“Football hota kyaa hai, miyaan?” Tulsidas Balaram would ask, voice feeble yet indignant over a telephone line crackling with static. It was in those lonely days of the lockdown that we would talk, conversations echoing in the stillness of an arrested outside world, with him often repeating the rhetorical question as if he was reminding himself of the simple truths of his times.
Balaram had just been bereaved in a sense. Chuni Goswami following PK Banerjee to the maidaan in the skies within 40 days of each other four years ago, would leave him, then 83, as the last of the Golden Trio of Indian football. The passing of the twin icons of a rich and varied Kolkata cultural landscape evoked spontaneous grief and a wave of nostalgia not often seen in Indian sport.
