Om Prakash Yadav

Om Prakash Yadav was born on the very mud he now teaches wrestling upon, in a room adjoining the akhara his father Bhagwan Das Yadav dug and consecrated in 1968 with a coconut, a priest, and a promise to the district that Shakti Akhara would produce champions. Om Prakash was five years old when the pit was cut, and by the time he could properly read he could also properly fall, which his father considered the more important skill.

He grew into a frame that neighbours still describe, admiringly, as built for the Olympics, shoulders that seemed too wide for the doorways of the family house, a chest his father would thump proudly in front of visitors as though displaying a prize marrow at a fair. Training began before sunrise every day of his boyhood — hundred dands, hundred baithaks, the wrestling ring turned and watered and turned again until the earth was fine as flour.

By eighteen he was winning district tournaments with a regularity that made the local sports page tiresome with his name, and the whole akhara, indeed the whole mohalla, spoke of the state championship the way one speaks of a formality still to be completed rather than a contest still to be won.

In 1988, at the state final in the divisional capital, Om Prakash lost his bout in ninety seconds to a wrestler from a rival akhara two districts away, a defeat so swift and so unexpected that the crowd, by his own account, fell into a stunned silence before someone began shouting that the referee had been arranged beforehand. He has told this story more times than any other event of his life, and the boys of Shakti Akhara today, none of whom were alive in 1988, can recite the referee's alleged crookedness practically word for word.

He did not wrestle competitively again after 1990, an ankle injury the following year making the decision for him in the way such decisions are often made, and turned instead, at his father's insistence and eventually his own conviction, to coaching the akhara his father had built, a role he has now held for over thirty years.

Under his charge boys arrive thin, frightened of the mud, unable to complete twenty dands, and leave — those who stay the course — with shoulders and a bearing that mothers notice before anyone tells them the reason. He speaks to them in commands even when the subject is vegetables at the market, a manner that unsettles strangers and reassures his students, who have learned to read affection in the volume of his voice.

Two of his students, brothers named Rajkumar and Ravikumar, could not afford the doctor's fees when both fell ill with typhoid the same season, and Om Prakash paid the bills from his own pocket without a word to their father, only to shout at the boys themselves for having accepted the money when they later tried, shyly, to thank him.

His father's photograph hangs on the akhara wall above the mace, garlanded fresh every Tuesday without fail, and Om Prakash still addresses the akhara each morning as though the old man were present to hear it, a habit the older wrestlers of the neighbourhood find touching and never mention to his face.

He remains, at past sixty, capable of lifting the heaviest of the training maces without visible effort, and continues to insist, to anyone who will listen at the tea stall in the evenings, that the boy who beat him in 1988 was no better wrestler than himself, merely luckier in his officials — a claim the district record books have long since stopped bothering to dispute, and which the akhara's newest recruits accept, as they accept the rising of the sun, without question.