There is a sense of profound loss at the quaint little house in Besant Nagar’s Customs Colony where Viswanathan Anand grew up to become the best chess player in the world. Sushila Viswanathan was not just mother to the country’s most celebrated chess player, she shaped the very contours of the five-time world champion’s monumental success.
Aged 79, she passed away in her sleep and is survived by her husband and three children, Anand being the youngest. While the champion himself stayed away from the media, trying to come to terms with the shock, his wife Aruna told TOI: “The demise has been sudden and the family is together in this time of bereavement.”
Anand made inroads in a sport dominated by Europeans, quite early in his life. The credit, to a large extent, goes to Sushila who taught Vishy his first moves on the chess board.
He was all of 13 when he beat India’s first International Master Manuel Aaron at the National Team Chess Championship at IIT Mumbai in 1983.
Recalling the match Grandmaster Pravin Thipsay says: “It was a May afternoon and I was told by some players that a teen from Madras Colts was about to cause an upset. I rushed to the board to find a young boy wrapped in woolens making lightning quick moves, his mother sitting beside him. He won the game soon enough and I learnt later that he was running high fever then but insisted on playing. Sushila ensured that Vishy would only have to think of his match, she would take care of everything else. She soon grew very popular in the chess circuit.”
Watching his mother engage in her pastime of playing chess at home enkindled Vishy’s interest as a five-year-old.
Sushila was with Anand on the day when he became a Grandmaster at the age of 18 in Coimbatore. The other boys ran out and bought a small present for him with the message, ‘Congratulations, Grand Master Anand!’ “That gift is one of my most prized possessions,” Sushila once said. And her biggest gift to the world of chess was Vishy Anand himself!
