“Ek naya game aaya hai, try karoge (there’s a new sport, do you want to try it)?” Assam’s Nayanmoni Saikia recalls her weightlifting coach asking an unusual question in 2008.

On Monday, Nayanmoni was one among four women locked tight in a huddle on rink 1 of Royal Leamington Spa’s Victoria Park, each one of them holding back tears and breaking into smiles. They had delivered what no Indian had managed to ever before and in a sport most in the country would struggle to link a face with: a Commonwealth Games (CWG) medal in lawn bowls.

“Ek naya game aaya hai, try karoge (there’s a new sport, do you want to try it)?” Assam’s Nayanmoni Saikia recalls her weightlifting coach asking an unusual question in 2008.

On Monday, Nayanmoni was one among four women locked tight in a huddle on rink 1 of Royal Leamington Spa’s Victoria Park, each one of them holding back tears and breaking into smiles. They had delivered what no Indian had managed to ever before and in a sport most in the country would struggle to link a face with: a Commonwealth Games (CWG) medal in lawn bowls.

The Indian team defeated the 2014 CWG bronze medallists New Zealand 16-13 in the semi-finals of the women's fours section at the Royal Leamington Spa, an upscale town about an hour from Birmingham's city centre, to secure a medal and the final spot. They’re not done yet, the unimaginable prospect of gold in their grasp against South Africa, the 2014 champions, on Tuesday.

Lawn bowls has featured in every CWG since its inaugural edition in 1930. For the four history-making Indian women, however, it wasn’t even part of their sporting dictionary a little over a decade ago.

Rupa Rani Tirkey, the Skip for the semi-final, was a national-level kabaddi player before her family wanted her to pursue an individual game and she won a government stipend for winning a medal in it in 2007. Lovely Choubey, the Lead, was a sprinter before an injury forced her to look at other options. Pinki, the Second, was a university cricket captain before she won silver at the 2007 National Games when she first picked up the ball. Nayanmoni, the Third, was a weightlifter before a back injury compelled her to switch to the “naya game”. They’re all CWG medallists—in lawn bowls.

Pinki is now 42. So is Ranchi’s Lovely, who got married last year. The 33-year-old Rupa, also from Ranchi, tied the knot this January. Nayanmoni, 34, has a six-year-old daughter who was sure her mother would win a medal the night before.

“What began 12 years ago has paid off now,” Pinki says.

Here’s what happened 12 years ago. As India hosted the 2010 CWG in New Delhi, it meant putting together teams to represent the host nation in lawn bowls, a sport that has individual, pairs, triples and fours events in CWG and where points are awarded for players and teams who roll the bowls closest to the jack.

The hunt began at the 2007 National Games in Guwahati and went on for the next couple of years, a period from where a majority of the current 10-member CWG Indian contingent (five men and women each) had been picked up.

From the 2010 CWG to the subsequent two editions, Indian lawn bowls teams would come close to the podium without actually getting there. With the home CWG rolling the sport off in India, though, more people would join in.

At 27, Navneet Singh is the second-youngest of this squad. The budding cricketer was Pinki's student at DPS when he came across lawn bowls for the first time in 2010 with teams practicing at the DPS RK Puram. "Pinki ma'am then suggested that I move away from cricket and play this because I might get opportunities to represent the state and country in this a lot sooner,” Singh, a commercial pilot and ground staff instructor, says.

Every player in the team either has private or government jobs. Singh says most of them have to pay out of their pockets to compete in international tournaments; the Bowling Federation of India and Sports Authority of India though funded the CWG trip. The squad had a foreign coach for the 2010 CWG, and none after that. At the Royal Leamington Spa, members of the men’s team were shouting out suggestions to the women in the rink from the stands.

The team trains at the DPS RK Puram and Yamuna Sports Complex in Delhi, where lawn bowls infrastructure was built for the CWG. Apart from that, only Ranchi and Guwahati have synthetic turf greens in India. It explains why all members of the team are either from Delhi, Jharkhand or Assam, where seeds of the sport were sowed with the 2007 National Games.

“Initially the sport was very popular in Kolkata too,” says Lokinder Singh, secretary of the national bowling federation.

The sport stills finds a presence at the Royal Calcutta Golf Club, where lawn bowls was first introduced in 1830 by British expatriates who played it as an alternative to golf.

In the years since, however, lawn bowls remained far from being a pan-India, popular sport. Nayanmoni says a lot of times, she has to explain to people what the game is and what playing for India in it truly means.

“But I don’t feel bad about it,” she says. “I take it as a positive thing. If someone laughs at us, we tell them, ‘aap haso, koi problem nahi. Hum kar ke dikhayenge (no problem, laugh at us. We will achieve something)’.”