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The Royal Game
| Article
# : |
20700 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1992 |
2,865 Words |
| Author
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Gregory McNamee
Gregory McNamee often travels in Mexico. He is the author of
The Return of Richard Nixon and six other books. |
It is a gray winter's afternoon several years ago. I am in my office at the university, where instead of grading student compositions and otherwise occupying myself usefully, I have taken to passing the hours playing one of the oldest games on the globe. The papers, after all, can wait until nighttime in my own kitchen; there is no sense in missing the opportunity for a good contest.
My opponent shares my addiction. But unlike me, sitting before the board pondering sure doom while bullets of blood form on my brow, he is perched atop a windowsill, staring at the clouds outside. He has not looked at the chessboard once, and the game is in its twenty-first move.
It is an old trick, this so-called blindfold chess, with a substantial pedigree. My foe learned it by loitering about the chess halls of lower Manhattan, one of the patzers--let's translate the Yiddish term as "chess hounds"--who perfected playing skills there. An otherwise modest man with a passion for medieval Scottish ballads, he knows the damaging effect his nonchalance has. And my game is beginning to show it.
In two more moves, it is done. "Checkmate," he says quietly, recapitulating in a single word the antiquity of the game.
Checkmate. Shah mat. The king is dead.
Indian Origins
The words are Old Persian, the language of the Zoroastrians, of Xerxes and Darius. Chess (which derives from their word shah, or king) found its way to Persia in the sixth or seventh century A.D., soon after its birth in Hindustan. There, as a game of war called chaturanga, it instructed legions of young Brahmins in elements of Hindu culture: in the notion of reincarnation with the idea that a pawn can be recycled as a queen or rook (a word that comes to us from the Hindi rukh, "sergeant"); in the notion of caste-system social obligations with its attention to protecting superior pieces; and especially in the infinite permutations of fate, karma, as it passes through the universe.
The ancient Hindus were a number-happy people who gave us, among other things, the idea of nullity in the form of the mathematical zero. The game of chess is a perfect expression of their fluency with numbers, and what numbers it entails. The sum of possible combinations of the first ten moves of chess, on Brahmin
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