“If it was a let, it was a let; if it was a stroke, it was a stroke,” he recalls the manner in which the late police officer Ashok Kamte played his squash and never questioned the judge’s call. It could be anyone umpiring — a small boy or a marker — Kamte played on, never arguing, throwing himself onto the next ball to seal the next point.

The one other thing Bhagra cannot forget is Kamte’s favourite punchline when they met over dinners later in the night after their regular games of squash. “Work hard, play hard, die young, leave a good-looking corpse,” he would say after a rejuvenating squash workout. The words came back chillingly to Bhagra when Kamte, Mumbai’s Additional Commissioner of Police, East Region, was killed during the 26/11 terror-attacks.

A staunch sportsman, who mixed gym regimes and squash and pumping weights, golf and a variety of other sports through the week, Kamte had stuck to his squash the longest — having started early in his teens, since he came from a defence family, where the sport isn’t uncommon. A doubles tournament in the city, in memory of the late cop, hence is most apt, as ISP’s Braveheart Ashok Kamte Squash takes off from February 6-8 at the Juhu Vile Parle Gymkhana.

Though he started out in athletics ¿ hammer-and-javelin throw and avidly followed body-building and weight-lifting, squash sparring mates often turned into buddies for Kamte, and that’s how Mahendra Aggarwal of the Indian Squash Professionals (ISP), forged a friendship with him, having met through journalist Raju Chainani at CCI. “I’ve never seen a dynamic officer like him, and as a homage to him, we decided we’d hold this tournament,” Aggarwal said.

Having once returned from a UN peace-keeping mission, Kamte had been dining with Aggarwal at a restaurant, when the waiter nervously watching the 12 midnight deadline approach, queasily asked them to wrap up their dinner fast. He said he feared a police officer who’d been recently posted there and was known to be strict on deadlines, mistaking Kamte for a foreigner, even while the IPS officer happily carried on his conversation on squash. “It took a lot of time to convince him that the man dining at the table was in fact the strict cop,” Aggarwal recalls.

When posted at Thane as rural SP, Kamte was a regular at the Asmita Club and then at the Jindals courts. Squash pretty much stayed a constant wherever he went as he hunted down the nearest courts to train in Pune, Sangli and Solapur. Although a knee injury forced him to completely stop two years ago, he’d hang around courts and watch all the action when he moved to Mumbai.