When did Leander start showing an aptitude for sport?
Having come from a sporting family — I played hockey and his mother (Jennifer) played in the national basketball team — one was hopeful that he would also take to sport. He had all the encouragement from the family and the school, and very early he showed the instinct for sport. He was a better footballer first, but he used to suffer from convulsions and was on anti-convulsives from the age of three to seven. The doctor told us he could not play again. It was obviously shattering for us, because he loved sports; he used to sleep with his football shoes and so on. We consulted another specialist and since he hadn’t suffered convulsions after the age of seven we started taking gradual risks. The neurologist advised us to put him into non-contact sports, and that is how we put him into tennis. He used to travel with an attendant when he was in Kolkata because we were still not sure how he would cope with it. Then, when he was 12, we sent him to BAT (Britannia Amritraj Tennis) Academy in
