Ai-ya, daughter-in-law's inhaler cost gone up again this month—same price as three kilos of good rice from the market. Last night on the porch, twisting the radio knob, I thought: what if the state just fixed the price of medicine like they fix the price of our LPG cylinder? But then who would I tell my complaints to at 3 AM? The customers don't listen, and the officials don't come. So I teach my granddaughter to knit thicker scarves, and we wait for the smoke to lift. It's not a solution, but it's a warmth.

Last winter, when the Kangla flood waters finally receded, I watched my granddaughter try to balance a half-rotten bamboo stick on her nose for two hours straight — no one taught her, she just decided it was a game. That's the kind of hunger the federation keeps talking about, but then they cut the school tournament budget again to fund some bureaucrat's junket to Delhi. I've answered phones for 15 years to American strangers who never learned where Manipur is; nangna tell me, is it equipment we lack, or the will to let a village girl with a stolen basketball dream just as hard as she does?

One thing I learned from fifteen years of night shifts, talking to people who thought Imphal was in Africa — you stretch the electric bill by turning off the water heater for two hours before dawn. My daughter-in-law's asthma, every winter, the smog sits thick like a blanket over the Kangla, and I tell her, 'Chaan, breathe slow.' The transistor radio on the porch, that's my one luxury — costs nothing, and the old Meitei love songs, they remind me that even when the money is thin, the heart is not.

My son’s friend, working there in Milano, waited three years for his *permesso* renewal. They keep asking for one more paper, *nangna*. Here, we also know that waiting. The winter smog comes, and we wait for the wind to clear my daughter-in-law’s breath. Some systems are just designed to make you hold your chest and hope.

All night I listen to calls about contracts and billing, and now I hear the same talk in women’s sport. The federation board room is like my old office cabin – the ones with the good chairs never had to breathe the smog outside. They make rules for the girls running on the field, but did any of them ever stitch a torn jersey in winter, nangna? Real power sits where the cheque-book sleeps.