During The Assam Riots We Found A New Game
Amidst the bloodbath, when Assam riots were making headlines, Mangaldai, a small Assamese town found a new obsession to keep itself busy.
“The less you bet, the more you lose when you win.” ― Bob Nastanovich
The year 1983 will be remembered by many in Assam as a year painted in mayhem and bloodbath. Widespread communal violence, fanned by rumours and paranoia, led to the loss of thousands of lives over a period of a few months during the spring of 1983. During the following months, Mangaldai witnessed — for the first time — visits of many noteworthy people and objects including those long, comfortable buses known as tourist buses; K.P.S. Gill, the iron-fisted and ferocious DGP of Assam; and Satish Jacob (as rumour had it) of BBC.
This was also the year when Teer arrived at Mangaldai, but almost imperceptibly. Nevertheless, what an effect it had on the townsfolk and how it changed some lives forever!
Teer, which means arrow in Assamese (and which, in the current context, should mean though its accurate meaning in English would be archery), was actually a double digit game of gambling. It was simple to place a bid, and that is what drew most people to it. Apparently, there were two rounds of games, called the first round and the second round, and each round had a winning number, which could be anything between 1 (called zero one) and 100 (called double zero).
Ashtik Sarma, a man clad in white dhoti and kurta, who could have been mistaken for a Sanskrit teacher in the local high-school, was the bookie. Many people referred to the snake as “ashtik” after sunset, so as to make it angry or upset (I do not know why); nor do I know if Ashtik Sarma was his real name or just a moniker. People used to wait patiently for Ashtik to come and open his small stall behind a real shop, and to sell tokens, numbers that he wrote on a small piece of paper and then signed his initials. If you wanted to place a bid on the number 11 for the first round, then Ashtik would write 1 at the top and circle it, 11 in the middle, and put his initials at the bottom of the page. If instead one wanted to place a bid on the same number but in both the rounds (so that one gets paid irrespective of whether the number was drawn in first or the second round), then the top part will contain the symbol ‘B/S’ (to imply both sides) and it would cost double the price.
The jackpot equivalent was called forekass (forecast), where one must go for two numbers, one for the first round and the other for the second; it would be written as 21x12, if one bid on 21 for the first round and 12 for the second. While a single round game only brought Rs 10 for a 25 paisa bid, forecast brought Rs. 50 for the same cost. If one was sure about only one of the two digits (due to lack of clarity in one’s dream or one’s analysis), there was the option to go for all the 10 numbers in a series (for example, 10–19, or instead 11, 21,…91), which obviously cost ten times as much. Kasim the mason , a mason who for many years worked at our place, every now and then, for many years, became my Teer guru and explained to me all the rules and regulations of the game.
Soon the town was full of people who, like the central character in Nakajima Atsushi’s story The Expert, wanted to be the best archer, if only in bidding on the correct numbers, of all. Every dream was analyzed; if a snake seen in a dream implied 7, a monkey implied 9, and so on. Had August Kekulé been into Teer, he would have opted for either 42 or 54, depending on whether he saw 6 snakes or 6 monkeys in his famous dream that helped him to decipher the structure of benzene. Similarly, every event was analyzed, be it encountering two ravens, or the number plate of the scooter that passed by. Every discussion was centered on Teer; every tea-shop was filled with Teer enthusiasts, each lane had scattered pieces of discarded Teer coupons. Philosophers of Teer, belonging to different schools of thought, participated in heated arguments over the formulation of the most accurate code of dream analysis and other major issues.
However, like all other forms of gambling, nobody could beat the house; thus, if there were a few winners, most ended up losing their money. If some of them lost due to ulta phota (opposite point: bidding on 12 while the winning number turned out to be 21), others got beaten by ek phota (single point: bidding on 12, while the winning number was 11 or 13). The saddest situation of all was getting beaten by ulta phota on a forecast bid, which meant that, for example, one took 21x33, while the winning combination turned out to be 33x21. Kasim had suffered this fate at least twice.
One of the most vocal enthusiasts of the game was Mahendir Maak (Mahendri’s mother), wife of a local driver, and allegedly a retired prostitute. This illiterate lady, like every other illiterate or semi-literate person in the town who was hooked to Teer, learned to count from 1 to 100 in English. While I never played the game myself, mainly because I was afraid of my parents, I was equally hooked to the game as the players; what number came on which round and who won and who lost was something I followed, thanks to Kasim, for quite some time. Soon the game was so popular that it was expanded to two sessions: morning and afternoon. So those who bid and lost in the morning session, had another opportunity to bid (and lose) some more in the afternoon. Lots of hard-working, poor people lost their daily wages to Teer; consequently, the frequency of beating their wives and kids, which was the easiest way to stop them from complaining about their needs, skyrocketed.
However, there was one aspect of the game that Kasim could not tell me much about, and it was about the venue. All I could know from him was that real archers really shot arrows somewhere in Shillong, a city of mythical proportion due to this ‘fact’ to many in Mangaldai, and their archery determined the winning numbers. Later I asked an uncle of mine, who worked and lived in Shillong, if he knew how the results of Teer were determined and if real archery took place there. With solemn intent and an excited voice, he described in detail how archery took place at the Polo Grounds in Shillong, and how the winning numbers were drawn. Though it appeared to me that he actually did not know what he was talking about (and I knew for a fact that he never played Teer himself), I listened to him in rapt attention and felt I learned something new. There was no reason for me not to feel that way, because this uncle was always good at explaining things convincingly; a few years ago, when I had asked him how shoes were made, he had explained that, in the shoe factories in Shillong, cows were shoved at one end of a big machine, and shoes used to came out from the other.