They’re coughing in the galleries at the Grand Chess Tour
A game of chess is not as silent as it pretends. Wherever there is order, there is chaos. Someone in the audience falls asleep and starts to snore softly, soon to be shaken awake by the prowling enforcers.
“Anand! Anand!” At least a dozen children barrel towards five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand as he makes his way into the Bhasha Bhawan auditorium—in Kolkata’s National Library, on the grounds of Belvedere Estate, formerly the residence of the Viceroy of India. Anand is here for the Tata Steel Chess India Rapid and Blitz, the final leg of the Grand Chess Tour. If he finishes sixth or higher, he will qualify for the finals in London next month. The heat is on.
“Stop! Stop running!” event officials cry in vain as the grandmaster makes his way through this group of small children. To budding chess enthusiasts dying for his autograph (even better, a selfie), he is an idol, surrounded by an entourage and escorted into a theatre of war.
“Chess,” Bobby Fischer once declared, “is war over the board. The object is to crush the opponent’s mind.” Chess can be gruelling. Ask Anatoly Karpov, who lost 22 pounds over five months during the 1984 World Chess Championship against Garry Kasparov—it was abandoned after 48 games because the players were wasting away. When two armies meet, blood is invariably spilt. Does it matter if it’s over 64 squares on a meagre chequered board? “Kasparov kept pressing for a murderous attack. Toward the end, Kasparov had to oppose threats of violence with more of the same” (Robert Byrne, “Game 21 Adjourned as Thrust and Parry Give Way to Melee,” New York Times, December 20, 1990).
So make no mistake—Anand and nine other grandmasters are here to do battle. There are batteries, castlings and gambits—Anand is forced to sacrifice his pawn against Dutch grandmaster Anish Girl, leading to a fall. Poisoned pawns are used to trick and cajole—Magnus Carlsen unleashes the Sicilian Najdorf to thwart the swashbuckling Armenian Levon Aronian. Later in the day, Carlsen is coaxed into a thrilling endgame by Indian wildcard Vidit Gujrathi, to a position of bare kings and thence to a draw.
After Anand has made his way in, calm descends, if only temporarily; an eagle-eyed fan, barely older than a toddler, darts into the garden beside the entrance—“Magnus oidike!” (Magnus is that way). The boy is followed by a gang of budding chess players who rush towards the Norwegian. Carlsen, it seems, is taking the scenic route.
Carlsen walks briskly into the auditorium, children shouting his name and twirling around him like moths around an icy blue flame. The greatest chess player in the world radiates calm, even when he’s frowning. You could set a spirit level by his posture during a game—legs apart, feet almost always planted firmly on the ground, sitting as far back in the chair as possible. He is perfectly positioned, on the board and in his chair, as he plays Giri on the second day. His upper body pivots backward and forward, depending on whether he’s contemplating his move or waiting for his opponent’s. Giri, on the other hand, is on the edge of his seat, teetering. On move 55, he concedes. Carlsen continues to frown.
Levon Aronian, in contrast, rarely frowns; he stretches, leans and paces. When he gets up and walks around, which is often, it is as if he’s hanging fire, hoping the queue outside the toilet will dwindle soon. As his profile in the New Yorker noted, “Most leading chess players appear tightly wound at the board; Aronian looks like he’s waiting for an Old-Fashioned” (Sean Williams, “A Chess Master with an Unpredictable Style and the Hopes of a Nation,” New Yorker, July 29, 2017). One day he’s in a flaming red shirt, and another day he has gold on his glittering red shoes.
But Aronian doesn’t really see himself as one of chess’s remaining ‘characters’ (though a senior journalist is filled with dread as his Mont Blanc pen is almost broken by Aronian’s vigorous autograph). “The world is moving towards conformity,” he observes wryly at the draw of lots. “I speak through my moves on the board, not through words. Chess is about silence, you know? It attracts introverts.” As if to prove him wrong, there are soon shouts of “Arrey bhai, bosh na re!” (Hey you, sit down); the photographers in the back are berating all and sundry for rushing towards the players and obscuring their view.
A game of chess is not as silent as it pretends. Wherever there is order, there is chaos. Someone in the audience falls asleep and starts to snore softly, soon to be shaken awake by the prowling enforcers (“Ma-der ghumotey diley bhalo hoto” (They should let us mothers sleep), the mother of a young chess student complains to another. In Game Eight of last year’s World Championship match, strange noises penetrated the soundproof room in which Carlsen and American challenger Fabiano Caruana were duelling. The rule of all good theatres is the quieter the show, louder (and many more) the coughs in the audience. During chess, everyone can hear you expectorate.
We haven’t even got to the phones yet. Every time a phone offends, it is confiscated. Soon, there is a large pile of phones at a corner of the stage. One of these keeps bursting into ringtone once in a while; and every time there is a mad, but silent, scramble to mute it. Somewhere in the back of the auditorium, someone dares to have a conversation on their phone, and Anand—playing, and eventually defeating, Wesley So, the World Fischer Random Chess Champion —leans sideways and looks into the audience bemused, as if trying to eavesdrop.
In the breaks between games, small revolutions threaten to erupt over the demand for phones to be returned. Some of the arbiters have to intervene and arbitrate in these matters of law beyond chess in their off-time. Outside, on the balcony, Carlsen, a Real Madrid fan, kicks a football around with considerable skill. His shirt hangs loose over his trousers and he is barefoot, a young man enjoying himself and in complete control of his art (“…while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists”— Marcel Duchamp, artist and chess player, Address to the New York State Chess Association, 1952). He only ever looks vulnerable with a football at his feet; at the board, he seems invincible. A slight beard making him seem older and more aloof, Carlsen emits Nordic cool even as he sweats with the ball.
Perhaps it is appropriate that a chess tournament at Bhasha Bhavan is bursting at the seams with language. Two children sitting in the audience spot Anand’s discomfiture and whisper to each other—“Anand is in danger!” They find it hard to pronounce his opponent’s name, Russian grandmaster Ian Nepomniachtchi, so they bestow him with an affectionate moniker—“tikiwallah jeetey jaabe” (The guy with the man-bun will win). The stage keeps morphing into tableaux vivants—Aronian stretching; Giri bent double in concentration, nose almost touching his queen; Ding Liren, ranked third in the world, looks like he’s frozen into position, using only the muscles required to move a piece from one square to another. High up at the back of the auditorium, Wesley So sits between games with his mother, contemplating life and observing the city’s chess enthusiasts. In a rare display of overt emotion, the Indian grandmaster Pentala Harikrishna can’t help break into a beaming smile as he uses the Rossolimo variation to crush the tikiwallah’s Sicilian Defence. For all its claims to silence and meditative force, a game of chess unfolds in many voices. Chess is conducive to drama.
So it is for the drama, really, that so many people throng to Bhasha Bhavan for this five-day tournament—on the weekend there is a packed house, and people refuse to go to the toilet for fear of losing their prime real estate, that perfect seat that lets you discern Anand’s quiet gaze and Hikaru Nakamura’s grimaces, Vidit’s sartorial sparkle and Giri twirling chess pieces in his fingers as he concentrates. At the end of every day’s play, you hear people detailing their winding roads back home—someone has to change buses twice; a father and his chess-playing little daughter will have to get to Sealdah station and then take a train. Between the bouts of riveting game play and the arguments with enforcers and organisers, between the desperate run to smelly bathrooms brought on by the glacial air-conditioning, the drama makes it all worth it.
Through it all, the coughs keep coming, and Magnus Carlsen continues to frown.
