In another special edition of The London is Blue Dispatch, Sam – known to many within the Chelsea social sphere as CFCCentral – shares an extremely beautiful, poignant piece on the intersection of his personal life and the current challenges faced by the Blues. It’s a long read, but well worth your time. – Dan

It’s going to be a long, painful process.

That statement had nothing to do with the club I’ve supported for 17 years.

A week ago, hearing commotion downstairs, I sprinted down from my room to find my grandmother walking menacingly towards our domestic help, her walking stick sharply jabbing at the poor lady’s ribs. This morning, just like one a few days before it, she was convinced that the help was planted by her sons to keep an eye on her. The lady retreated to the kitchen quickly, and I managed to plant myself in the doorway between them.

Move, my grandmother snarled. When I politely declined, she walked to the nearest window and yelled “Thief! Thief!” When no one arrived, she pointed her walking cane at my chest, her eyes livid, than thin white glaze of mania dancing in them. When I offered a firm no, she rammed the end of the cane into my ribs, twice. Enough force to leave a bruise. The lady called timidly from inside the kitchen, asking what to do. When I turned around to answer her, my grandmother bit me.

That… caught me by surprise.

It wasn’t exactly a “Last of Us” style chomp, thankfully. But for a moment I stood in utter disbelief. This incident happened just 4 days after she pulled out her phone diary and called the local police station, telling them that her sons were trying to lock her away and steal her house. They arrived on my doorstep in a patrol car, catching me completely off-guard. I invited them in, and apologized to them profusely while still in my pyjamas.

That’s when we decided to call the family doctor. Dementia and paranoid schizophrenia were mentioned. A week later, the neurologist would confirm Alzheimer’s.

My grandmother is 91.

When she was born, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh were still one entity, and under the British Empire. Gandhi had kicked off India’s non-violent civil disobedience movement only two years before with his famous Dandi march, a 387 km walk to the coast of Arabian sea. World War II was still a few years away.

The doctor’s verdict sent shock waves through the family.

Not me.

A little over three years ago, I made the glaring error of postponing my trip to my Dad’s place (four hours away by bus) by a day. That same night, India’s Prime Minister declared a nation-wide lock down, sealing the city limits and wiping out public transport. I spent close to a year locked up alone with my grandmother.

Her house is a one-bedroom house over a hundred years old. I say her house because it will never be my home. I sleep in a crawl-space/attic above the dining room, which you get to via a ladder. It is about 25 feet x 12 feet. The ceiling is 4 feet high. There is no air-conditioning, no windows. Mumbai touches 40°C in summers with 80-90% humidity. The body bleeds water even when sitting absolutely still.

For every day of that lockdown, around 40-odd times a day, I would be summoned downstairs to exorcize spirits her mind conjured up when the world had gone still. Multiple times in those months, she threatened to throw me out of the house - for not getting her food from her favorite restaurant (it closed down permanently during lock down), or for only picking up one kilogram of food essentials (the local grocer was rationing supplies.) I was a slave to every whim of a woman I would come to loathe with every fibre of my being.

By the second month of lock down, I stopped coming down from my crawlspace.

I slowly realized that my troubles began from the second she saw me. So for weeks, I became a ghost. I did my chores, cooked and used the bathroom only when she slept. The lights in my attic stayed off all day. When she called, I’d peep through the crawlspace to guess what she was calling me for. 30 out of 40 times, I met her orders with silence. Slowly, she began to forget I existed in the same house.

As soon as the lockdown was done, I packed my bags and caught the first bus back to my Dad’s palce. For weeks after I left, I received 12-15 calls a day, some at 3-4 AM. “You went to the market hours ago, when are you returning?” On other days, she pleaded for my return. When all else failed, she reverted to threats.

I was told her sisters stopped taking her calls. Our neighbour, who has known my grandma for 50-odd years, stopped coming over for morning gossip over steaming chai. My uncle and his family, who live in the building adjacent, sent her food through their domestic help. They visited only on Sundays; never more than half-an-hour because grandma made 30 minutes feel like 30 hours. My sister, who faced far more verbal and physical abuse at her hands than I ever have, once stayed out late for dinner and was dropped home by her boyfriend (now her husband) at 11 PM. “Whore!” my grandma bellowed at my sister on the doorstep as his car pulled away. She forced my sister to take her bags and leave the house. My sister stayed four hours out of her childhood home in the dead of the night. A terrified, crying mess, she eventually made her way to my uncle’s place.

A lot has happened in the past three years.

My sister left for the U.S. Dad had a cardiac arrest and was down medically for a year and a half. Grandma stayed in her house, refusing to move. Any mention of a doctor or a hospital visit and she threatened to end her life. We hired 6 helps in those three years to stay with her. Three left within a week and never returned. One she accused of stealing the very same bananas she had eaten hours before. One developed severe anxiety and heart palpitations and left.

A month ago, when my Dad left Pune to move south for flight training, and when my sister flew back to the U.S, I had a choice to make. I was happy at my dad’s place, away from everything I'd endured through the years.

The Pune house is a palace compared to the my prison cell in Mumbai. It is a serene 3-bedroom flat on the 7^th floor, far removed from the chaos in the city’s center. I have my piano in the house; when I'm not analysing games or writing, I let my anxieties waltz over the keys. I have a proper room of my own, with a giant window I spend hours staring out of. Between 12-2 AM, I shut the windows and drown out the world. When my family sleeps, I bring my voice to a podcast.

In my grandma’s house, I live on the ground floor, right next to one of the city’s busiest railway stations. In one of the London is Blue episodes, you can hear a train’s foghorn blare multiple times in the background and annoying creak of my grandmother moving the dining table out of restlessness. The mind becomes a straitjacket. There is no escape. Between those two choices of staying alone in sanguinity, or being her tormented guardian, I always thought deciding would be the easiest thing in the world.

And yet, I arrived in Mumbai on the eve of my birthday, 40 days ago. Still two days away from the police call. Another few days before being bitten. The last time Chelsea won was on the 15th of January, my last full day in Pune. Since then, I have gone back to being a ghost, putting on noise-cancelling headphones, writing for half the day, poring through games of players who could grab the world by the scruff of the neck tomorrow.

Football is what keeps me sane. Watching games in Dad’s place is a ritual. In Mumbai, living the way I have to, it is salvation. Every matchday for the last couple of weeks, I have cupped my phone in my palms and prayed. This is a big deal since I am an atheist. I pray for a win. I pray for a gentle crack of dawn in an attic that stays dark even during the day. The first three games brought three successive draws. These days, every time a Chelsea fan asks “how could it possibly get worse?” the footballing Gods answer – “let me show you.” Those three draws were followed by three successive losses. We haven’t scored once.

If you’re still here, reading, then just like me, you’re wondering – where is he going with this?

Sometimes, the hardest thing to do is to stay when everyone else leaves. My grandmother’s family saw a self-centred, malevolent woman who poisoned anything that came close. So they abandoned her. On days she thought she was alone in her house, she would look at the portraits on the mantle, portraits of those who had passed in our family – my grandfather, her 2nd son, my mother – and ask out aloud "where is everyone? what have I done to deserve this loneliness?" As one of the ghosts in her house, I felt like she was asking me too.

When the doctor told me it was going to be a long process, my first thought wasn't feeling sympathy for my grandmother's plight or the realization she had battled a mind-altering illness for decades. When the doctor told me it was going to be a long process, I was itching to ask – how much longer? It took me some time to process the emotional weight attached to that thought.

In the few months I left her alone to spend time with my Dad, he would sombrely update me on the effects of my absence. More than a couple of times, she slipped and fell - in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in the living room. A 91-year-old cannot hoist up a 100 kilo torso, especially with two knees that had undergone replacement surgeries. She had to shout herself hoarse till a passer-by realized what had happened. My uncle had to break into the house by cracking open a glass ventilator to unlock the latch, then lift her back onto the couch. She was lying on the floor in a pool of her own sweat for four hours.

Once, she left the milk on the gas stove and forgot about it. On another occasion, she opened the gas valve and forgot to light it. She sat down in front of the TV and the gas stayed on for a while. A second visit to the stove to light it would have blown up the house. I could not banish the feeling that I could have changed all of that, had I been there. So I came back. Many of those who left, bitter, when she was alive will return to say sweet words after she is gone. I do not wish to be one of them.

Sometimes, a process defies time, progression and sense. When the neurologist prescribed medicines, the change in her was near miraculous. For the first week, her voice was dulcet. She made me sit next to her, held my hand in hers, kissed them and made me promise I would never leave her alone. She said she was sorry for being a burden. Words I'd only dreamt of hearing for a decade. There have been bad days since, but I never thought she’d get this far. I'm glad I hung on, if only just.

Of course, watching Chelsea get back to winning ways would ease a lot of the ache.

Reading a lot of discourse around the club recently, in the situation I'm in, does little to lift my spirits. But how I personally have come to see it is shaped largely by the story I’ve shared with you.

All of us are hurting, in one way or another. My plight is a minor discomfort compared to that of a few other Chelsea fans I have spoken to in the past year. Our lives are so intricately intertwined with the fate of our clubs that sometimes it is hard to pick the exact string that leads to the source of our disenchantment.

These owners are new. These players are new. The manager is new. It is fair to say many of us are yet to develop any kind of fond attachment to them, leave alone the kind of reverence we came to shower on past heroes and stalwarts. But as I've discovered, a process is seldom linear. It took me a decade to see my grandmother's true self for seconds. Did I think she was capable of that? Not in a million years. What if I'd never seen it? It wouldn't have mattered, because deep inside, I'd promised myself I wouldn't have regrets as long as I did all I could.

I cannot predict Graham Potter’s future any more than I can tell you which side of my grandmother I will see tomorrow. Should Potter stay or should he go? It does not matter which side of the line you’re on, because you can make valid arguments for both. But that is not the question I’m asking myself. I’m asking myself the same list of questions I turn to when my grandmother is impossible to live with – Will I have any regrets if this all ends at this very moment? Have I truly exhausted the limits of my patience and faith? Am I doing enough to help?

The owners promised a full cultural overhaul of the club when they took over. So far, they've delivered a lot on that promise. They brought in a crop of promising, driven players from all across Europe. They got the best recruitment experts with proven track records. They brought in an external consultant who helped forge the work culture of one of the greatest sports teams ever. The only thing about the culture the owners haven't been able to press a hard reset on, is us.

It took me years to realize that fighting my grandmother's fire with my own fire burnt out both of us and left us choking on smoke. It does not work, which should be pretty damn obvious because firefighters don’t carry flamethrowers. So I chose to meet her rage with tranquillity. For her to show the slightest inclination of getting better, I had to be better first.

The players are shocked and look helpless.

The manager is struggling to impose his ideas.

The football is getting worse.

The fans are incensed.

Move those sentences around in any order and it will not matter, because anyway you see it, it still reads like a vicious cycle. For the wheel to break, something must change. It helps to pick up the broken pieces of our present and try to put together something resembling the mosaic of our future.

Living with my grandmother has taught me that trusting a process is rarely about the results. It is about perseverance, self-discovery and working towards a purpose bigger than ourselves. I am not enduring what I am with my grandmother so that I can miraculously lead her to a recovery, or to make her see how she’s fissured a happy family over the course of a decade. In our process, I have at times walked away, retaliated with wrath and worse, wished for the inevitable end too. I have felt a lot of those feelings watching us over the past few months, making me curse into the hollow of my palms and wishing for Graham Potter’s sacking. Feeling anger is okay. How I express it… that’s what matters the most. I realize now that the two processes in my life will not end with my grandmother’s demise, or with Potter’s resignation. When I become better, everything else will, too.