The fair where nobody loses: A football fan’s Durand Cup education in Imphal

The heat is the first thing Debanjan expects to miss noticing. Kolkata in August is not summer but monsoon, and the two are not the same kind of punishing. It is a wet, breathless heat, rain-soaked air that wraps itself around a person like a towel that never quite dries, the kind of humidity that has trained a whole city to move slower and complain louder. So, when he steps off the aircraft at Imphal’s Bir Tikendrajit Airport and the air actually touches his skin instead of clinging to it, it stops him for a second on the tarmac. Somewhere behind him, other passengers are already reaching for their phones to photograph the hills ringing the valley. He simply stands there and breathes, the way a man does when he has walked into a room and realised, only after the door has shut, that the room is nothing like the one he left.

The traffic outside the airport does not honk at him. Nobody is racing a bus to a signal. The road unspools calm and unhurried toward the city, and Debanjan, a government servant from Kolkata who has spent three decades of Saturdays and Sundays inside Salt Lake Stadium, understands within the first twenty minutes that he has arrived somewhere his football fandom has never been before. He has come to Manipur chasing the same tournament he has followed his whole adult life, except this time the tournament has done the travelling, and he is simply following it home.

A Derby Man, Thirty Years Deep

To understand why this trip mattered to Debanjan, it helps to understand what football has meant to him for most of his life. He is East Bengal to the bone, a red-and-gold man in a city that still divides itself along exactly those lines, and for thirty years that loyalty has meant sitting through every edition of the Kolkata derby he could get to, feeling Salt Lake Stadium physically shake under him when a goal goes in, learning the particular grammar of a maidan crowd the way a priest learns a prayer.

For thirty years, that has been his idea of what football sounds like. Chanting that could curdle milk. Chants traded like blows across a stand. A silence before kickoff so total it has its own weight, and a roar after a goal that seems to physically displace air. This is the football Debanjan grew up inside, and it is glorious, and it is also, if he is honest, exhausting. It asks something of you. It wants your loyalty declared before it will let you enjoy it.

The 135th edition of the Durand Cup, Asia’s oldest football tournament, gave him a chance to test that loyalty against something else entirely. This year’s competition unfolded not in one city but across five, from Kolkata’s own grounds to Ranchi, Shillong, Guwahati and Imphal, with the group stage scattering matches to corners of the country that rarely get a tournament of this size on their own soil. For a man who has never left the ecosystem of Bengal football, that geography was an invitation.

If the Durand Cup could carry itself two thousand kilometres from Salt Lake and still be recognisably the same tournament, then perhaps Debanjan could follow it there and still be recognisably himself. He booked the trip, and Imphal is where Group D of this year’s competition, featuring three Manipuri clubs, NEROCA FC, TRAU FC and debutants FC Raengdai, alongside Indian Navy, was quietly assembling one of the tournament’s most instructive footnotes.

Boys Who Still Play in the Street

The detail that undoes Debanjan first is not inside any stadium. It is on the drive into the city, and then again the next morning, and then everywhere after that: children playing football in the street. Not once, not as a novelty, but constantly, in courtyards and dusty patches and narrow lanes, a ball moving between small feet with the unbothered rhythm of something that happens every single day because it does.

He recognises the scene because it used to be his own. He remembers mornings and afternoons in Kolkata given over entirely to a ball and whoever else could be found to kick it, back when there was still grass to ruin and nobody minded ruining it. That Kolkata, he says, has quietly gone extinct. Grounds have shrunk or vanished, grass has become scarce even in season, and the children who might once have filled that space have migrated indoors, to screens, to FIFA played with a controller instead of a foot. Kolkata still loves football with a passion that borders on religion, but increasingly that love is spectated rather than played. It has become, in his own phrase, something sold to supporters, rather than something lived by children.

In Manipur, nobody has told the children yet that this is meant to change. The football culture there is not curated for tourists or preserved as heritage; it simply continues, unbothered, in the way that culture does when nobody thinks to interrupt it. And it is not sentiment alone that makes this matter. Manipur, a state that accounts for a sliver of India’s population, has for two decades punched wildly above its weight in producing players for the national setup and for Kolkata’s own two giants.

Renedy Singh, born in Imphal, wore both the East Bengal and Mohun Bagan jerseys across a career that took him to the captaincy of the Indian national team, joining the list of footballers over the decades who have crossed the derby’s great divide and worn both colours in a Kolkata lifetime. That lineage runs directly into this Durand Cup: Naorem Mahesh Singh, East Bengal’s creative heartbeat this season, and his Manipuri teammate Jeakson Singh Thounaojam are both products of the same footballing soil Debanjan was now walking on.

As it happened, Mahesh was not even in Manipur during Debanjan’s stay, sidelined by an injury and deep into rehabilitation at a training base elsewhere. It was a small irony, and in its own way, proof of the point. The player Kolkata now depends on had to leave Manipur to become who he is, but Manipur is where the habit of touching a ball every single day, without being told to, first took hold of him.

The Mexican Wave That Should Not Have Happened

If one moment explains the emotional distance between Salt Lake and Khuman Lampak, it is the Mexican wave.

Debanjan describes it almost as if he is still confused by it. Early in one of the matches he watched, the crowd at Khuman Lampak Main Stadium spontaneously launched into a Mexican wave, that stadium ritual of shoulders rising in sequence around a bowl, and it did not stop after one polite circuit. It went round and round, two or three full loops, gathering the entire ground into a single moving gesture that had nothing to do with either team on the pitch.

He is careful to explain why this stunned him. At Salt Lake Stadium, during a Mohun Bagan–East Bengal derby, such a thing is not merely unlikely. It is unthinkable. The two ends of that stadium exist in a state of undeclared war for ninety minutes; a Mohun Bagan stand does not lend its arms to an East Bengal Mexican wave, and an East Bengal stand does not return the favour. The very idea of the two sides moving together, even in something as trivial as a wave, is at odds with everything the rivalry has trained both sets of supporters to feel. What Debanjan watched unfold in Imphal was a stadium that had, for those few minutes, no factions at all. Whoever was winning did not seem to matter to the wave. People had come to celebrate, not to take a side, and the wave was simply the noise their shared enjoyment made when it needed somewhere to go.

It is here that Debanjan, without quite meaning to, hands over the sentence that holds the whole trip together. Kolkata football, he says, is a kind of war. What he found in Manipur was closer to a fair.

A Fair With No Villains

That word, fair, keeps returning whenever he describes what he actually watched. His first match in Imphal was a seven-goal thriller between TRAU FC and debutants FC Raengdai that swung one way and then the other before Raengdai completed a stunning 4-3 win, coming from behind against a home side that had led twice. It drew a near-capacity crowd that behaved less like a football audience and more like a village turned out for a mela. He remembers a father and mother in the stands with a small child, none of them declared supporters of either side, simply there because the fair had come to town and this was where the fair currently was.

Local fans did rally behind the debutants as much as behind their own TRAU, cheering the newcomers’ fearlessness even as it cost the home side the points, and the noise around him carried none of the surgical hostility Debanjan associates with a derby crowd back home. Nobody in the stand around him seemed interested in dissecting a tactical mistake or hurling an insult at a struggling player. People were there to watch football happen, the way one might watch a river.

Debanjan was back in that same stand days later, on the Sunday TRAU closed out its group campaign against Indian Navy. It was, by most measures, a one-sided match, Navy camped in TRAU’s half for long stretches and finishing with a barely believable twenty-six attempts on goal, but Afridi Buyamayum scored twice for the home side, including a strike late in the game that briefly silenced even Debanjan’s practised, derby-trained instinct to expect the worst, and TRAU held on to win 2-1. The crowd that day did what Kolkata crowds rarely allow themselves to do against the run of play: it simply enjoyed the siege, gasping at Navy’s chances and roaring just as readily when TRAU’s goalkeeper somehow kept them out.

The absence he kept noticing was the absence of apparatus: no tifos unfurled before kickoff, no ultras group with a designated drumline, no rehearsed chant passed down through supporter generations the way it is at Kolkata’s big clubs. And yet the enthusiasm in the ground, he insists, was in no way lesser for it. It was simply undirected, unbranded, belonging to the football rather than to any tribe watching it.

A third match sharpened the point further. NEROCA FC, fielding several foreign recruits, played Indian Navy’s all-domestic service side, and Navy personnel who happened to be on duty nearby drifted over to watch and ended up celebrating as freely as any civilian when their side pulled ahead. NEROCA’s own supporters, watching their team go down, did something Debanjan struggles to imagine happening at Salt Lake: they kept cheering. Not for the scoreline, which had already gone against them, but for the effort, for the occasion, for the simple fact of having been present for it. A losing end in Kolkata does not typically behave that way. It broods, it turns on its own players, it remembers the defeat as a debt to be repaid at the next derby. In Imphal, losing seemed to carry no such interest charge.

He did not, by his own admission, get deep into conversation with the local fans around him. There was no dramatic exchange of footballing philosophy across a language barrier, no local supporter suddenly reciting Kolkata’s derby history back to him. What there was, instead, was proximity without friction: an outsider allowed to simply sit inside a crowd’s joy without being asked to prove he belonged to it.

Sticky Rice, a Guide’s Accent, and a Fort Called Kangla

Away from the stadium, Manipur kept dismantling Debanjan’s expectations in gentler ways.

He had privately braced himself to miss his fish curry and rice, the dish that anchors most Bengali meals the way a chorus anchors a song. He did not. The rice in Manipur, sticky in texture in a way Kolkata’s rice never is, turned out to carry a sweetness he says he has never tasted before, extraordinary enough that it rewired, at least for a week, his sense of what rice was supposed to taste like. A local eatery he visited, a modest joint called Ok Chicken, produced a local meal he still speaks about with real fondness. Street food up and down the city impressed him without exception, and a glass of pomegranate juice, of all things, became one of the trip’s small unexpected triumphs, better, he insists, than any he has had before.

The most memorable meal, though, happened away from any restaurant. At a picnic with local acquaintances, he watched pork cooked with almost nothing, no oil, no masala, just heat and patience, served alongside more of that impossibly sweet sticky rice. It should, by every rule he grew up cooking and eating by, have tasted of very little. Instead it tasted, he says simply, excellent, an experience he does not expect to forget.

Language produced the trip’s one properly comic moment. At Kangla Fort, the historic seat of Manipur’s former kingdom, he hired a local guide who spoke to him in Hindi, except the accent sat so far from anything Debanjan’s ear was used to that for a disorienting few minutes he genuinely could not tell whether the man was speaking Hindi, Meiteilon, or some third language entirely. It resolved itself, as these things do, into ordinary comprehension within minutes, but the moment stayed with him as a small, specific reminder of how far from home he actually was. English and Hindi, he found, bridged almost every other gap comfortably; it was only when locals spoke to each other, unfiltered, in their own tongue, that he was politely and completely locked out, which he counts, in retrospect, as one more thing the trip gave him rather than took away.

The city itself, he says, simply breathes differently. Slower, cooler, calmer, with an abundance of time that Kolkata’s residents have long since sold to their commute. He noticed traditional dress worn easily by women in the markets, alongside a younger crowd just as comfortable in western wear, two wardrobes coexisting without tension, much like the two versions of football he had come to compare.

What the Fair Is Really For

It would be easy to tell this story as a simple contrast: Kolkata’s football is fierce, Manipur’s is gentle, one city fights and the other celebrates. Debanjan’s own account resists that neatness, and rightly so. He does not come home from Imphal disillusioned with thirty years of derby chanting, and he is not about to trade Salt Lake’s fury for Khuman Lampak’s calm. What he brings back instead is something closer to a comparison than a conversion: proof that the same sport, played under the same tournament banner, can hold two entirely different emotional temperatures and be equally, legitimately alive in both.

That is, in the end, precisely what a tournament spread across five cities is built to reveal. The Durand Cup did not need to leave Kolkata to remain the oldest football competition in Asia. It chose to anyway, carrying itself into Ranchi and Shillong and Guwahati and Imphal, and in doing so it made it possible for a government servant from Kolkata, a man who had never in his life watched football outside his own state, to sit inside a stadium two thousand kilometres from home and recognise the same game wearing an unfamiliar face. Without that spread, without the tournament’s own willingness to travel, Debanjan’s football world would still end exactly where the Bengal border does.

Asked what he would tell a friend back in Kolkata weighing whether the trip was worth it, he does not hesitate long. Go, he says, not to compare which version of football is better, but to notice that there are versions at all. If he had to leave the whole week as a single image, it would not be a goal or a scoreline. It would be that Mexican wave, rolling unbroken around a stadium that had, for a few minutes, forgotten to pick a side, doing the one thing thirty years at Salt Lake had never once let him witness: an entire crowd, agreeing, simply, to enjoy itself.

He flies back to Kolkata’s monsoon in a few days. He suspects the derby, when it comes again, will still feel like a war. He no longer thinks that is the only way football is allowed to feel.