A bishop gobbled up a pawn. A queen lunged at a horse. Two kings crossed swords.
The generals marshalling the troops were short of eyesight but not of smart moves.
On Saturday, several visually impaired chess players took part in a tournament at the Kolkata Centre for Creativity (KCC) in Anandapur, near EM Bypass.
The participants have never seen pawns, bishops, kings or queens on a chessboard.
The unique shape and carvings of the chess pieces help them distinguish the king from the queen or the rook from the knight.
Besides distinguishing the chess pieces from their shapes, the players also look for small dots on the top of the black pieces to differentiate them from the white ones.
“I can tell you the name of the piece I touch. It was not easy at the beginning and took time and practice. Now, I cannot think of life without chess,” said Sudip Rajbanshi, 30, from Sodepur in North 24-Parganas, one of the participants in the All-Bengal Chess Competition.
Sanju Biswas, 11, from Nadia, was among the youngest participants. Visually impaired since birth, Biswas, a student of Nabadwip APC Blind School, said his parents encouraged him to take up chess.
“I have been playing chess for a year now and the more I play the more I get to learn,” said Sanju.
The tournament was organised by the KCC along with the Kolkata District Chess Association to celebrate World Braille Day.
Louis Braille, a French educator who invented a tactile system of reading and writing for the blind and visually impaired in 1824, was born on January 4, 1809. This year marks 200 years of an independent reading script for the visually impaired.
Niloy Chakraborty, coach of the Bengal chess team for the deaf and blind, who has tutored many players who participated in Saturday’s tournament, said: “Events like these go a long way in bringing these people to the mainstream.”
A talk on the relevance of Braille in the 21st Century by Devkumar Dandapat, a professor of English at Bijoygarh College, and a music performance by visually impaired children from Ek Kadam Foundation were part of
the celebrations at the KCC on Saturday.
“We strive to create meaningful experiences for a wide range of audiences across the city with events that focus on the development of marginalised people and differently able individuals,” said Richa Agarwal, chairperson of the KCC.