Nevertheless, unusually for a middle-class family during the early ‘90s, the Mirzas decided to devote all their time and resources to help Sania develop her sporting talent.

The huge gamble they took with their lives eventually paid off, and today Sania, barely 21, has become an international sporting icon. I came to Australia to attend a conference, and have enjoyed watching the reactions of silver-maned university professors when I announce that I’m an uncle of Sania’s, and that I’m off to watch her play at Melbourne Park (for the purposes of full journalistic disclosure, let me state that her father is my second cousin.)

But when I dropped in to see Imran and Sania at their hotel in Melbourne earlier this week, I found them deeply troubled. The blizzard of off-court controversies in the last few months into which Sania’s name has been dragged, has left the Mirzas depressed, with the most bewildering being the accusation that she deliberately showed disrespect to the national flag, and was therefore in some way anti-national.

The facts of this particular incident are well known, and Paul McNamee, the organiser of the Hopman Cup, during which the controversial photo of Sania and the Indian flag was taken, has already explained that the tennis player was resting her feet in the players’ box a couple of rows away from the tricolour. The photo was shot from the court with a telephoto lens, which would have distorted the angle and shortened the distance between the flag and Sania’s bare feet. After the opening women’s singles match against Australia which she won, Sania was watching Rohan Bopanna play the men’s singles event, and waiting to join him for the doubles encounter. “Most players adopt the practice of keeping their legs raised after a match to assist in overcoming a lactic acid build-up to prevent cramping,” McNamee said. “It is just a normal situation.”

... contd.