Salima Tete's Journey to India Hockey Captaincy

The mahua trees are in bloom. Everywhere across this landscape—rocky undulations carpeted with tough grass, dotted with small, dense groves of bamboo and the scraggly canopies of mahua trees, there is the messy profusion of pink flowers.

- Rudraneil Sengupta

The mahua trees are in bloom. Everywhere across this landscape—rocky undulations carpeted with tough grass, dotted with small, dense groves of bamboo and the scraggly canopies of mahua trees, there is the messy profusion of pink flowers. This is a busy time for villagers here, in the tribal lands in the district of Simdega, roughly 150km from Ranchi in Jharkhand. The mahua flowers bloom for a single day and fall, leaving a rich carpet of pink and pale green around the base of the trees. The flowers are highly coveted—fermented and distilled into the local drink of the same name—and most villagers are busy collecting them. A sweet, almost sickly smell permeates the air. The fragrance of the mahua attracts not just humans but also goats, cows, bears, bats, all manner of birds, deer, and monkeys.

Sulakshan Tete is not among the villagers collecting mahua flowers. He walks with purpose towards a shady grove of bamboo, his powerful calves showing under his shorts, his muscular shoulders straining against a T-shirt, his right hand wielding a machete. He inspects the grove, carefully going around it, till he finds a youngish stem to his liking.

“See how this is the right size,” he says, gripping the stem, “and look at the little bit of root poking out from the ground, that’s what tells me it has the right curve also.” With a few expertly placed hacks, Sulakshan cuts out the stem, root and all, from the grove. It looks exactly like a hockey stick! It takes Sulakshan less than an hour of deft work with the machete to finesse the natural curve of the root into the smooth head of a hockey stick.

“This is what I played hockey with most of my life,” he says. “My father played with a stick like this and taught me how to make one too. When my daughter was only eight years old, she asked me to make one for her, so I did.”