This essay is part of our 'a summer without...' series. Read more here . *** When you are seven years old and you are watching the French Open, and you don’t know better, you simply support Steffi Graf. It’s 1992, she is up against Monica Seles and she is about to lose. My grandmother is cheering for Seles. This is less, I suspect, out of some studied appreciation of her style, and more because “someone else should get a chance, I say”. As if tennis is not a ruthless meritocracy but a feel-good yoga retreat. My sister and I are at my grandparents’ house in Bangalore in front of the TV. The broadcaster is Doordarshan , and the transmission is granular. It’s not perfect, but it’s the summer. We will go back to Bombay in a week, the season of chickenpox and train travel, holiday homework and clay court tennis behind us. Same place, two years later: Sergi Bruguera is up against Alberto Berasategui. Ah, Berasategui! A man whose polysyllabic name I have been rolling around my mou