Good Sport

Making the most of the city's sports scene as a trailing spouse in Mumbai.

For those of you wondering how I’m spending my time while I’m not working here in Mumbai, I’m afraid the answer is not that I’m writing my next book. It’s also not that I’m job-hunting, although Jasper desperately wants me to go and work in an ice cream parlour, which doesn’t sound so terrible. Nor am I dedicating myself to creating delicious and nutritious meals for Dylan to come home to after a hard day’s slog at the construction site. 

The simple answer? I’m leaning into my status as a trailing spouse — making the most of the fact that my current Indian visa forbids me to work, by doing what all ladies of leisure are duty-bound to do: I am having fun. And fun, for me, means doing lots and lots of sport!

Running at Marine Drive

Rink Hockey in Bandra

Pickleball in Lower Parel

Padel at Taj Land's End

Pilates Academy Worli

Hockey at Don Bosco High School

I’ve always loved term ‘trailing spouse’ — it conjures such a vivid image of tins cans bouncing along behind a speeding car. Dylan is the car. And I am one of the tin cans. The others form an ever-growing tangle of women in similar situations: overqualified to be sitting around all day doing nothing, but not authorised to use their skills in India. I am talking doctors, lawyers, engineers and the like, all compelled into household management by visa restrictions. I don’t mean to belittle household management — it’s unbelievably arduous and time-consuming here in Mumbai. But let’s be honest: it’s hardly intellectually stimulating. So, when the groceries, the cleaning, the appliances, the plumbing, the electrics, the transportation, the childcare — and the small armies of domestic help we hire to assist with all of it — are finally under control, we women find ourselves with time on our hands. And, what better way to use our (still somewhat limited) time than by serving both our bodies and minds with a bit of social exercise. 

My social and sport circle is not entirely made up of imports to India, I should point out. As a foreigner, I am kept on the straight and narrow by my guides — Indian women, mostly mums from Jasper’s school — who have taken it upon themselves to answer my inane questions about how things in Mumbai work. They instruct delivery men down the phone when my accent is getting me nowhere, recommend restaurants, shops and travel destinations, can negotiate far better prices for just about anything, and give me hope that there is a world in which I not only survive Mumbai, but thrive — and do so with currently unattainable levels of glamour. These women make living in Mumbai look easy when, goodness only knows, it is not. 

A typical week in my current, very leisurely life, might include some or all of the following: padel, pilates, squash, hockey, running, swimming and mum drinks. Mum drinks might not traditionally be classified as a sport, but attendance does require a certain level of training and, given that we end up talking a lot about what sports we are doing and which ones we’d like to do, I think it belongs. You’ll notice cricket is absent from my list of weekly sporting pursuits. This is mostly because I don’t like cricket (Read: Sticky Wicket). But it deserves an honourable mention because cricket is where it all started. 

Had I not played cricket last January, I might not have been spotted in sports kit around the apartment complex, and invited to play tennis with a new friend who lives in the same tower as us. Had I not played tennis with her, I might not have been identified as someone who plays racket sports by the mums at school, and invited to join their padel community. Had I not started playing padel, I might not have been so easily talked into joining a group of ladies training for a 10K run. And had I not done the run, I might not have been able to justify my exploration of reformer pilates to Dylan. The butterfly effect of saying yes to one cricket tournament has certainly reached far.

I don’t know if Dylan or Jasper deserves more thanks for bringing hockey back into my life. Arguably, it’s thanks to Jasper because he is the one who made friends with a Japanese girl in our apartment complex, whose mother subsequently told me about a group who play hockey every Sunday morning. Hockey is officially the national sport of India, but we were very sad to learn, once we arrived, that nobody really plays it in Mumbai. After three years with our ears to the ground, we had given up on finding any hockey until this revelation. Where Dylan’s thanks are due is for the fact that he went one weekend to scope it out — at 7am on his one day off that week. His photos of the sunrise over a full-sized turf pitch showed me it was good, but it wasn’t until the following weekend when Jasper and I joined him that we fully appreciated what a wonderful start to the day it made. Especially considering our human alarm clock has us up at that hour anyway.

Mumbai at 7 am on a Sunday is calm and peaceful. It’s also relatively cool, even in summer, which is essential if you are trying to shock your body back into a level of fitness it hasn’t known for several years. Hockey fitness is unlike any other fitness I’ve ever known and the first week I graced the pitch, I had to take to the sofa for the rest of the day to recuperate.

Dylan and Jasper at Don Bosco hockey

Don Bosco High School hockey

Jasper in hockey kit at the Don Bosco High School turf

Hockey pitch at Don Bosco

Dribbling at Don Bosco hockey

Dylan and Jasper at Don Bosco hockey field

My limitations did nothing to curb my enthusiasm, however, especially where Jasper’s hockey education is concerned. We used to joke that he’d be born with a hockey stick in his hand, on account of Dylan and I having met on a hockey pitch, in Yangon. He showed early promise of coordination and stick skills, too — inventing spoonball at the age of about eight months. {Read: More than a Love Affair} We now hope that bringing him to a sideline laden with highly-skilled, incredibly patient, volunteer hockey coaches each week will awaken his inner hockey player. Or at least remind him that he is one third of a very sporty family and that whenever one person is playing, the other two are duty bound to cheerlead. 

The Sunday morning hockey cohort is mostly men — some of whom I believe have an Olympic medal gathering dust in their homes — but there are a couple of women and it’s through them that I have been introduced to a wider hockey scene in Mumbai. Having only played a couple of times, and somewhat rustily even then, I wasn’t sure why I got the call up to a small tournament being played during weekday evenings back in April. Surely there were better players available? But, in the true spirit of Mumbai — city of dreams/ opportunity/ fortune, or whatever go-getter terminology you want to use to describe a city filled with relentless optimists — I said yes. I figured I would work out if there had been a mistake later. That tournament was my first experience of ‘rink hockey’ — played on a hard, multi-purpose sports court and with the pitch marked out by 3-inch high barriers. The five-on-five team structure meant there was nowhere to hide and it was utterly exhausting — but exhilarating too. It whetted my appetite for more and so when the invitation to play on a more normal turf pitch came around, I was one of the first to raise my hand. 

This week just gone, all my other sporting endeavours have taken a back seat as I have been playing in a hockey tournament. Dylan’s preferred pre-commuter-hour alone time in the office has also been eaten into as he has been taking Jasper to school in order to accommodate my 8 am pitch appearances, at a high school on the other side of the city. So anomalous has this been compared to our very regular, regular morning routine, that Jasper asked me ‘Mama, will you play hockey every day now?’ My mind is sad when I tell him ‘No, only this week’, but my body is relieved. Besides the fitness which I still don’t have, I had forgotten the significant role that elbows play in women’s hockey and I now have the bruises to show for the fact that I take man-to-man marking very seriously. Not to mention the toenail to which I will almost certainly be bidding farewell, after I accidentally made foot-to-ball contact while the ball and I were moving towards one another at pace. War wounds aside, the experience has made me realise how much I love team sports. While I am by no means the most skillful player on the field, I like to think I make up for it with my commitment to team morale. 

After this tournament, my regular schedule will resume — meaning a return to the school drop-off, padel and, after two weeks’ break, running. There is nothing more boring to non-runners than runners talking about running, so I’ll be brief: I recently ran a 10K and I enjoyed it so much, I have signed up for another. Granted, there was something a bit special about the one I just did, in that it was a Nike-organised event, only for women, and it was at night. Oh, and there was free beer at the end! The Nike After Dark Tour has hit Sydney, Shanghai, Seoul and Mumbai so far, and is headed to LA, Mexico City and London next. If you are in any of those cities and have the opportunity to sign up — do it — because if the Mumbai one was anything to go by it will be slick, empowering and hugely celebratory of female athletes. 

Prepping for this run was the first time I have ever followed a training programme, and I only did so out of fear: of migraines. I started out my preparation running willy-nilly — 5 kms here, 8 kms there — assuming I just needed some kilometres in my legs. I ran at the racecourse, round the park, around our apartment complex and on Marine Drive, whenever I had the chance. This meant I was usually running in the full force of the morning sun at around 9 am. Until I was hit by a miserable, mid-run migraine. One quick look at me will tell you I wasn’t exactly designed to withstand tropical heat — much less to do as much sport in these temperatures as I do. But this migraine knocked my confidence and drained my enthusiasm — to the point where I took it as a sign from the universe that I should give up on even participating in the run, let alone trying to get a good time.  

I’ve suffered from migraines all my life — having had my first one at the age of about eight — but despite having many years of experience behind me, I’ve never fully worked out what triggers them. Sport definitely plays a role and some of my worst ones have been induced by intensive running, squash or hockey. I always thought it must have been a toxic imbalance of too much adrenalin, too little sugar and a mind that is more determined than my body is strong. I now know — as much as anyone knows anything about the true causes of migraines — that my issue is more likely to be salt. One simple presentation from a sports nutritionist — organised by one of my tin can lady friends to help a group of us who were training for the Nike run together — has been a game-changer. The secret? Electrolytes. The rationale? The drinking water here is so purified that it is devoid of any goodness whatsoever. The nutritionist told us the filtered water we drink does nothing for our bodies and that we must always boost it with electrolytes when we exercise or we might as well not bother drinking anything. 

I really took this advice to heart, and there is a distinct possibility that I’m now addicted to electrolytes. I regularly google whether it’s possible to OD on the stuff but, when the internet has no alarmist response to my search, I continue to fuel my tropical sporting life with them. Not only did I finish the 10K run, I did so at a pace I’m very proud of — crossing the line in 60 minutes flat. I’m less proud that I ran the whole night-time race with my sunglasses on, but I couldn’t risk the glare of traffic lights and camera flashes undoing all the good work the electrolytes were doing.

Sprint finish!

My recent performances on the hockey field have also been fuelled by electrolytes, as were my earlier victories on the padel court. Yes, you read that right: victories — plural. 

Back when I was just dipping my toe into the world of padel, someone organised an informal, social tournament. Having only set foot on a padel court twice in my life at that point, I signed up as a beginner and was duly allocated a partner and a spot in the beginners’ tournament. By the time the tournament rolled around a month later, however, I had played far more and, while I wouldn’t go so far as to say I had improved at padel, I had definitely improved at putting my tennis and squash skills to use on a padel court. That is to say, I could move my feet, hit balls back over the net and mostly understood the rules. I have no doubt that a proper padel-er would watch in horror at my approximation of their sport but the numbers never lie. Drafted in at the eleventh hour to cover for someone dropping out of the intermediate tournament, I competed in both tournaments — and won both. Not on my own, of course. My partners carried us through many of my mistakes, but the weight of the gold around my neck by the end of the morning suggests I had earned my salt — sugary, powdered, unnaturally flavoured salt. 

I’m not really in padel for the competition, however, as much as I’m in it for the social side. It’s very easy for we non-working mums to do the drop-off and then retreat to the solitude of our homes for the rest of the day. But padel coaxes us out of our own heads and into the sunshine. It’s light-hearted, light exercise but commitment to it is not to be taken lightly. A court booking is a court booking and those who signed up are expected to show up. One trouble with padel being such a new sport in Mumbai is that there aren’t many (or any) substitutes hanging around waiting to be pulled into a game at the last minute. Just a few weeks ago, one of us forgot they had signed up, leaving the other three to enlist the help of one of the ‘markers’ or ball boys to complete our four. His flip-flop clad feet were the first clue that he wasn’t exactly an avid padel fan, despite working at the courts. When he then didn’t seem to know where to stand on the court, or how to hit a ball using anything other than a pancake toss motion, my expectations were lowered further. And when he attempted to take a phone call while we were in the middle of a point, I lost my cool and literally shoo-ed him off the court, disciplining him about appropriate court-phone etiquette as he went. He learned that day that we mums mean business, even when we are really all leisure. 

Court bookings will become more scarce during the monsoon, as many of the courts will struggle to protect themselves against the battering downpours. For those occasions where we want to be social, but can’t find a padel court and are in too much pain from pilates for pilates, we have invented an alternative pastime we like to call Whaling. Whaling is when we swim out to a platform in the centre of a very large swimming pool to bask and chat. We are clearly visible to anyone who might want or need us, but unreachable except by water and we certainly don’t bring our phones. If there is a more perfectly symbolic act for a bunch of highly capable mums hellbent on shirking their domestic duties, I haven’t found it.

That's our whaling platform - right out there in the middle. I'm sure you can see the appeal. (Offspring in the foreground for scale!)

Once last thing...

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