For a very long time, he has only been a quiz question - name the first captain of the Indian football team. Quiz geeks and football nerds ace the answer, remembering and pronouncing it differently. T Ao. Tay Ao. Dr Tay. Te Ao. From Nagaland.And there, more often that not, would end the short story of a short name.The story of Dr Talimeren Ao, captain of Mohun Bagan and India, flag bearer of the Indian Olympic contingent at the 1948 London Games, and still perhaps the most famous Naga. A phantom figure who hovers over the football history of free India, his footprints have faded but the name is resonant and powerful in the collective memory of his people.They stage two football tournaments in his name. In Assam, where Talimeren grew up, there are two sporting venues named after him - an indoor stadium in Cotton College, Guwahati, where he studied, and an outdoor venue in Kaliabor, east of the Kaziranga National Park.At a time when the ISL, Indias high-profile football league, has a team called NorthEast United near the top of the points table, its worth re-telling the story of the regions first footballing hero.?At the beginning, there will always be Talimeren. The name means the all-glorious or all-mighty in the Ao language and, at 5ft 10in, he had the physique to back it up. Talimeren was a dominating presence in midfield and defence for nine seasons at Mohun Bagan (1943 to 1952), and a team-mate of Sailen Manna and Taj Mohammed at the London Olympics.Talimeren was to give up competitive football to pursue his medical career during the early years of independent India, returning home to Kohima as an assistant civil surgeon at the Civil Hospital in 1953. He retired as Nagalands Director of Health Services in 1978, and died in 1998 at the age of 80.That is merely biography. It is not the life a man lives.In black and white photographs, Talimeren is distinctive. Sitting with his 1948 team-mates, he is tall, angular, with high cheekbones and a steady gaze, arms crossed; all the players are shoeless, wearing socks or tape in the style that made much news.Around him and about him though, the information is on the whole scrappy; this 2015 article from Scroll is the most detailed account of his life. Given that more than one-third of Indias professional footballers at the highest level come from the NorthEast, the story of their spiritual father remains mostly unknown.My mother is the only surviving keeper of the record of what he did, says Dr Aos elder son, Talikokchang, 58. He is driving us along a bumpy road, through Dimapurs grey-beige haze, to the family home outside the main town.Deikim Doungel, a nurse at the Kohima Civil Hospital where she met the handsome, young Dr Ao, is now 87. She lives with Ningsangenla Tally, the eldest of their four children, in Kohima, in a house containing Talimerens trophies and medals. They do not entertain visitors anymore, having seen dozens come and go with unfulfilled promises. When in Dimapur as part of events with her church group, she returns to the home she shared with Talimeren and sometimes her two sons chat about their father.Talikokchang, short-formed into Akok, runs a school named after their formidable grandfather, Reverend Subongwati Ningdari, who in many ways, shaped Talimerens life. At the Rev. Subongwati Memorial School, as part of the state syllabus, the Class 9 English textbook features a chapter on Talimeren.His second son Indianoba, four years younger, is an engineer in the government power department. The youngest child, Bendangmenchetla Bendang, a former badminton player who married her mixed-doubles partner, belongs to Kohima too. Shes also visiting and, more shy than her siblings, hangs back from the conversation but joins in occasionally to fill in details.Its an implausible odyssey, an enormity of achievement over a short span of time while straddling a vast geography.From the hilltop village of Changki in the Ao tribes homeland of Mokokchung in Nagaland, to leading out free Indias first Olympic contingent in London, Talimeren traversed villages, towns, cities and nations. He returned home to Kohima where, in 1963, he witnessed the creation of a state called Nagaland. Today, in the still-simmering demand for autonomy and assertion of identity in the state, Talimeran Ao remains an exceptional kind of Naga.Football is central to his storyline. The sport found its way into his life at the age of six or seven, after the Baptist Reverend Subongwati moved his family from Changki to Impur, also in Mokokchung, as part of his missionary work.Talimeren, the fourth of his 12 children, took to football in the mission compound, not with a real ball but one made of cloth scraps, or sometimes with a wrapped-up pomelo, a grapefruit variant.Without the pace and bounce of the real ball, control became part of the foots natural response on small grounds that often had 10 or more teams playing simultaneously in post-s