Two gentle, polite, bright men wait to wrestle on a board

The brightly-lit, mirrored rooms in the bowels of the Capitol Theatre are where actors prepare. Put on make-up. Slip into character. Rehearse their lines. Now in these rooms sit two men who are performers of another kind.

- Rohit Brijnath

They are unpretentious authors of quiet, intense drama, though their show is never scripted.

The Ding Liren-Gukesh Dommaraju world chess championship showdown commences on Nov 25. These are men who prefer concise moves to long sentences but, on Nov 23, they uncomplainingly finish their final interviews. Their tone is gentle but inside, like with any sportsperson, ambition flames. And sometimes if you listen carefully you can hear the crackle of it.

I ask Gukesh which athletes he looks up to and he first mentions the preternaturally calm former Indian cricketer M.S. Dhoni. But it's when he speaks of Novak Djokovic that you get a sense of the qualities he admires and perhaps asks of himself.

"Djokovic is someone who has this strong mentality and he is super, super focused. He has this killer mentality. Whenever he was playing against Roger (Federer) and Rafa (Nadal), the crowd would always be against him and he would always manage to silence the crowds. And in the end he ended up with a plus score against all of them. I just feel like he is an athlete who is just amazingly strong mentally."

Chess is relentless, the preparation grinding, the defeats worn in silence but hollowing inside. In his room, Ding, the world champion, offers honesty at low volume in Mandarin.