Real moments from the court — Goregaon Sports Club
The Instruction That Started It All
It began, as so many beautiful things do, with a grandmother's dream.
My nani looked at my mother one day and said, with the quiet certainty of someone who had already decided, "I want her playing like Sania Mirza. I want to watch her on television — Wimbledon, Roland Garros, all of it."
And me, being the wonderfully oblivious child that I was, looked up with complete confidence and said: "Are you talking about Saina Nehwal? Because she plays badminton. I'll play badminton."
My grandmother was not amused. She was clear. She was certain. She wanted tennis. And somewhere in that living room, in that one conversation, the next twelve years of my life were quietly, irrevocably decided.
me, genuinely confused why badminton wasn't the answer
Two Rackets, Because Why Have One
It was 2013. I was seven and a half years old, and the world was very large and very full of possibility.
There was a sports club just five minutes from our house. Goregaon Sports Club — GSC. And at GSC, there was a tennis arena — three whole courts — that seemed, to a seven-year-old's eyes, like something out of a dream. My parents decided: no full commitment yet. Just the summer camp — the tennis afternoons of April and May — to see how it goes.
But before any of that, we went to a sports shop. And my father — my wonderful, ridiculous, loving father — bought me two rackets. Not one. Two. Because, in his words, she should never have the necessity of not having a spare. As though I were about to embark on a professional tour and not, in fact, a seven-year-old about to learn how to tap a ball.
I walked into that summer camp alone — one little girl in a big pond, surrounded by far bigger fish, with absolutely no idea what was about to happen to her.
my family casually deciding my entire future in one conversation
One Hundred Taps. Take a Break. One Hundred More.
Day one: tap the ball on the racket strings. One hundred times. Take a break. One hundred more. Day two: bounce the ball on the strings — controlling it, feeling it, making peace with it. One hundred times. Take a break. One hundred more. Day three: balance the ball on the edge of the racket and try — try — to flip the racket in your wrist without letting it fall. Nobody could do it. We all stood there in the Mumbai heat, flipping our rackets and watching the balls hit the ground in a kind of collective, communal defeat that actually brought us together.
Then came the real thing. The forehand swing — just the motion, no ball yet. The backhand. The volley. The serve. The overhead smash. We learned each stroke like a new language, our bodies slowly memorising the grammar of a sport we didn't yet speak.
And then came actual drills. The coach would drop the ball, and we would hit. And it was electric.
It was also, I will admit, the summer I developed a very sophisticated talent for inventing reasons not to go. A stomach ache. A headache. A sudden inexplicable tiredness that only appeared on tennis afternoons. Don't judge me. I was seven.
every. single. tennis. morning.
me after tap number 87
The Girls I Dreamed Alongside
When summer camp ended, my parents enrolled me in the night batch — eight to nine in the evening. Because in that batch, I found something I hadn't expected: community. A group of eight or nine girls who all showed up every evening, rackets in hand, and slowly, without even realising it, became each other's people.
We had our coaches — Akshay sir and Nirmal sir, who were equal parts fun and terrifying in exactly the right proportions. Those evenings had a rhythm to them, a warmth, that I didn't have the words for at seven years old but can recognise clearly now.
And then there was the advanced batch. They played right before us. Every evening, we would stand at the edge of the court and watch — these older players moving with a fluency we could barely imagine. We had names for them in our heads, these giants of the court. We whispered about them. We dreamed about them.
us showing up to the 8–9 batch, ready for everything
A Membership, and a Family That Just Got It
In 2014, something happened that I didn't fully understand at the time but have grown more grateful for with every passing year.
My parents watched me. They saw how I lit up when I talked about tennis, how even on the days I pretended I didn't want to go, I always came back glowing. They saw something in me that I perhaps hadn't yet seen in myself: that this wasn't a phase. This was a love.
And so, quietly and without fanfare, they took out a membership at Goregaon Sports Club. No conditions attached, no expectations voiced. Just a simple, generous act that said: we see you, we believe in you, go play. They wanted me to be able to walk onto that court whenever I needed to — unabashedly, completely mine.
I was nine years old. And without knowing it, I had just been handed a home.
A T-Shirt We Wore Four Times
The head coach told my mom I was ready — ready for the four-to-five batch. The intermediate batch. I was nine years old and I felt, in that moment, like I had been handed something precious.
The intermediate batch meant one extraordinary, terrifying, wonderful thing: tournaments. We got an academy t-shirt. Ceremonial. Symbolic. We wore it for exactly four tournaments and then swapped it for our own clothes, as one does when one is nine and developing opinions about sportswear.
My friend from my building — let's call her Kushboo — joined the same batch not long after. And Kushboo and I were, from the very beginning, a complete and total disaster together. In the best possible way. We talked constantly. We laughed at everything. We got into trouble approximately every other session.
But oh, we loved it. The four-to-five batch was joy in its purest form. And the very serious, very important question we asked each other after every tournament: "How many matches did you win?" The answer, for all of us, for a very long time, was: "I lost in the first round." We asked anyway. Because we were nine and hope is infinite at nine.
me after losing in the first round but acting completely unbothered
Three O'Clock. Five O'Clock. Sometimes Seven.
From ages ten to twelve, we moved to the three-to-five batch. Sometimes six. Sometimes seven, when our coach was generous enough to let us keep playing. The competition sharpened. The friendships deepened. And the drama — oh, the drama. Conversations about nutrition, sleep, and bowel movements were discussed with coaches as performance metrics.
My father never asked me to be Serena Williams. He never asked me to win. He asked me to show up. To face the opponent. To learn from the loss. He taught me that participation — real participation, eyes open and heart present — is its own form of victory.
And my mother. My mother, who deserves her own book, her own monument in the sun — because that is where she spent every afternoon of those years. Sitting in the raging, unforgiving Mumbai sun until whenever my session ended, watching me play. Watching me make mistakes. Watching me hit the same wrong shot for the fifteenth time. And never once making me feel lesser for it.
When I lost matches — including the ones where the other player bent the rules and I stood there and said nothing — she was honest, sometimes sharp. She pushed me to find my voice, to stand up for myself. But she never made me feel like the loss defined me.
us after sir refused to end the session at 5pm
The Advanced Batch, Justin Bieber, and TNT in My Stomach
2017. I was turning twelve in just twenty days, and I wanted the advanced batch the way you want something you're almost afraid to want — quietly, desperately, with a superstitious certainty that wanting it too loudly might make it disappear.
Two girls from my batch got promoted before me — the second being a girl I'd had a thousand arguments with, whose definition of sportsmanship and mine had never once aligned. And there I was, still in the intermediate batch with Kushboo, and the peculiar loneliness of wanting something just beyond your reach.
Then came the Justin Bieber concert. I went. It was everything. And two days later — two days — my coach called my mother aside and said the words I had been waiting years to hear:
I cannot describe what happened in my body in that moment except to say: TNT. Dozens of tiny, joyful explosions, from my stomach to my fingertips. Twelve years old in twenty days, and I had made it.
The advanced batch was humbling in a whole new way. Everyone was good. The big players I'd worshipped from afar had moved on, which meant there was space for me to grow into something. And I did. Slowly, messily, brilliantly — I did.
There is a small but telling footnote to the Kushboo story. After I moved up, a quiet animosity crept in. It came to a head at a championship series match at GSC itself — our home court, the one we had grown up on together. We met in the quarter finals. Right before the match, we were sitting normally — laughing, talking, just us. Then her mother stepped in and physically kept her away from me until the tournament was over, drawing a hard line between friendship and competition that felt unnecessary and, honestly, a little sad.
I went out and played. I won — cleanly, fairly, without drama. The funniest part? Nirmal sir was the umpire. And Nirmal sir and I had an absolute blast during that match — laughing between points, exchanging looks, making the whole thing feel far less serious than her mother had decided it needed to be. Not long after, Kushboo left tennis completely. That's just how some stories go.
me internally at that exact moment
me carrying my nerves AND my racket bag to every match
A Court That Was Home When Home Was Complicated
From 2017 to 2020, I fought for my place in the advanced batch the way you fight for something you love — stubbornly, consistently, refusing to let it go even when it was hard. And then came COVID.
Those months were hard in ways that went beyond tennis. I developed serious infections in both big toes — the kind that ooze, the kind that throb, the kind that make every step a small negotiation with your own body. And when September 2020 came and my coach finally said the courts were open again —
I went anyway. Pus-filled toes and all, I went. Because the tennis court was the only place I knew how to feel like myself again. The only place where the noise stopped. Where I could just be — a body in motion, a racket in hand, a ball crossing the net, clean and simple and mine.
me showing up to court in September 2020 on two infected toes. did not miss.
2:30 PM. Ten Rounds. A Thousand Jumps. And Pure, Unhinged Joy.
From 2021 to 2023, tennis became everything all over again — and this time, with a dedication I hadn't known in myself before. We played from three to six, sometimes seven. But I started arriving at 2:30 every single day. Not because anyone asked me to. Because the court called me earlier than it called everyone else, and I listened.
My warm-up became a ritual, sacred and non-negotiable. Ten full rounds around all three courts — not jogging, running. And then skipping: one thousand jumps, every day, without fail. My body was a machine built from love and stubbornness and the particular kind of discipline that doesn't feel like discipline because you'd do it even if no one was watching.
But here is the thing about those years: they were not just about the grind. They were about the joy. Wild, ridiculous, uncontainable joy. There was the sacred tradition of stamping on someone's freshly bought white shoes — a crime, technically, but a love language among us. There was girl number two, who had a spectacular talent for getting in her own way, shooting herself in the metaphorical foot so reliably and dramatically that watching her do it every single day never, not once, got old. We laughed. Every time. We laughed until it hurt.
On holidays, someone would drag a pipe onto the court and suddenly it was less tennis, more water fight — slipping, sliding, absolutely soaked, completely unbothered. And birthdays? You did not celebrate a birthday at GSC and walk away with a clean face. Cake was purchased specifically to be lathered, rubbed, and smeared — ceremonially, lovingly, with great enthusiasm — across the birthday person's face. It was tradition. It was non-negotiable. It was us.
And through all of this, I had a friend by my side who was my absolute partner in crime for every post-session snack run — named after a penguin, of all things, which honestly just tracks completely. The two of us made our way through dosas, idlis, medu vada, paav and chicken bhuna, sandwiches — anything under the sun, really. And ganne ka ras — fresh sugarcane juice, cold and sweet — because after hours in the Mumbai heat, nothing on this earth could compare.
Akshay sir and Nirmal sir made me feel like I belonged there. Not just permitted to be there, but belonging. That is a gift not every coach knows how to give. They gave it freely, and I will carry it always.
me after medu vada number four
my penguin-named partner arriving for post-session snack duties as always
The Leaving — And Why It Still Hurts
And then came Cambridge A Levels, and with them, the unravelling of a rhythm I had spent twelve years building. The workload was immense. Things on the court grew complicated. And eventually — slowly, then all at once — I stopped going.
I don't say that easily. Even writing it now, there's an ache in it that I don't think will fully go away. Because leaving tennis wasn't just leaving a sport. It was leaving twelve years of Mumbai afternoons and aching muscles and triumphant shots and heartbreaking losses and the smell of a freshly opened can of balls and the sound of a clean forehand hit perfectly in the sweet spot.
It still hurts. It probably always will, a little. But here is what I want to be absolutely clear about: this chapter is not over. I may not be the next Serena Williams. But in my own eyes — and my own eyes are the only ones that have ever truly mattered on that court — I could never hate something so pure that made me who I am.
me trying to explain why I left. it's complicated. i'm not typing that.
The Promise I'm Keeping
I am in Milan now. Older, different, still the same person who fell in love with a sport because her grandmother pointed at a television and said I want that for her.
I've looked for courts here. There are regulations, processes, requirements — I understand them, I respect them. But I am paying attention. I am waiting. And the moment there is an opening, I will be there — racket in hand, slightly out of practice, entirely willing — because some loves don't expire. They just wait.
Tennis and I are not finished. We are just, for now, in a long pause between points.
me in milan. waiting. patiently. very patiently.
Thank You, Tennis. I Mean Every Word.
So here it is. The love letter I've been meaning to write for years.
Thank you for being the first place I ever felt truly at home. For being the one constant when everything else shifted. For teaching me, at seven years old, that one hundred bad taps are just the beginning — that you keep going, and eventually the ball does what you ask.
Thank you for the discipline you built in me quietly, over years, without me even noticing. For the maturity. For the strength — physical, yes, but more importantly the kind that lives in your chest and tells you to get up, return to the baseline, and serve again.
Thank you for the paav and chicken bhuna, the medu vada, the sugarcane juice, the 2:30 arrivals, the thousand jumps, the ten rounds, the birthday cake on someone's face, the water fights on the court. For the feeling of a perfect shot connecting right in the centre of the strings. For teaching me that confidence isn't arrogance — it's just knowing your own worth and refusing to let anyone else define it for you.
Thank you for being the place my mother sat in the raging sun for, year after year. For giving my father a way to show me that showing up matters more than winning.
Thank you for Akshay sir and Nirmal sir. For every girl I competed with and against and alongside. For my penguin-named partner in snacks and laughter. Even the ones who cheated. Even the ones who made things hard. You were all part of the story.
And thank you, most of all, for making me who I am.
I'll be back. That's not a wish.
— Your most devoted student, your homesick player, your forever believer
This is part one of a longer story. More chapters to come. Stay tuned.