There is pin drop silence in the hall. Four people in pairs facing each other occupy each table concentrating on the words on their scrabble board and the choice of alphabet tiles in front of them. Although there are older people playing as well, many of the players are quite young, mostly in their teens. In one corner sits a young man winning each of his games with the highest point spread, garnering respectful glances from other players, old and young. He is Pakistan’s Scrabble champion Waseem Khatri.

Though the Pakistan Scrabble Association (PSA) meets every weekend to practice and play tournaments at the Beach Luxury Hotel, this was not a usual day. It was the last day before Waseem, along with his three team members, flew out to Prague in the Czech Republic to take part in the World Scrabble Championship (WSC) that started on Dec 4 and ends today (Dec 8).

Apart from that the youth scrabble team was also all set for the World Youth Scrabble Championship (WYSC) to take place in Dubai from Dec 12 to 14. This was also a farewell for that 17-member team, one of whom, 16-year-old Mohammad Inshal, was first leaving with the senior team to play in WSC to join the youth team in Dubai on his return.

The youth players are PSA’s strength. Each year the PSA holds a school scrabble championship where children from schools from the entire country enter their pupils to play scrabble in Karachi. The biggest halls at Beach Luxury Hotel are jam-packed with school children playing scrabble and the best among them are picked for other tournaments in order to shortlist and groom the best upcoming talent in Pakistan.

Though the annual school scrabble event is fairly recent, the national champion Waseem Khatri, 24 now, and a student of Chartered Accountancy was also discovered through a similar event though several years ago when he, too, was a school student. Hailing from Kharadar, the boy had no background in scrabble. No one in his family played the game. Yet seeing a spark in him, the senior members of PSA took him under their wing. Today, Waseem has a younger cousin, Shahzeb Khatri, also involved in scrabble. He also had to prove his mettle first through the school championship after which he was groomed in the game by the experts. “Scrabble is a good educational game. It’s a mind game. And in order to generate interest in the children of Kharadar in this game, I have started small scrabble tournaments for them in my area,” he says.

The remaining two members in the team taking part in the World Scrabble Championship are veteran players of the game, Tariq Pervez and Mohammad Inayatullah. Both are also PSA vice presidents and have been playing for around 25 years. Tariq Pervez also heads PSA’s youth programme. “We realised very early that working at the grassroots was the key to our scrabble players making a name for themselves in the world. Waseem is a shining example if that and now our youth teams are doing the same,” he says.

PSA’s youth team took part in the fifth WYSC for the first time in Manila, Phillippines, in 2010. They created a sensation to establish themselves and make a name for their country there. Their performance remained consistent in the other editions in Johor Bahru, Malaysia and London, UK. In fact, the Pakistan team finished third in London last year. Youth players Javeria Mirza, Javeria Salman, Mohammad Inshal, Jahanzaib and Yash Gandhi deserve a special mention here. Javeria Mirza won the trophy for the highest single move score for her word ‘SHUNTERS’. Javeria Salman and Mohammad Inshal finished 14th and 17th in the championship with Jahanzaib, Javeria Mirza and Yash Gandhi picking up the 21st, 23rd and 24th positions, respectively. And this year they are expected to do even better.

In fact, Pakistan had also been selected as the venue for the 2014 edition of the WYSC but later it was decided to move it to Sri Lanka due to security concerns. “The parents of international players had strong reservations about sending their children to play a championship in Pakistan,” the director of PSA’s youth programme, Tariq Pervez, points out. “It’s our loss,” he shrugs.

But looking ahead one should also not ignore one’s past. PSA is now in its 25th, silver jubilee year. It was formed in 1989, the year after its president, Goshpi B. Avari, attended a scrabble competition at the US Consulate in Karachi. That was when she opened the doors of her hotel to scrabble enthusiasts where to this day they gather to play the game every weekend. She gains nothing from this monetarily.

Mrs Avari would love to organise an international scrabble competition in Pakistan. “We had, in 1994, invited players to Karachi from Dubai and Sri Lanka but doing so now may not be so easy,” she says.

Another important person with a lot of contribution for scrabble in Pakistan is the one who is responsible for starting the game in the Muslim world. Known as the Baba-i-Scrabble in Pakistan, the late Ishtiaq Ahmed Chishty used to play scrabble in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, with his colleagues in the Saudi oil company Aramco. It was there in 1959 that some nine of them formed a playing group. After Dhahram, he set up a branch in Riyadh followed by another in Jeddah to become known as the ‘Scrabble Patriarch’ in Saudi Arabia. After retiring from the oil company in 1994, he came to Pakistan to settle down and offered his services to the game here. He served as the vice president and secretary of PSA, too.

Mr Chishty’s better half, Malika, also took to playing scrabble but out of sheer boredom. She says that she along with the rest of the players’ wives didn’t know what else to do when their husbands met to play scrabble so they also started playing.

Mrs Chishty is a world record-holder for putting together the longest word — ‘COMPUTERIZATION’— that anyone can ever make in the game. It was a chance in a million or billion to have the right alphabet tiles and the mind to make such a word. First there was ‘RECOVER’ and she made ‘COMPUTER’ that ended on its ‘R’ to add ‘IZATION’ to it later.” The couple became known as the ‘first couple of scrabble’.

Mr Chishty also had a hand in coining the name for the world scrabble body while attending a meeting in Malaysia where the name World English Scrabble Players Association (WESPA) was suggested. PSA is affiliated with WESPA.

He also created a record by becoming the oldest playing member in the WSC held in Malaysia in 2003 where he ended up 83rd. In the earlier editions in 1993 in New York, he had bagged the 46th position and the 42nd in Australia in 1999. His record was broken by Mohammad Sulaiman, who came 20th in the 2007 WSC edition held in India. The current national champion Waseem Khatri finished 44th in the 2009 edition in Malaysia. It is a big thing to be placed in the top 50 and Waseem is still young and getting better and better.

Mr Chishty used to say that it is a scientifically-proven fact that scrabble is good for the aging as well as the young. He once told Dawn, “It keeps people in their seventies and eighties mentally active while preventing diseases such as Alzheimer’s and is good for the young from the education point of view. You never tire of it. It is like a healthy addiction.”

Scrabble was invented in the 1940s in the US by a gentleman called Alfred M. Butts. Initially no one was willing to market the board game so he used to make the sets by hand in his garage. Then one day the owner of Macy’s came across his creation and inquired if there was any place he could buy it from. There wasn’t. So realising that it had not yet been marketed, he decided to do it himself. And the game picked up from there. Mr Chishty’s family has a cherished handwritten letter from the late Mr Butts appreciating his efforts in promoting the game here and in Saudi Arabia before that. Mr Chishty passed away in 2011. The PSA holds an annual scrabble tournament, the Chishty Memorial Scrabble Tournament in his memory.

The PSA does not come under the Pakistan Sports Board. Not having any government support, they have to work at coming up with their own funding to run the association and hold events. The players traveling abroad to participate in the various championships have to raise their own funds. “Sometimes, there is help at hand like Mr Nadeem Omar, an ardent sports fan and a scrabble player as well, who sponsors some players. Mrs Avari, too, helps in whatever way that she can like she has helped with some players hotel stay at Avari Dubai Hotel for the forthcoming WYSC. Sometimes, our vice presidents pay for the travel and stay of the players who can’t afford to pay themselves but show promise. So we are getting by,” says PSA’s General Secretary Maria Soares.