With home-made T-shirts, they move from a small ground in Vasai to Bombay League

Mumbai, December 15: Some months ago in the industrial suburb of Vasai, a bunch of migrant workers from Chhattisgarh huddled together to first dye and later stitch T-shirts till the wee hours. A power cut complicated things but candles were lit to complete the work.

This isn’t about a tyrant employer’s exploitation but the against-all-odds story of a rag-tag hockey team of factory workers — Jharkhand XI — and its journey from playing casual games on their off days at Janaki Pada, Vasai, to the fourth division league of the Bombay Hockey Association.

It’s also about their shoe-string budget, their home-made orange T-shirts and the passion for the national sport that has failed to fade despite travelling miles to the city of opportunities to earn a living.

They all hail from remote areas in Chhattisgarh — the unusual hockey hub where kids spend their early days searching for ‘J’ shaped bamboo sticks in forests and grow up playing inter-village games that have a rooster or a goat as prize trophies. They are proud of their hockey tradition and roots but the presence of a Chhattisgarh XI already in the league saw them reluctantly settle for Jharkhand XI as their name.

Skipper Ranjit Tigga, who works as a crane operator, says the team name is an insignificant issue. “The most important thing for us was to play. We consider that people from Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Orissa are almost the same as they also share the passion for hockey with us,” explains Tigga.

The opportunity to play on astro-turf means a lot to them. Ruben Bara, 38, the oldest in the squad who works with a paint manufacturing unit, says: “We have been playing at an uneven and small open space in Vasai for the last eight years. Every Friday we are off from work, so we are religiously at the ground from 11 am to 3 pm. But this year we decided to enter the league and now we are playing on astro-turf.” In their dare to dream big, the players were helped by their statemate Stanislaus Ekka, a Mumbai resident who played for the Navy and currently plays for Indian Airlines. Ekka gave them the idea and the industrial workers pooled in the entry fees of Rs 2,500 for the league.

When it came to their sporting gear, the skilled workers among the squad took charge. Kuldeep Tirkey recalls the eve of their League debut. “We had the Herculean task of dying, printing and stitching 15 jerseys in a day. We started this work after office hours at 8 pm and this went on till early morning,” he says. A flying start to their campaign — three points in first game and a 8-0 win the second — means that a hard night is something they can laugh about today. While for most hockey is an after-work recreation, for someone like Benedict Ekka it is a way of keeping in touch with a game that made him dream big.

Ekka works as a lamination worker today but not too long ago he had coaxed his father to give him Rs 200 to buy a fibre stick. “Those were the days when I dreamt of playing for the country. But my family needed an earning member so I gave up my dream. Playing hockey still triggers the passion in me,” he says.

Bara talks about his early days in his village Darupisa. “There was no television… we just watched our elders play in a small village ground. We did not know any international stars. Our heroes were our elders. For us, hockey was part of our life. We played the game because we loved it,” he says.