Mona Supreme

Mona Meshram rose from anonymity to attention, excelling at cricket and also balancing employment with an elite sport

- By Pritha Vashishth

THE lane of memories, a little crooked like a smile, lingers on Mona Meshram's face as she leans back into her chair. Outside, the afternoon light filters in lazily, dust motes floating in the air like unfinished thoughts. The dust that coils around her bat in stadiums across the country, however, never quite settles, not even when she rests in a hotel room between matches. It follows her on her kit bag, in the creases of her palms, and in the way she speaks about the game.

There is a string telephone tattooed on her left arm. She scratches her right arm, where another tattoo shelters the word 'Inspire', and chuckles softly at the distance, almost the irony, of its existence. Her eyes, set deep in the burrow of her skin, drift somewhere else entirely. They do not return to a cricket field. They return to a child holding a volleyball, not a bat.

“So I started playing volleyball on the ground next to our house when I was four or five,” she says. “I can still hear the clamour of the cycles we had.” The image comes easily to her. Dusty lanes, children shouting and wheels rattling against uneven roads. Her father, however, seemed absent from her memories. “Even in my faintest memories, I cannot remember his presence. I can only remember my mother going to houses to cook food.”

Her sister, Sapna Meshram, puts it more plainly later. “We never thought of it as sacrifice,” she says. “Someone had to stay.”

Meshram coughs, gulps some water, and looks away for a moment. She cannot remember the exact day he left, or how old she was when absence eventually became routine. “That shouldn’t be of much importance,” she says finally, almost dismissively. “Because it didn’t mean that I lacked father figures.” The sentence lands with the quiet certainty of someone who learned early that survival does not always wait for explanation.