"Nobody said I must stop.

While clearing out her grandmother's trunk, Diya found a photograph she had never seen. It showed a young woman of about twenty in a white sari, standing on a cricket field with a bat on her shoulder. Behind her, a group of other young women were laughing.

"Who is this?" Diya asked.

Her grandmother took the photograph, held it close to her eyes and was silent for a while. "That is me," she said. "Nagpur, 1968. We had a women's team at the college."

Diya laughed, then stopped when she saw her grandmother's face. She had never seen her grandmother do anything more energetic than walk to the temple. "You played cricket?"

"I opened the batting," said her grandmother. "I was quite good. We played other colleges. Once I scored sixty-two."

"Why did you stop?"

Her grandmother put the photograph down gently. "I got married the next year," she said. "In those days, that was the end of it. Nobody said I must stop. Nobody said I could go on."

Diya did not know what to say. That evening, she put the photograph in a frame and stood it on the shelf in the drawing room, where everyone would see it.

The next Sunday, she took her grandmother to watch her own college team play. Her grandmother sat at the boundary for three hours, shouting advice that nobody had asked for, and on the way home she told Diya exactly what the opening batter had been doing wrong.