Suresh lost his watch at Teen Patti once. Not as a bet — he'd just taken it off because the metal was cold, set it on the floor beside his knee, and by the time the game broke up at four in the morning he forgot it was there. Someone stepped on it leaving. The glass cracked clean across the face.
He still has the watch. Never fixed it.
The thing about playing blind is that it's not really about courage, whatever people say. Suresh's uncle played blind for forty years and he wasn't a brave man — he was afraid of dogs, afraid of his wife, afraid of the electricity bill. He played blind because looking at the cards made him nervous. Simple as that. The not-knowing was easier to sit with than the knowing.
Nobody talks about that version of it.
Teen Patti came to the city the way everything comes to the city: nobody remembers exactly when it arrived, it was just suddenly everywhere. Suresh learned it from watching, the way you learn most things that matter. Sitting at the edge of the durrie, too young to play, old enough to be ignored. He watched his father's face when the cards were bad. His father was a man who could hold almost anything — disappointment, hunger, the particular exhaustion of a certain kind of life — but three bad cards in a row would produce this small tightening around the eyes. Barely visible. Suresh saw it every time.
By the time he was old enough to play he already knew: the cards are not really the point.
There's a sequence hand he still thinks about from maybe eight years ago. Someone else's sequence, not his. A man called Pinku — everyone called him Pinku, he was forty years old, had a hardware shop — pulled a pure sequence and just sat there. Didn't raise. Didn't push. Just sat there breathing, and the pot drained away into side bets and folds until there was almost nothing left to win. His hands were shaking when he finally showed. Shaking so bad he couldn't fan the cards properly.
He'd been so afraid of losing the hand that he'd won almost nothing with it.
Suresh thinks about Pinku sometimes when he's holding something good.
The rules, if you need them: three cards each. You bet before you look or after, your choice — blind players pay half. The hands rank trail at the top (three of a kind, three aces the highest), then pure sequence, sequence, colour, pair, high card at the bottom. You can ask for a sideshow against the player before you, compare hands privately, the worse one folds. You can keep going until one person is left or everyone agrees to show.
That's the whole game. It's not complicated.
It's completely complicated.
He played once with a woman who won four straight hands and then immediately left without explanation. Just stood up, said something about her sister, took her money and went. He spent the rest of the night trying to figure out if the four hands were luck or judgment and whether leaving when you did was its own kind of skill. He still doesn't know. Probably both. Probably neither.
What Suresh has noticed, after however many years: the people who play Teen Patti badly share one thing. Not greed, not recklessness — it's more like they're having a different conversation than everyone else at the table. They're playing the cards. Everyone else is playing the people holding the cards. It sounds like a small difference. It isn't.
His daughter asked him once what Teen Patti was and he said it was a card game and she said what kind and he said the kind where you don't always look at your cards and she stared at him like he'd said something in a foreign language.
He didn't know how to explain it better than that. Maybe there isn't a better explanation.
The cracked watch is on his wrist right now. He never got it fixed because in some way he can't fully articulate, the cracked face is the correct face. Time in a back-room Teen Patti game does something strange anyway — it pools, it stretches, 2am arrives and then it's 4am and there's no memory of the hours between. The watch being broken seems honest about this.
Or maybe he just never got around to fixing it.
Probably that.