Graze-touch-kiss

What are your daily habits?

I don’t know what the practice for other sports’ warmup is, but when we were practicing gymnastics, we had to start running 3 rounds around a 400m outdoor track. At 5 pm, all the students would rush down the stairs and start running around the track to complete the warm-up rounds. Some of them would bend down, touch the earth with their fingers, and then touch those fingers to their forehead reverently to seek blessings, while others would do a cursory bend, touch and kiss their fingertips, either to seek blessings or to thank Mother Earth. I understand why they did it, I don’t know if we invoked said blessings or received them even. To be honest, I picked up this habit rather quickly, I would rush down the first flight of stairs and leap through the rest to land at the start of the track and then bend down and graze the tracks with my fingertips, then touch it to my heart and lips. Initially, I believed in the blessings from a higher power, but towards the end, I think I did it more out of habit. Everyone who got on the track/field to play any kind of sport had a version of this graze-touch-kiss routine they followed. Even today, when I visit the gym and go to the tracks for a walk, I bend down and make an effort to touch the tracks. Is it because I seek blessings or just to reassure myself that I can bend that much and touch the earth with my palms?

Back in the day, it used to be a mud track that would be wet and slushy during the monsoons and packed, dried, and baked in summer neither of which were good for our feet. So, hoping for the best, and seeking blessings were all valid efforts at hoping to neutralize the evil eye. A few years later, when development or rather the redevelopment bug hit the local government they decided to convert the mud tracks into a cemented track, claiming longevity. As most runners will attest, pounding cement hurts even more than pounding earth. But the tracks got their facelift and we now had to seek those blessings for the fresh lot of injuries we were going to self-inflict as we used the tracks. We were consistent, we did our version of the graze-touch-kiss routine and off we went on our rounds every single day.

I touched the tracks hoping that today was a good day for our coaches. Gymnastics is often referred to as the ‘mother of all sports’ but for me, it was the sport that ’mothered me’ in a traumatic way. Since I had so openly adopted that graze-touch-kiss routine, I also believed in reading expressions and attributing the intensity of the exercises we would be pushed to achieve that day. I used to do this in school with my language teacher. If she wore a dress in a particular colour then there was going to be hell to pay. I had no clue then, that sometimes people used to color-code their dress to the days of the week. And sometimes everyone was entitled to a bad day at work. Since I had cracked the teacher-dress code, I was convinced I had also cracked the coach-expression code. Now, that graze-touch-kiss routine extended even to performing gymnastics. Just before it was my turn to take my run for the vault, I would quickly bend to do the graze-touch-kiss routine and then take off, like a bolt of lightning full throttle straight ahead, and two steps before I had to leap on the springboard, I would check my speed and then would land very gently on the board, ensuring I had absolutely no lift, so I did not go off flying into outer space.

This is possibly the worst thing to do on the vaulting horse because then it means you land like a grenade on the vaulting horse, which is designed only for flying touches from your fingertips as you lift off to perform some gravity-defying somersaults or something equally spectacular. The vaulting horse in our gymnasium had about 4mm of foam under the layer of rexine that was covering the wooden frame. Running full throttle even if you check the speed in the last two steps is a lot of force to bang into the vaulting horse with. My fear of anti-gravity was greater than my fear of bruises, injury, or reprimands. I call this attitude a passive-aggressive stand and it irks me when I am at the receiving end, so I know why my coach’s mood turned foul during class, & why we had to do so much more, and why the graze-touch-kiss routine was not working. But, one can live in hope, right? And when you are close to losing hope, is when you invoke the supernatural. Bend-graze-touch-kiss.

Initially, I used to only do the graze-touch-kiss routine while we were in the gym. I don’t know how or when things changed and when I started doing it everywhere else, but suddenly I was doing the bend-graze-touch-kiss routine when I was out training my older sibling to run to improve her stamina. I did it when I started a race while running with the school team. I also did it before we started the interschool basketball game. Many years later, as I stepped onto the dais to place my suitcase in the green room, I paused, bent did the graze-touch-kiss routine, and then just picked up the case and walked into the greenroom like everything was normal. I’m still ragged about it, but I have no explanations. Some habits just stay.