Five women and a game of dice

“Ahhh....!” A unanimous squeal of disapproval and disappointment followed by giggling from five of them sitting in a rough circle startles the silent lane. We obviously were making fools of ourselves again. All four slit tamarind seeds have landed flat and lie scattered in four different directions. We were not supposed to toss them like dice in the game of Ludo. Halamma is quick to step in and demonstrate the right technique. She asks us to watch closely as she gathers and flicks the seeds with a quick, gentle twist of her wrist, somewhat like a leg spin bowler’s googly.

This time they land in expected asymmetry, some with their flat, ivory bellies showing. Depending on how many are sitting belly up Halamma will move her pawn – a piece of broken, bottle-green glass bangle. “Ek girta hai toh ek, do girta hai toh do, teen girta hai toh teen, chaar girta hai toh chaar [If one seed turns up, you move one square. If two, you move two squares and so on],” she explains. She switches to broken Hindi in yet another effort at explaining the game to the two novice outsiders, who know little or no Kannada. She moves ‘our’ piece on the painted grids and skilfully tosses the tamarind seeds once again. It is her turn.

“We have made these as our homes,” Halamma says, pointing to the four crossed squares on the edges of a 5X5 grid. The grid and its squares are painted on the grey tiles of a raised platform behind the village temple where they are sitting and playing. Each crossed square represents a player’s home. Each home hosts a player’s four pawns – differentiated by the colour or size of the bangle pieces. The player decides which one to move upon throwing the tamarind seeds /dice. There appears to be some strategy, but we don’t seem to get it. There is a crossed square in the centre which remains a mystery to us.

“When all the bangle pieces from a player reach the crossed square in the centre, the game is over,” says Nagraj. He is a quiet spectator in his 50’s sitting behind the women in the circle, who comes alive to mansplain. “After working in the paddy fields and eating their lunch, they gather here to play. There is no entertainment inside the house. No power, no television. So, they all play till four [in the afternoon],” he says.

Halamma places the tamarind seeds in our hands, pulling us back into the game. Another chance. This time, the seeds land neatly on the painted board. Two out of the four with the right side up. Cheers follow, and our piece of bangle trudges two squares ahead. We still haven’t got the name of this game.

“It is called katte manne,” another young man from the village, overhearing our conversations with the women, jumps in.

“Chakka. Chakkara. Chowka Bara,” Halamma rattles the many names of the game that she knows. Dressed in a bright red saree, she appears the oldest of the five women, in her late 50s. Her laughter has the loudest ring and her smile the widest reach. If it was not for this merry sight of five women laughing loudly and having fun on a winter afternoon in the middle of a street in a small village, we would have walked past that lane, straight to the Tungabhadra. The river flows quietly at this time of the year. A ferry ride would have taken us across to Hampi, the ruins of which are visible from this side. But Anegundi, this village in Karnataka’s Koppal district that we are in, and the game that the women are playing, are all older than the UNESCO-recognised heritage site of Hampi. The village surrounded by boulder-strewn hills is widely believed to be Kishkinda – kingdom of the monkey ruler Sugriva in the epic tale of Ramayana.

The game that the women are playing, though we realise this much later, may connect it to another epic Mahabharata. A version of Chowka Bara is what was once played by royals, including the five Pandava brothers, who gambled their kingdom and lost their wife away to the Kauravas. Here five rural women – Hanumavva, Halamma, Kavita, Geeta and Lakshmi – in the age group of 20 to 60 – play Choka Bara every day. Encouragingly, no one appears to have lost her husband in the game.