ROURKELA: On Sunday night, after India’s match against the US at the Birsa Munda Hockey Stadium in the city, Jyoti Chhetri scanned the capacity crowd for a glimpse of her parents. Once she had spotted them, she smiled. At some level, the Chhetri story couldn’t be any more romantic. She was born inside the city’s main sports hostel at Panposh.

That hostel’s meat and drink is in ensuring kids who take up a hockey stick graduate summa-cum-laude (Dilip Tirkey, Prabodh Tirkey, Lazarus Birla and, recently, Amit Rohidas to name a few). She fell in love with the game. Now, the 20-year-old, already a World Cup silver-medallist in the inaugural Hockey 5s event last month, is strutting her stuff at the Stadium that’s about 10 minutes away by walk.

Chhetri’s smile, however, hides a grave problem her family faces in the immediate future: the genuine danger of being asked to vacate their home by the government. Soon after she was born in 2003, Bhim Singh, Jyoti’s father, moved out of the small hostel (he was working as a watchman when his daughter was born) quarters to a vacant piece of land right outside the hostel.