Angry Chess
The hardest part of chess, they don’t tell you, is finding the second player.
In Dewas, this was a genuine supply-chain problem. Cricket players were available in bulk. Carrom players could be summoned by the sound of a striker hitting the frame. But chess players existed in the census the way tigers do: officially present, rarely sighted. Vishwanathan Anand never had this problem. He had all of Chennai. I had one brother and a handful of friends, and none of them could lose quietly.
A game of chess in our colony lasted until the first queen fell. The owner of that queen would study the board for a dignified ten seconds, then curl a middle finger against his thumb and flick his own bishop into the winner’s lap. The winner flicked back. Within a minute the pieces were under the cot and the board was the only thing left on the floor. “Haar gaya to haar gaya, pieces kyun phenk raha hai?” was the most common sentence in our house, and nobody ever answered it.
Any economist will tell you that a behaviour you cannot stop, you tax. We were children, so we wrote rules for it instead. Carrom rules, applied to chess pieces. Your knight didn’t develop to f3; it was launched in the general direction of f3 and settled wherever physics and floor dust permitted. Captures happened the honest way, by collision. The tantrum became the opening move.
Somehow it worked. Boys who wouldn’t sit through one game of actual chess queued up for this. The queen, it turns out, is far more popular as a projectile than as a strategist. I was never bored again, which for a bespectacled boy in 1990s Dewas is roughly equivalent to enlightenment.
We never named it then. Naming things is what adults do to feel productive. Three decades later, I have done what any reasonable adult would do with a childhood memory: I turned it into a website, and I named it Angry Chess, which is less a name than a description of everyone I played it with.
No app, no login, no newsletter popup asking for your email like an insecure lover. Just the game we played on the floor, now playable without the floor.
Go flick a bishop. Report back.
PS: My brother has played it and pointed out that my flicking has deteriorated. Some supply-chain problems, it seems, follow you into your forties.
