Suman Oraon, Rima Oraon, Punam Oraon, Lachmi Oraon and Sandhya Rai are jet-lagged from the flight back from Paris. The girls represented Rugby India, which placed fifth at the Paris World Games, a tournament India was invited to play for the very first time in France. The five are now headed back home after three eventful days… only after a quick touchdown at the t2 office. Out of the 12 representing India in the under-18 category, these five are from Saraswatipur in Bengal. To think that four years ago they hadn’t even heard of a game called rugby!
Kick-off
Saraswatipur is a tea estate in the Jalpaiguri district, where the girls have grown up playing football with wild abandon with the boys, across the fields. Enter a priest based in Siliguri who happened to preach at the church in Saraswatipur every Sunday and decided that the Khelo Rugby programme — an initiative by Jungle Crows that gives its young members valuable lessons in sociability and hard work — could very well play a part for the running, scampering, scuttling children of the tea estate.
Of course no one had a clue what the game was all about and parents immediately had their backs up. “Who will look after you if you break your leg?” was Suman’s mother’s concern. “If you’re going to wear shorts and run around, who will marry you?” scolded Lachmi’s mother. And Sandhya would just take to playing truant from tuition until her parents gave in. “They’re bright kids and they got the hang of the game really quickly,” said Harinder Singh, their coach and manager for Jungle Crows.
Paris pack
Earlier this month the girls made the cut-off to participate in the Paris World Games — Rugby Sevens in Paris, after a month-long training camp in Mumbai, where they practised three times a day in the relentless rain.
They’ve returned after an eye-opening experience on how the game is played abroad. “Everyone is bigger, stronger, they eat so much and they all looked older than us. Four of us struggled to take one of them down! We thought we’d be playing against girls like us, but…” trailed off Lachmi who received a particularly hard blow to the head after a tackle and had to be helped off the field. The girls played five matches over two days, of which they lost three and won two, including a 55-0 thumping of Team UAE.
Tackling phuchka
Nutrition is one of the many obstacles for the girls. “Their diet is something we struggle with. We’re trying to get them to increase their intake of eggs and bananas. It doesn’t help that the marketplace is far from where they live and they stock up once a week only,” said Harinder. Would they like to eat what their opponents at the Paris Games were eating, though? A solemn shaking of heads was the consensus. “Everything boiled,” confirmed Sandhya, who would rather have her favourite phuchka.
Forward pass
The girls are now sheroes back home and kids in large numbers from Saraswatipur have followed them into rugby. If the girls do particularly well in schools in their hometown, they’re given a scholarship to a school in Calcutta, an opportunity that Suman has availed of. She’s studying in Class XI in Debendra Vidyapith For Girls on Linton St, and has been interning at Decathlon in Uluberia to understand sports gear better. “I didn’t like it in the beginning but now I do… I like learning about the products and helping customers,” said the 18-year-old.
Go for Gold
If there’s one thing these girls have in common, other than sharing a last name and hailing from the same district, it is their ambition to win silverware. “We want to win a gold medal for India,” they chorused. And considering the Indian girls team has qualified for the 2018 Asian Games in Indonesia, and all five of these girls have a good chance of making the team… we’re already counting our days.
Text: Ramona Sen, Rwitoban Deb & Rushati Mukherjee
