Match this girl

For a while on Show Court 3 at the Australian Open on Thursday, it seemed as if Sania Mirza was going to buckle under the pressure and surrender. After winning the first set 6-1 in her typically aggressive style, her game had faltered, and she looked pensive as she submitted 4-6 in the second. Now she was down 1-3 in the decider, and her Swiss-Hungarian opponent Timea Bacsinszky threatened to run away with the match.

The exhortation from the players’ box had come from her father, Imran Mirza, and it had sounded like part instruction, part encouragement. Like many Indian families, the Mirzas are extremely close-knit, and Imran has played a pivotal role in Sania’s emergence as a world-class tennis player. I still remember my surprise when, visiting her house in Hyderabad many years ago, I discovered that Imran and his wife Naseema were about to set off for Thiruvanthapuram in their beat-up Maruti Esteem so that Sania could participate in a tennis tournament. They couldn’t afford to fly.

Nobody had heard of Sania Mirza at that time, but Imran, an enthusiastic club cricketer and tennis player, had recognised very early, when his daughter was just six years old, that she was blessed with an amazing ball sense. The Mirzas were solidly middle-class, and owned a small printing press. They did not have the money to send their daughter abroad for training, and facilities in Hyderabad for coaching a precocious tennis genius were primitive.

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.

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