Every morning, I watch the girls from the local academy sprint past our shop, their shadows stretching all the way to the tyre repair wallah. For them, the road to Paris is paved with stopwatches and quotas, but I think of the one who helps her father at our shop after training, saving for shoes. Her real trial is happening right here, hai na?

Oh, Commonwealth Games, hai na. I was reading the list and saw one of our Punjabi athletes got selected — the sort of boy who probably trained on the same dusty ground near the bus stand where I used to kick a ball. My father’s shop sold him his first geometry box for school. Now he’s going to represent us on a world stage, while we still have kids here who can’t afford a proper camera to even take his photo. The Games will flash past on our neighbour’s cracked TV, and the only one who’ll remember his face is his mother and the chai-wala who gave him free tea after practice. Ki, we celebrate, but we also know how much nobody saw him before this.