Safira's best hour is bound to come

By Our Sports Reporter

VIJAYAWADA, OCT. 24. At the 2000 Commonwealth chess championships at Sangli, Maharashtra, Safira Shanaz had come close to striking the death blow to Dibyendu Barua's game. I was about to resign, the Grandmaster told her later. But that was not to be, for Safira fumbled when it mattered most.

A year before, she had subdued Swati Ghate, Pallavi Shah and Aarthie Ramaswamy in the National women's A championships at Kozhikode but ran into rough weather, again when the coast was in sight, against the ice cool Koneru Humpy.

For four years now, Safira has been missing the International Woman Master title, while her junior and teammate on several sojourns, S. Vijayalakshmi, has gone on to become a Woman Grand Master. Vijayalakshmi's boldness and Humpy's composure are two traits so crucial to a quality chess players armoury, she says wistfully.

But for these two ladies, chess is foremost in their list of priorities, while Safira's loyalties have been torn between the game she loves and the engineering studies she has pursued at Anna University, Chennai. Incidentally, her finest years in the game were when she competed actively in every tournament the metropolis had on offer.

For the past two years she has been with her father Malik Jan Mohammed, a cardamom planter, in her native Cumbum. The picturesque Thekady hill range in Kerala, bordering the area is a soothing sight for the eyes but has been hard on her game. Cut off from the competitions cities and towns offer, her skills, she feels, have slackened without sharpening at regular tournaments.

She longs to emulate the dynamic game of Vladimir Kramnik, even as she looks upto Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov. Kasparov, she got to see in flesh and blood playing simultaneous chess at Warsaw, Poland, where Safira, as National under-14 champion had gone with Vijayalakshmi, the under-12 champ and her sister, S. Meenakshi, the under-10 supremo.

The other big names she has come across in person are Nigel Short and Jonathan Speelman at the Goodricke tournament in Calcutta. Safira's strong middle game gets grounded often in excessive caution, blunting the killer instinct, essential to land the spoils.

Thanks to her talent, the chess caravan has taken her places - to Szeged in Hungary, the Asian junior championships at Macau in 1996, the Asian Zonals at Teheran in 1997, the Asian women's team championships at Shenyang, North China, where she was a member of the bronze-medal winning team comprising Vijayalakshmi and Swati Ghate.

A B.E. degree holder in Electronics and Communications, Safira's professional advancement comes only second to her chess. The highs and lows of a career spanning more than a decade have found laurels teasing her tantalisingly from shaking-hand distance but shying away out of reach when she stretches out for them.

But patience is a virtue she has in abundance and before long, Safira's hour in the sun is bound to arrive.

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