A Man of Many Words

Srikar Raghavan

I

My dear sir, you please come near Why-Yem-Sea-Ye and call me. I will be down there in five minutes. – he says, in his inimitable drawling tone.

I stand opposite the YMCA building in Secunderabad, waiting for Damaraj to show up. I haven’t seen him in over twelve years, and I have zipped here directly from the airport, first thing in the morning. I see a man of moderate stature walking briskly towards me, sporting a full-sleeved tee that has CONQUEROR emblazoned on it multiple times. I stifle my grin a little, even as he breaks out into one, marvelling at how much taller I’d grown in these years. The last time I met him was in 2010, when I was a scrawny tenth-grader participating in what would be my last school-level Scrabble tournament. After that, I had spent two years in preparation for a technical education, five angsty years trying to finish a troublesome engineering degree, and then five more years unlearning all of it to nurture a writerly dream.

It felt like my life had come full-circle.

You see, around the turn of the century, when most Indian parents were looking to boost their children’s education by shuffling them through an assorted melange of tuitions, when Vedic mathematics and abacus lessons and Brilliant Tutorials and that whole gravy-train was running wild across the country, a chartered accountant named VR Damaraj was spinning other ideas in his head. He wanted to use Scrabble as a medium to teach children English, and to inspire in them a love for reading. He essentially fathered the phenomenon of school-level Scrabble in India, spreading the game to clubs around the country – from Mumbai to Calcutta to Hyderabad to Mysore and more. And he did this all out of his own pocket, with a little help from his friends.

Chitchatting enthusiastically, he ushers me up to his famous penthouse apartment – one he’d often boasted about back in the day – and my initial reaction is not of amazement, but of silent concern. The house looked as though a shy tornado had run its course, whipping up magazines, cardboard boxes, clothes, and assorted reams of papers into what resembled the preferred living conditions of some tortured artist with a chaotic disposition, Francis Bacon perhaps. In the centre of all this madness sat a humble mat, upon which there was a crumpled bedsheet – presumably where Damaraj had slept the previous night. My concern turned into awe. (A helper-boy did come around later and tidy up the house.)

There was a sober reason for this mess. The penthouse had been jointly owned by Damaraj and his siblings. See, I had two brothers and two sisters. So, they all died. Natural deaths. – he says, casually. In January this year, which is when I met him, Damaraj was sixty-nine years old, and he had been the youngest of the lot. All their stuff has come here, and I’m trying to throw out as much as possible. Leading the way through the detritus, he ushers me into the kitchen, where a breakfast of cornflakes and milk awaits. I watch warily as he washes the bowls with another bowl of bottled mineral water – he doesn’t trust the local tap water, and I’m not sure if I trust his brusque washing style. But then, he had always been rather extraordinarily idiosyncratic.



My earliest memories of Damaraj are of a genial, constantly-grinning man, with some witticism or funny anecdote waiting to be delivered from his perennially-pouting lips. A raconteur of the goofiest variety, he would hold forth on all manner of subjects with singular unorthodoxy. Of course, in all these years, he hadn’t changed in this regard. Although his manner of speaking seemed to have become more languid and drawling with age, the punchlines were still nestled in their usual spots. He was as talkative as I remembered him to be, if not more. After COVID, I haven’t had many visitors. I don’t visit anybody either. Life has been quiet, and he plays Scrabble mostly on the WordFeud app these days.

Twenty years ago, the Scrabble scene in Hyderabad was a hip and happening affair. It was in 2003 that I first met Damaraj, after my parents had enrolled me into Zygo Scrabble Clubs as a hyperactive eight-year old who needed a distraction. Every December, during Christmas vacations, Damaraj would throw four-day extravaganzas he called Word Fests – the most appropriate title for these events – to which I would make an earnest pilgrimage every year. Scrabble was only a small part of these fests, as Damaraj had realised that there needed to be more spice involved to keep children interested. In between serious games of Scrabble, we were treated to other attractions – poetry writing (limericks and kennings), unjumbles, public speaking, spelling bees, and a plethora of quirky games that he had dubbed ‘Language Appreciation’. For every bingo we made, there was a bonus prize awaiting – a Munch, Perk, Five-Star, or a Milkybar.  

It was a riot. Damaraj would come up with the themes and exercises personally, and so we might suddenly find ourselves trying to speak for five minutes on why ‘Damaraj is more handsome than Shah Rukh Khan’. I still remember some cheeky kid who decided to go against the grain, and earnestly announced why he felt this was untrue, since Damaraj was balding and always wore a cap, while Mr. Khan still had a full head of hair.

Limericks were the crowd-favourite. I vividly recall the first limerick I ever heard - an example he’d picked out from somewhere to explain its unique rhyme scheme.

There once was a girl named Jill,

Who had a voice that was very shrill.

Once, whilst singing in class,

She shattered the glass,

And her parents were given the bill.

Damaraj fondly remembers one particular limerick that a fifth-standard girl had cooked up on the subject ‘The North Pole’.

I went to the North Pole

And fell into a hole.

A polar bear came to my rescue

And treated me to a barbeque

And kept me warm with a lot of coal.

He still considers limericks to be an artform in their own right, and is presently working on a rendition of the Mahabharata in limerick form. It is a work in progress. The Mahabharata has much to teach us. A war between cousins actually happened. What it teaches us is that people fight and destroy jungles, and this is never a good solution. Everybody died. So it becomes a laughing matter too, you see?

Like all worthwhile endeavours, Damaraj’s vision for a Scrabble-based literary extravaganza sprung from a deep personal connection. He’d been introduced to Scrabble via his circle of college friends, and they often played together. He recalls that one of them, a man named Satyamurthy from Vellore, was quite good at it, while the rest of them were only amateurs at that point. As it happened, Satyamurthy was working at the steel plant in Vizag, where a tragedy was in the making. He was working in coke-oven factories. They have a railway track where they load that coke. He slipped and fell face-first into the oven. He inhaled those fumes – and in one minute, he died. He had just been married, and had a one-year old son. I felt so bad. By then, I had started working as a consultant. So, I thought, why not host a Scrabble tourney in his memory? The next time I went to Vizag for consulting work, I conducted one tourney. That was the first in India. Soon, one thing would lead to another, and invitations to conduct tournaments in Madras, Bombay, Pune, and Hyderabad followed suit. Scrabble had found its first energetic patron in the country. 

These initial tournaments were all restricted to adults, however. The decision to take the game to children, the children who would become so beloved to Damaraj, would come later. I am not a stupid for lifetime. At one point, I realised that we must teach children. The problem with these oldies is that they don’t improve. Will you start a school for old people? No, – he says, before launching into another meandering story about the impetus for children’s Scrabble. And this story leads into yet another passion that Damaraj holds close to his heart – cricket.

 

II

 

Even during my school years, there was a particular whisper that had been circulating as the stuff of legend – that it was Damaraj who had discovered the genius of VVS Laxman and fostered his talents. It was only during this meeting that the truth of the myth was explicated at length. As it happens, VVS Laxman is Damaraj’s aunt’s grandson. Laxman’s mother is his cousin. When Damaraj was in college, he’d been a steadfast cricket fan. He had met Sunil Gavaskar at a practice match in Guntur, where he noticed that Gavaskar was the only one not drinking beer, because he was so broke. Gavaskar was paid fifteen rupees for lunch per day. He had also watched Gundappa Viswanath play Ranji cricket, and GR’s subtle, unaggressive batsmanship had thoroughly impressed him. He was not hitting the ball, he was only touching the ball. Later, in the eighties, when he saw a twelve-year old Laxman playing against Tamil Nadu in a first-class match, displaying his inimitable style of artful strokeplay, Damaraj had a déjà vu moment. He immediately pronounced that ‘this boy will play for India’ and convinced Laxman’s family that they must put all their eggs into the cricket basket. The original plan had been for Laxman to study medicine, since cricket still wasn’t the lucrative career option that it is now. The rest is, well, cricketing history. So, this Laxman experience taught me that if I want Scrabble to improve, I should teach children, okay? – he says, with deadpan seriousness.

Organising tournaments for children presented its own set of problems. Unlike adults, they do not have a broad vocabulary to rely on. In competitive Scrabble, one is not allowed to refer to a dictionary. If you play a word that is suspect, the opponent can challenge it, which will then be examined by an umpire. If the word doesn’t exist, it has to be retracted and you lose a turn. The problem with children is that they will challenge every word! At the first children’s tournament in Bombay in 1999, Damaraj faced a crisis as the only umpire of the event. From nine in the morning to six in the evening, I was running around picking up challenges. He found a creative solution for this – a handy booklet that contained all the allowed two-letter, three-letter, four-letter words which everyone could refer to while playing. Now, challenges were only limited to larger words, and the rest were sorted out amongst the players amicably.

I remember being presented with one of these word-lists when I first started playing. It was a game-changer. Anyone with modest interest could just start playing, and the alacrity with which children pick up new words is quite astonishing. Damaraj still conducts Scrabble camps for children in Hyderabad. Someone recently connected him with a bunch of kids from a local government school, who have now tasted the delights of Scrabble. Most of these children are auto drivers’ children. They are so good. They are so good. And they learn so quickly. I give them exercises. And I pat myself for designing those exercises. The challenge is to figure out how to help them learn. It took me a long time to figure all this out. There needs to be a systematic approach to excellence.

It takes some creative leaps and bounds to arrive at the pedagogical bullseye for teaching children Scrabble. It is easy to bore kids to death and never make them want to play the game again. A glance at current school Scrabble tournaments in the country tells me that the prevailing scene is mostly a serious affair, done for certificate’s-sake, with little of the experimental passion that could really enlarge its scope. Though the Zygo tournaments were conducted with a veneer of competitiveness, the reality was far more flexible. Anyone who decided to participate at the last minute could just contact Damaraj for a ‘wildcard entry’, and make their way to the tournament. I vaguely remember one girl who was notorious for peeking into the tile-bag before picking her tiles, and when Damaraj was pointed towards this phenomenon, he merely brushed it off with a sensitive guffaw. Children will be children. The point is to figure out how to help them learn. He says he’s planning to collect all the word-power exercises he has created over the years into a book someday.

As for adult Scrabble, it has been growing steadily in the country, and there is big money up for grabs. Damaraj still maintains some of his grouse against the incorrigible oldies who fail to perform on the big stage, but there is also some cheer to be found. Of all his students, Damaraj carries glowing admiration for one name in particular – Akshay Bhandarkar.  When I conducted the first tournament in Mumbai in 1999, he was the first boy to sign up. Only good thing about that boy is that he learnt how to play the game so well, – he says, chuckling. Mumbai, Pune, and the Gulf seem to be the base from which the best Indian Scrabblers presently operate from – and it has long been acknowledged that it was Damaraj and Zygo Clubs that enabled this phenomenon. Keeping aside all the romance about Scrabble being a pathway to linguistic mastery, the fact remains that it is a competitive sport, like any other. You play to win, with eyes on the prize. If you are a batsman, you should score runs. If you are a bowler, you should take wickets. Otherwise, what is the point? Akshay Bhandarkar went on to win the World Scrabble Championship in Bahrain in 2017, reinforcing Damaraj’s convictions. Of all of Bhandarkar’s skills, Damaraj is most impressed by how he consistently manages to create bingos of eight letters and higher – a difficult feat indeed, considering how impossibly cramped a Scrabble board can get just halfway into a match.  

Scrabble coaching came late into Damaraj’s life, around the time people tend to have mid-life crises and start longing for an upright posture. Before his avatar as a Scrabble guru, he had been a full-time business consultant, investing in the stock market and jet-setting around the globe. In 1991, that landmark year, he had found himself on a business trip to London, where he visited a Marks and Spencer outlet and made some funny decisions. At that time, we were not getting any apparel made of Egyptian Cotton in India. And Egyptian Cotton is very, very lovely. So, for my friends, for my brother, for myself – I bought forty shirts. Totally 1.2 lakhs I spent. They were all gone, within 3-4 years. The finish was top-class. Everyone used to look at me. Anyway, over a period of time I became more sober.

Europe still fascinates him to no end, and he has a trip planned later this year. I want to go to Dublin. Oscar Wilde is from there. So are James Joyce and Bernard Shaw. I want to spend some time there. Before that however, the plan is to visit Salzburg in Austria, where the film The Sound of Music is set. It is one of his favourite movies, and he wants to take a walk into the Alps, emulating the ending scene where the Von Trapps walk off into the mountains.

His taste in literature is eclectic, and often comes with absurd declarations. Once, on a phone call some years back, he’d said – You must read Ernest Hemingway. You see, he won the Nobel Prize in the year I was born. That’s why I’ve started reading him. In our recent conversation, he declared – It took me twenty years to understand Shakespeare. Only three of his plays are good – rest is garbage. I failed to probe into the details. Damaraj’s love for western culture is only matched by his enduring interest in Indian history. He is presently making his way slowly through a Telugu translation of Adi Shankaracharya’s Soundarya Lahiri (which he says has become his new Ulysses, a book that took him forty years to finish) as well as the Telugu poet Sri Sri’s magnum opus Mahaprasthanam. Sri Sri wrote this in the same metre as Shankaracharya did. It is hard to observe it while reading, but when recited, it becomes noticeable. He also hopes that someone will adapt Vaibhav Purandare’s biography of Shivaji into an engrossing film someday.

In other words, Damaraj belongs to the generation of yesteryear, that stuck their hands out towards the West, with their legs firmly planted in their roots. His primary schooling was all in Telugu, and English came only later in life. His mastery of Scrabble is also a phenomenon that has aged well with time, honed over years of practice. In December 2007, when we arrived in Chennai for that year’s fest, there was a simultaneous Scrabble match waiting for us. Damaraj had decided to play against twenty-five children at once, out of pure whimsy, and many ended up beating him in the scrambled time-frame. That was the last time I had played a game with Damaraj in person. We later played a slew of games on the WordFeud app during the first lockdown, where I remember a mixed bag of results.

So, of course, a game was in the offing when we met this January too. I had already spied a deluxe rotatable board collecting dust on the top of his cupboard. After some hours of non-stop chitchat, we decided to settle down for a game, with palpable excitement. By this time, my brother Hari had also arrived, and Damaraj suggested that the two of us team up while he would play solo. He is far too puritanical to play three-player Scrabble, like some of us might at home. It takes away from the magic of the game – it has to be a one-on-one battle, a back-and-forth conversation of strategies.

He fished out a freshly minted word-list for us, and while we were constantly leafing through it, he barely touched it. Damaraj cracked two bingoes in each game, and won both games we played that day – one comprehensively, and the other by a tight margin. You can see some of that self-satisfaction in this photo of him taken just afterwards. CONQUEROR, indeed.

 

III

 

Around the time he was hitting his half-century mark, in the early 2000s, there emerged a serious medical scare that Damaraj had to conquer. An artery in his brain had been punctured, which required a life-threatening surgery. The doctors said it was 50-50. They basically had to make room in my brain, push some things around, to fix it. The brain is angry when this kind of stuff happens. The surgery caused him to speak in spoonerisms, which meant that he was saying chicken instead of kitchen, and fessing up some mucking words. I started doing Yoga. I’d never done Yoga before. It really helped. After two years, I was completely fine. I never had that problem again.

Around the same time, he had authored a legendary article in The Hindu, full of passionate reflection and soul-searching. About six years ago, my friend Nikhil and I discovered this piece with serendipity. I’d met Nikhil through the Scrabble scene. We were both from Mysore, and knew each other as young kids battling it out at one of those December fests. When we reconnected after a long interim, we had deemed it mandatory to go down the Damaraj rabbit hole, and see what the Internet would serve up about him. In the process, we had uncovered this hilarious article, written in his characteristically irreverent and goofy style, which kept us laughing for many days. The page is no longer available online, but I had read it enough times to become capable of reproducing it verbatim. Now, however, only a few outstanding sentences persist in my memory:

I went to a school where shirt was not compulsory.   (Emphasising his humble beginnings)

Children are indeed a pleasant deviation from the tragedy that is adulthood. (Underscoring his life’s larger mission)

The horse-whipping of socialists is still in the realm of utopia. ­ (A rather strong choice of words, even for a chartered accountant who loves investment banking)

The sooner one leaves, the better are one’s chances of becoming a father. ­(A completely unexplained sentence - perhaps a Freudian slip - that hinted at his choice to never marry)

He concluded the piece with a homage to the ornithologist Salim Ali – a man every bit as eccentric as Damaraj himself. Presenting the image of birds flying over from the horizon, Damaraj had likened the creatures to young children, and himself to Salim Ali - an admirer of the free spirits and innocent heights to which they were able to soar. It was a fitting end to a moving article that included, amongst other things, a heartfelt tribute to Damaraj’s school teachers. This came up in our recent conversation as well, where he was all praise for his high-school English teacher, who gave him free tuitions and ensured that he topped the school in English. Damaraj had scored 84 in his board exams, while the overall topper managed just 81. It was a big deal. He was also effusive in his admiration for his Telugu teacher, who had a great grasp over grammar, and which he sees as lacking amongst the current crop of teachers. Mentors are wonderful, for any beginner – he said, and I was about to make a comment about how Damaraj had been an equally influential mentor to me during my formative years, when he interjected –

But if you put that word on a Scrabble board, you are in big trouble. You see, there is also that word, TORMENTORS…

I burst out laughing, and decided to save the mush for this article instead. In his own unassuming way, Damaraj nourished in me a love for language and reading. Both me and Nikhil agree that our eventual decisions to study literature and the humanities trace a trajectory that goes back to the intervention that Zygo Scrabble made in our lives. Prizes at the tournaments were always books, and sometimes there would be a table stacked with second-hand books where we could help ourselves to whatever caught our fancy. Those four days in December would always be something I looked forward to throughout the year – a space where we were encouraged to be kooky, creative, and unflinchingly original. It is no coincidence that the man organising it all exemplified such a worldview himself.

The fact remains that securing an imaginative space for school children can be profoundly impactful. Such projects are the last thing you can hope to find in any political manifesto. There is infinite scope for envisioning such spaces, and Scrabble is just one amongst innumerable potential hooks that can catch children’s attention. For a young and impressionable kid, the thin line between a mentor and a tormentor can make all the difference in the world. 


***

About the Author: 

Srikar Raghavan is a writer and researcher based out of Manipal. He usually finds himself curled up in uncomfortable positions with a book in hand. 


Author’s Note:

When I told Damaraj that I was writing this piece, he wanted me to point out that the pandemic effectively snuffed out whatever was remaining of the Scrabble scene he was keeping alive. He is, however, still keen on continuing the club’s activities in whatever manner. If anyone is interested in reaching out to him, you can write to him at vrdamaraj@gmail.com, or ping him at +917981342672.


Previous
Previous

Of Death and Dying: A Sri Lankan Farewell

Next
Next

Dylan, Nash & Conversion