It was 6:30 pm on a Saturday evening when the calling bell rang. While Kannan and I glanced furtively at the door, in came Achan holding a big flat square box. Amma was helping him carry it over to the free space in front of the TV. The toys in our hands seemed meaningless and we ran towards Amma to not miss the action. Achan and Amma slowly uncovered the box. To our utter amazement, we saw a board with lines and circles and Achan took it out proudly and placed it for all of us to see. We took in the smell of the new board, got engrossed in its design and colors when Achan dropped small flat round disks - black and white - onto the board. That was the first time we were introduced to Carrom! Achan taught us the game, he pointed at the four holes at each corner of the box and said that we would need to push in coins to win a point. He said there would be a disk - much larger than the rest of the coins which we would use to strike other coins on the board. He taught us how to ke...