Watching Khalid Jamil's features closely as he speaks, it is a thankless endeavour for he speaks so little, al... Read More

Watching Khalid Jamil 's features closely as he speaks, it is a thankless endeavour for he speaks so little, almost famously now in monosyllables, and you are left with nothing.

But if you engage him long enough to speak longer than he does, watching Khalid Jamil closely, you realise that's the face KA Abbas would have thought for Rahim Khan in his timeless short story, 'Sparrows'. Thin, tall, bearded but hollow-cheeked and sunken-eyed but not haggard, and strong -- fitting the word, 'guant' Abbas had so memorably used to describe the lonely Rahim Khan. At 40 today, Jamil looks a lot less muscular than he did in 1997 when he burst on the scene as a powerful, burly 20-year-old midfielder in the Jo Paul Ancheri mould. He's still just as a strong, though. And just as quiet.

Like Rahim Khan, Jamil smiles very little too. Is he as tortured a soul too. "He used to be the joker in the dressing room as a player," Gumpe Rime, youth development head at Shillong Lajong FC and the team's goalkeeping coach, remembers about his ex-Mahindra United teammate in the late 1990s. "I don't know when and why he's become such a serious person as a coach," he wonders. "Maybe it's the responsibility that comes with being a coach, but Khalid? He has nothing to prove."

"At Mahindra, we had this bonding exercise where we needed to abuse each other using all swear words we knew. Khalid always won hands down and he would take it to the level of abusing the officials and managers too. We secretly wanted to do it, he revelled in it. No one minded because it was meant to break boundaries and help the team bond," remembers Gime, who would be on the rival bench as his ex-mate seeks to realize a dream unprecedented in Indian football with Aizawl FC.

It is a very changed time in Indian football today. Not many would identify with Ancheri (forget invoking Abbas), or for that matter, Jamil's India debut under Syed Nayeemuddin at the 1997 SAFF Cup in Kathmandu or even the best player award in a little-known largely-forgotten SAFF tournament in the Maldives in 2000, a team under Sukhwinder Singh that included the veteran Keralite, Pappachan. For starters, both Gime and Jamil's club, Mahindra has long since wound up, but it all becomes necessary to put an idea to this coach out of nowhere.

Because that is also the best way to get Jamil to open up -- to use the one compliment, or slur, depending on who you are. So you hazard the chance, playing on his famous reticence. "People are saying you are the new Nayeemuddin…"

"Kaun bola?" he looks up from his monk-like focus in the ritual of putting on his football boots, collecting his timer and whistle and picking up the cones for the series of warm-ups. He is mildly amused. If flattered, he does well not to show it, but an ice-berg has been breached.

"Dekho, discipline toh hamesha tha… but I had never imagined I would find myself here one day. Yeh kabhi illmm nahi tha," he says as his fastens the laces on his boots and nods to Abdul Aziz Siddique , good friend and his assistant at Aizawl, to allow one of the many local adolescents hanging on, to have a feel of the ball and the inviting turf before the squad descends to train.

"Bahut hi zyaada hardworking hain. Maybe, a bit too much," says Siddiqui of his friend. "But as players, even we never realized he had that yen for coaching. Perhaps, as he's grown he's learnt to take disappointment in his stride. Clearly that has helped,” he says, before adding, "Bahut badla hain as a person."

Ask Jamil himself the one thing that he has learnt in his journey, where he stands a day away from a strange, personal redemption, the 40-year-old Jamil is evocative in his reply. "Never complain. It sounds simple, easy but it is a great lesson you learn in life and in football. Never complain, take things as they come and what is to happen will happen. See, here, it is happening…"

A once-promising, seven-year spell with Mumbai FC ended on discord when among others, he was accused to being overtly defensive. "Kya karoon, defensive hona pasand hain. I prefer playing with a sound defensive mindset, but when we have to be attacking, toh sabko attack dikhatey hain…"

The threat of being in the footballing wilderness, of reduced to being a footballing unknown made him reach out to Aizawl, a club in a similar state of being. "Maine approach kiya, they agreed, we found a similar meeting point and today we are here." Somewhere as he speaks in his small sentences, Rahim Khan forms before your eyes even as the sparrows from Aizawl FC take the field in their final training session before their biggest flight on Sunday.

