“Don’t let worries get you down, play bridge instead.”

Readers of Mumbai’s Mid-Day tabloid, more particularly the Sunday edition, may have come across this quote if they have spent time on the “Timepass” pages, which include cartoons, horoscopes, crosswords and a column on bridge, which Hema Deora has been writing for at least a decade.

But while the tabloid categorises her column as “timepass”, bridge is anything but that for the 67-year-old former interior designer, who is set to represent India at the Asian Games later this month. Bridge is featuring in the Asian Games for the first time and Deora is one of the 24 players in the Indian squad who will be flying to Indonesia.

Hema Deora is the wife of the late Murli Deora, a former Member of Parliament who had also served as the mayor of Mumbai and was the president of the Congress party’s regional committee in the city for 22 years from 1981 to 2003.

Hema Deora never played bridge till she was almost 50 years old. Born in a traditional Maharashtrian family, her father never allowed any card games to be played in the house. It was only after she got married that Deora was introduced to bridge.

Her husband Murli Deora, who had picked up the game during his college days, used to spend hours on weekends playing it with friends. “He was a marvadi and most of them play bridge,” said Hema Deora, laughing. “He used to be so engrossed in it. I used to make him and his friends such nice tea and they would never even acknowledge.

“I remember one day I asked him if he enjoyed the quiche I made. He said, ‘I don’t remember.’ I said, ‘This is a bit too much.’ What is so fascinating about this game that they totally forget everything else?”

Learning the basics

Deora never understood the fascination until she started playing bridge herself in 1999 after her two children went to university. “In the beginning I was very bad,” she said. “I literally had to learn the basics of cards – what is spade, heart, diamond, clubs.”

Deora hired a coach, JM Shah, who had started playing bridge in his hostel room at the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, in the sixties and has represented India several times. Within less than two years, Deora participated in a national selection trial and won it, which gave her the chance to represent India for the first time, for a tournament in Sri Lanka.

“We won the trophy and then went to Bermuda for the world championship, but we didn’t do well there,” she said. Deora has since represented India in places such as Shanghai, Karachi, Monte Carlo, Tokyo and Jordan.

She has had several great experiences during these trips. Once, in Montreal, she came up against a pair comprising two very recognisable faces. “It was an open championship around 2003 or 2004 and we came up against Bill Gates and Warren Buffet,” she said. “We beat the two of them, but Bill was just a beginner at the time.”

Despite becoming a competitive bridge player, Deora had to take several breaks in between as she had to travel with her politician husband. In spite of that, she became so good at the game that she was asked to write columns on bridge by Mid-Day and Jetwings, the inflight magazine of Jet Airways. “Whenever I meet [Jet Airways chairman] Mr Naresh Goyal, he jokes that his flights are always full because of my columns,” said Deora, laughing.

In her columns, Deora writes about a hand of bridge that either she has played or interesting ones that have been passed on to her by others. “I’m allowed only 230 words, in which I have to compose the whole hand and write it in an interesting way,” she said.

Despite the space crunch, Deora always tries to include tips that readers can pick up, or writes about times when she could have played a hand better than she did during a match. “It’s only 230 words but it takes me a couple of hours to write it,” she said. “Now, before going to Indonesia for the Asiad, I have to give them three weeks’ columns in advance. I have a lot of work to do,” she added, laughing.

Asiad expectations

When she started playing competitively, Deora never dreamed of participating in an event as prestigious as the Asian Games but believes she has earned a spot in the Indian team. Her practice routine includes playing with her partner three times a week, along with practicing on the online portal Bridge Base for two hours daily.

Deora is part of the mixed team and women’s pair events at the Asian Games. In the team events, three pairs form a team. This means the result of the match is dependent on how each of the three pairs play. “I don’t know what to expect at Asiad because I don’t know how every pair will perform,” said Deora.

In the Asia Cup in June, which served as a selection event for the Asian Games, Deora’s team won bronze. “We could have won gold but one particular pair’s performance was not up to the mark and we lost badly. We were doing quite well before that,” she said.

Deora still believes the Indian bridge squad should be able to win at least three medals in Indonesia and hopes that success at the Asian Games can translate into bridge moving out of clubs and becoming more popular in India, especially among the youth. The youngest player in India’s 24-member Asiad squad, Sapan Desai, is 37, while as many as eight were born in the 1950s.

“This is not the case in other countries,” said Deora. “We play against teams whose players are much younger. In other countries, bridge is introduced in schools and colleges. I hope the same can be done in India.”