By Jilawatan

It’s a tale of two girls from one city. In their chosen professional lives, it’s the best of times for one; the worst of times for the other. Saina Nehwal seems to be ascending the final steps to the acme of her sport, badminton. The other Hyderabadi of our story, Sania Mirza—earlier known as a tennis player but now essentially a celebrity who asks questions of contestants at beauty pageants, appears in advertisements or hotly denies endorsing gutka products in Pakistan—seems to inhabit a slippery spiral of decline.

The contrast between them was stark over the last few weeks. As India feted Saina for winning in a row three Super Series badminton titles—Indian Open Grand Prix, Singapore Open and Indonesian Open—and becoming the world No. 3, news trickled in that Sania, true to unfailingly indifferent form, had been knocked out of the first round at Wimbledon. The careers of the two girls, almost homonymic though made distinct by a pliable syllable in their names, are moving rapidly in opposite directions.

At 20, Saina has a world of success to look forward to. Sania, already India’s greatest ever woman tennis player at age 23, seems to be tragically puffing and plodding her way to the end of the road as a sportswoman. Once at a career high of No. 27 in the world rankings (in 2007); she’s now down to 111. She has had a troubled, uneven career, and is plagued by a persistent wrist injury. The buzz in the tennis world is that she’s going to find it very, very tough (read ‘impossible’) to reclaim the heights she reached five years ago.

Perhaps Sania knows that deep down in her heart. In early June, after winning her first match following her marriage to Pakistani cricketer Shoaib Malik, Sania said: “The distance between us is difficult. But we will be together for life hopefully, so two years isn’t long.” It seemed to imply that she’d play for only two more years. Before Wimbledon, Sania tweeted—the all-too-familiar trait of those on the verge of making their final bow (Shashi Tharoor, Lalit Modi)—that she “hadn’t imagined” she’d be “playing after marriage in the first place”. The irony is obvious: the career of a player who became an icon for the post-liberalised, newly confident Indian woman could dissolve into matrimony before 25.

To be fair to Sania, she has not had it easy—in her early teens she was lionised as a prodigy who had the groundstrokes to take on the best in the world. Fans and the media loved her attitude, her T-shirts and her nose-rings; those who manufacture and market image coopted her career into their own schemes to make profits. Sania was quite willing to play ball. Columnist Bachi Karkaria says, “Sania loved that status, played the role of a media darling very well. She loves the limelight, and she lends herself very well to it. She was like a breath of fresh air.” And then the inevitable happened—Sania began to court celebrity, says Karkaria, not the game. “Public appearances, media, the sound bites you have to give—this can interfere dramatically with your game.”

Sania somehow also attracted controversy, deliberately or unwittingly—orthodox Muslim clergy denounced her tennis skirts and for shooting an advertisement in a mosque; a case was filed against her for resting her feet next to the national flag on a table. Before her marriage to Malik, Sania was linked with actor Shahid Kapoor and engaged to another Hyderabad resident. The marriage with Malik was solemnised after an ugly spat, due to allegations that he was married to another girl from Sania’s hometown.

Perhaps there are lessons that Saina, who was born in Hissar, Haryana, and shifted to Hyderabad, can draw from the Sania Mirza story. For now, though, she’s doing all right. Right after winning tournaments, she’s known to be back in the gym early the next morning. “I’ve worked very hard on my game all my life after I started playing, and it’s not that I was looking for glory in the game—I love to work on my game,” she says. “It’s not easy, because doing it day in, day out, up to eight hours a day, needs a lot of discipline. But I like to do it.”It perhaps helps that her coach is P. Gopichand, the former All England champion who once refused an offer to endorse Coca Cola because he believes it’s not good for health. For one who possesses a robust game and a strong will, Gopichand is just the mentor who could help maintain her steely resolve. “There’s no time for euphoria,” Gopichand says of Saina’s recent successes. “We’ve achieved the targets we’d set for the year, but we’ve much work to do.”

There’s pressure on Saina, but happily, it seems it largely comes from within. “She tends to put pressure on herself because she expects too much from herself,” says Gopichand. Though she was mobbed at the airport on arrival after her three wins, the pressure from the media is lesser on Saina than was on Sania. “She’s not a celebrity-oriented girl, and is rather plain,” says Karkaria. But then, as they say, success accounts for a person’s sex appeal—and soon you are likely to have ad firms chasing Saina.

Tennis, of course, is a much larger sport than badminton on the world stage. Irrespective of the little she achieved, the advent of Sania, understandably, excited India. Not detracting from her achievements, you can’t deny that Saina has been winning tournaments relatively unknown in India, against nameless players of a sport not hugely popular in India. This, and the fact she’s not prone to a celebrity temperament, might be just the factor that will keep the Saina story so different from Sania’s.