Thiruvnanthapuram: Wearing a pair of spike shoes his classmate had loaned him for the occasion, teenaged Mahesh swung into action to fetch the gold at the ongoing Kerala School Athletics Championship in the state capital. The diminutive class-7 student from Leo XIII Higher Secondary School in Alappuzha flung the heavy discus with all his energy, covering a distance of 38.03 metres that took the 14-year-old to the top among the competitors in the sub-junior boys’ category of the three-day meet.
If Mahesh had to borrow his niche footwear, it was because the boy came from an impoverished family. Travails of an orphaned life have kept chasing him since infancy, as the kid’s parents deserted him when the child was nine months old. It was his grandparents who raised him, continuing to live a rented house at Kalavoor, 10 km north of Alappuzha.
It takes only a casual glance at his routine to know the hard work that has gone into Mahesh’s achievement at the meet that is concluding tomorrow (Oct 28). The boy gets up at 4.30 early morning, does the domestic chores and appears at the practice ground at the break of dawn. From there, he goes to school. The evenings after the classroom hours are spent in selling lottery tickets that earn him some money.
No lucky draw helped Mahesh pocket the medal at the state-level championship, though. True, the boy, with a height of less than five feet, initially felt nervous on the field on Friday, seeing his tall rivals. “I had almost chickened out,” he revealed later. “But then I have come all this way facing such tough situations that I thought I should not withdraw from the event. I realised I too had put in efforts to make a claim to victory.”
So, what is his full name? “Simply Mahesh. That’s it,” the gritty athlete would reply. “I have no parents. And so, no initials either.”