GG Perera

Sunil Perera managed a hill-country tea estate for four decades and filled the evenings with carrom and the game his father played, which had no cube in it at all. His hands are still exact. He almost never turns it, and he holds a position on the subject that he has never once been able to prove: the older version is the harder of the two, he says, because nothing can be bought back and nothing can be finished early. Younger members point at the equity tables. He reads all of it, agrees the arithmetic is against him, and does not shift a millimetre. He opened his first account here in 1998 and has been making the same argument ever since.