Masks On, Veteran Riders Gallop Through The Racecourse's New Normal

Seated atop Dora, his beautiful Dutch warmblood horse, Churchgate’s Haroon Adam (70) looks rather regal this evening at Mahalaxmi Race Course, but that’s not why his three children call him Tughlaq. The royal nickname came after an avant-garde domestic move that Adam made five years ago: Bringing home a doomed-to-becoming dead-weight gym contraption, “cross-trainer”.

- Sharmila Ganesan

The equipment may have made him look like the whimsical Mughal king but given that the lockdown has turned the equipment into the family’s goto fitness option for months now, the patriarch does not need to get off his high horse anytime soon. He may once again appear to be a wise fool as he gears up to gallop through the new normal, but Adam appears to have made peace with riding with a safe yet-inconvenient mask much the same way he had accepted driving with the safe-yet-stifling car seat-belts decades ago: “Life cannot be stalled.”

It’s this stoic sentiment that has caused many senior citizen members of Amateur Riders’ Club, a 75-year-old private civilian riding club and NGO, to return to stables with a boyish vengeance. Rendered incorrigibly regimented for life by equestrian passion, what binds this jolly lot is an appetite for chai, leg-pulling, business risks, and punitive jalebis. An unspoken rule among makes those who suffer a fall treat others to jalebis in the atonement.