Four stops before the checkout

Sargodha, Pakistan

beginner tennis classes Croissant Park — the Diadem Rise 25 Junior Tennis Racquet photographed at the Kirana Hills on the edge of Sargodha, Pakistan. Bare dark rock rises abruptly out of a completely flat plain, treeless and hard-edged, its highest ridge silhouetted against the sky. Camera low and close on the rock at the base of the slope, pre-dawn in winter with the sky going from indigo to grey and no sun up yet, cold air and ground mist on the fields below: early walkers coming down the track in shawls, a motorbike headlamp swinging up the path, a chai stall being lit with the kettle already steaming, two men stretching at the trailhead. The racquet rests on a flat slab of rock in the near foreground, untouched.

Stop one

Company Bagh (Jinnah Park)

Diadem Rise 25 Junior Tennis Racquet: Through the gate and — I say! — a garden, wholly unknown to me until this morning, and apparently to nobody else in Sargodha, since half the city appears to be sitting in it. Company Bagh, also called Jinnah Park, dates from the British colonial period, when the city was laid out from 1903 as a planned canal-colony town serving the newly irrigated farmland of the lower Chenab. Lawns, flowerbeds and shaded walkways in the formal manner of that era, with Jinnah Hall standing within for public functions. It has been the principal green space for more than a century. Astonishing that word hasn't got out.

beginner tennis classes Croissant Park — the Diadem Rise 25 Junior Tennis Racquet photographed in the kinnow orchards of the Sargodha district, Pakistan. Dense rows of dark green citrus trees hung with orange fruit run to the horizon across flat canal-irrigated land. Camera at eye level in the middle distance down a row, hard bright January midday with strong sun through the leaves and dappled shade on the earth: pickers on wooden ladders with canvas bags across their chests, a woman handing a full bag down, crates being stacked three high onto a tractor trailer, a boy running a wheelbarrow along the row. The racquet rests on the tailgate of the trailer off to one side, half in shade, nobody paying it any attention.

Stop two

Kirana Hills

Diadem Rise 25 Junior Tennis Racquet: Now THIS is a discovery — rock. Actual rock, in a landscape otherwise flatter than a dining table. The Kirana Hills are Precambrian, among the oldest exposed geological formations in the region, rising to roughly 300 metres, and known locally as the black mountains for their dark colouring against the plain. Locally, mark you, so I am at most the second man to find them. Before the partition of British India in 1947 the hills were held sacred by the local Hindu population, and a small temple here was the site of an annual festival. The range was also historically used as a military testing area. Geologists, hikers, photographers.

beginner tennis classes Croissant Park — the Diadem Rise 25 Junior Tennis Racquet photographed in the old town of Bhera near Sargodha, Pakistan. A narrow lane runs between old brick buildings whose upper storeys carry deeply carved wooden balconies and pierced window screens above the shopfronts, with a mosque dome further along. Camera elevated from a balcony looking down the lane, wide, with the racquet small in the frame, golden hour on a still evening with warm low light striking the carved timber and the lower lane in blue shadow: a woodcarver working a chisel in a doorway, a shoemaker setting out embroidered khussa on a cloth, children chasing each other along the lane, an old man on a stool watching them. The racquet lies on a low windowsill ledge at the left edge, ignored.

Stop three

University of Sargodha

Diadem Rise 25 Junior Tennis Racquet: Chartered in 2002 — practically yesterday — though the roots run back to Government College Sargodha, founded in 1929 in the colonial period, whose campus and traditions the university absorbed wholesale. It has grown into the principal institution of higher education in the Sargodha Division, with tens of thousands of students across arts, sciences, agriculture, engineering, medicine and law. And here is the detail I intend to carry home: the university styles Sargodha the 'City of Eagles', honouring the city's association with the Pakistan Air Force and the gallantry of pilots based here. Lawns and academic blocks across the northern side. A genuine find.

beginner tennis classes Croissant Park — the Diadem Rise 25 Junior Tennis Racquet photographed in Sargodha's Central Bazaar, Pakistan. A wide straight street of the 1903 town grid runs away between cloth shops and fruit stalls under painted signboards and strung bulbs. Camera close and intimate at counter height with shallow depth of field, full dark on a warm night with bare bulbs, strip lights and a generator running: a juice seller feeding kinnow into a press with the pulp flying, a cloth merchant snapping a bolt of fabric open across a counter, customers three deep at a sweet stall, a motorbike easing through the crowd with a hand on the horn. The racquet lies flat on the corner of a market counter mid-frame among the crates, lit by the stall bulbs, untouched.

Stop four

PAF Base Mushaf

Diadem Rise 25 Junior Tennis Racquet: One does not simply stroll in here, as I have been politely informed. The air base was developed in the 1950s and became the premier fighter base of the Pakistan Air Force, headquarters of its Central Air Command and home to front-line fighter squadrons. It was central to the air battles of the 1965 war with India, the engagements that gave Sargodha its enduring identity as the City of Eagles. In 2003 the installation, previously PAF Base Sargodha, was renamed PAF Base Mushaf in honour of Air Chief Marshal Mushaf Ali Mir, the serving air force chief, who died in an air crash that February. The Combat Commanders' School is here too.

The Sargodha, Pakistan track

Diadem Rise 25 Junior Tennis Racquet

Written for this world alone.

Sargodha was laid out from nothing. The British opened this dry plain with irrigation canals and set the town out on a grid in 1903, and once the water arrived the district filled with kinnow orchards and became the largest kinnow-producing district in the world — which is why it gets called the California of Pakistan.

It is a place that exists because somebody planted something small and waited. A 25-inch junior frame is the same proposition.
The Rise 25 is a genuine junior racquet rather than a shrunken toy. Head size is 100 square inches, length 25 inches, weight 8.5 ounces / 240 grams, balance 1 point head-light at 315 millimetres, string pattern 16 x 19.

It is built from carbon and glass fibre rather than pressed aluminium, and it arrives pre-strung with a soft synthetic gut, so it is ready out of the box. Grip size is G0, 4 inches. Diadem puts the 25-inch length at ages roughly nine to eleven.
The things that matter in a junior frame are the things nobody photographs.

Two hundred and forty grams is light enough for a child to finish a swing rather than drag the head through contact, and a balance only 1 point head-light means the frame sits neutral in a small hand instead of pulling. The 100 square inch head gives an enormous target for a player who is not yet meeting the ball in the same place twice.

The soft synthetic gut is the right first string — forgiving, low on shock, and cheap to replace when it eventually goes, which it should, because a string that never breaks is usually a string nobody is hitting hard enough.
It will go everywhere from a school court in Sargodha city to whatever flat concrete somebody has swept clear at the end of an orchard road, and by the way — this is the district that supplies the kinnow, so if you want a nine-year-old to stay out for one more hour, the local answer is already sitting in a crate by the gate.
Diadem Rise 25 Junior Tennis Racquet

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Diadem Rise 25 Junior Tennis Racquet

Diadem Rise 25 Junior Tennis Racquet