (I distinctly remember trying to steal the ball from a teammate during tryouts, which, while a bold strategy, did not bode well for my chances.)

Baseball wasn’t my sport either. Though I was dominant in Little League for one year in sixth grade, I found out it was because Bishakha accidentally placed me in the wrong age group. I was going up against third-graders and looked like the Indian Babe Ruth. The next year, the situation was rectified. I quit after a handful of games because I kept striking out.

Maybe I needed something more grounded. For a brief period in elementary school, my mother made me take up wrestling. This wasn’t the kind where I threw around pillows at home. It was actual competition requiring outmuscling other humans. When the other kids were horsing around and grappling before practice, I would jump in and act as the referee of the exchanges so I wouldn’t have to take part in the actual grappling. You get the point. There’s a trend here.

When I woke up at the crack of dawn the next day to prepare for my tennis match against Shyamal, I didn’t have high hopes. I hadn’t swung a racket in twenty years. Even though Shyamal was about to kick my ass, this was about showing up for him.

My father had fretted over the possibility that the game would be rained out, but the weather was perfect when we arrived at the courts. He had on a white polo shirt and a matching baseball cap, and he’d rented a racket for me to use for the day. He also hired a ball boy assigned specifically to our game. We took our places on opposite sides of the court and began. Wesley sat on the court right behind Shyamal. In many tennis matches, this might be a dangerous spot. Not in this case.

My forehands, if you could call them that, sent the tennis ball flying well outside the lines. Every couple of minutes, I’d put my hands up to signal “My bad!” which should have been “I am bad!” I was swinging my racket like a baseball bat. The poor ball boy was sweating profusely, as he was unexpectedly receiving the biggest workout among the three of us, having to chase after all my errant swings.

There was one other issue, though: Shyamal was terrible too. Really bad. I mean, so was I, but I had an excuse. This was not a grand display of tennis on either side. This was the opposite of Borg vs. McEnroe. It was more like two Muppets facing off. I stopped feeling bad for the ball boy once I saw him openly laughing at some of our volleys. Shyamal would trot from one side of the court to the other, flailing at my serves, which were surprising each time they made it over the net.

When Shyamal told me a day earlier that he wasn’t good, I thought he was trying to be polite. He wasn’t! He actually was terrible. What was his coach teaching him the whole time? Now I had some suspicions about my father’s claims of being a strong athlete when he was growing up.

If this experience was about searching for answers, I got the most concrete one this morning: Why wasn’t I good at sports? It was in