Friends first, partners later Sutirtha and Ayhika combine for rare medal
When they trained as kids in the tiny town of Naihati, some 44km away from Kolkata, Sutirtha Mukherjee and Ayhika Mukherjee's mothers would wait outside the table tennis hall. On Saturday, all of India symbolically joined the Mukherjee matriarchs, waiting, their nails chewed, outside the hall in Hangzhou as their daughters went on to shock world champion Chinese pair Chen Meng and Yidi Wang and enter the women's doubles semifinals. The achievement is all the more significant and historic because India have never won a medal in the women's doubles event at the Asian Games.
