This is the Asian Games in the land where cabbage is king and calling estranged neighbours home is the flavour of the season. You can't escape Korea's famous kimchi or even the feel-good South Korean vibes radiating towards their visiting brethren from the North. In this scenario of reunion and rehabilitation, the Indian performance has been powered by Family.

ATHLETICS: Saha (above) won the 200 m and Sunita Rani made a stirring return to the track, winning the 1,500 m

It's said that in the great Indian families, the centrifugal force rests in the figure of the mother. At the Busan Asian Games, after a first week ridden with disappointment, India's challenge came together in the form of its women athletes who hauled in the gold and set records. In a single day, three women won gold, doubled India's tally of athletics golds from the 1998 Bangkok games and gave the country more of this precious metal than in any other Asian Games since Delhi 1982. In a signature move that is patented by Indian sport, one of those women, Sunita Rani whose victory was the most emphatic of all, almost didn't make the trip to Korea at all (see box).

DISCUS THROW: Neelam Jaswant Singh produced her personal best and a Games record to win her first ever Asian gold

Reality will bite later, when the expectations and stakes get higher and the competition tougher, but in Busan the Indian athletes team pulled the national contingent out of some grim early days and towards a heady finish.

For India's fractious sporting family, it has been a tale of sacrifice, adoption, brotherhood and sibling rivalry. After K.M. Beenamol strikes it rich in the 800 m, not to be outdone, little brother K.M. Binu runs the race of his fledgling career and, in the most surprising finish for India, ends up with silver in the men's section. A family from the hilly Ikkudi district of Kerala, where there isn't a proper road leading to their village of Kombotinjhal, has brought India three Asian Games medals.

GOLF: Golfer Shiv Kapur won India's first gold in Busan in blustery conditions. It was the first gold for Indian golf in 20 years.

No ordinary obstacle could stop Robert Bobby George reaching out to give his own small family everything he thought it needed. He gave up a love of his life-long-jumping-for the love of his life: wife Anju. "I stopped jumping because I could not focus full-time on her career," he says simply. Bobby now is always almost on the edge when Anju jumps in competition. She set off the gold rush for India, winning gold on the first day of the athletic competition.

Ask the tall, slender Anju if her hugely technical event, the long jump, needs more decorated coaches and she laughs and replies like the good Indian wife of the fables, "There is a foreign coach for jumps, but I would rather listen to my husband." Today the couple plan to try out the Grand Prix and indoor season in Europe in the winter.

HOCKEY: India launched the defence of its Asian Games title riding on the genius of their controversial veteran Dhanraj Pillai

Times have been kind to the Georges; for another sporting couple Busan brought an end to hard time: Jaswant Singh, husband and coach to discus thrower Neelam, watched her turn her Bangkok bronze medal win into gold in Busan and throw her personal best. The quietly fiery Neelam told journalists after collecting her medal, "You have all been unkind to me, always saying that I only performed at home. This should set the record straight."

It was also the only score sprinter Saraswati Saha wanted to settle in Busan. "I will not return empty-handed," she had told her family. A painful hamstring almost caused her to limp out of the race before the home stretch but she ran and ran-and at the end limped away to the dressing-room to call to Kolkata to her husband.

GOLF: Golfer Shiv Kapur won India's first gold in Busan in blustery conditions. It was the first gold for Indian golf in 20 years.

Some families adopt: in 1992 coaches Dr Kuntal Roy and his wife Shubraja took in a confused, gawky teenager. Soma Biswas came to Shubraja with the desire to be a high-jumper after she was discarded by a SAI scouting programme. When Kuntal returned from Germany after a doctorate in sports coaching, his wife told him she had almost given up trying to shape Biswas into any kind of athlete. "She had no speed, no power," he remembers. Today she is Asian Games silver-medallist in the heptathlon, a gruelling seven-event competition. Her first phone call after completing her last event was to Shubraja. "I've instructed her parents not to call her up often. She has no social life, no boyfriends," says Kuntal. "At times, I feel bad. But then I have to do it." To be a heptathlete you have to be a monk first.

LONG JUMP: Anju Bobby George leapt to 6.53 m, good enough to open up India's gold account in athletics

The air in Busan does strange things even to the quarrelsome Indian hockey team which came together like never before, putting out the challenge of Pakistan in a high-tension semi-final. The Indo-Pak match was a grudge game and an encounter of the highest order. Hard-edged competitiveness and gamesmanship replaced good-natured bonhomie and mutual respect. Only Dhanraj Pillai could manage to assimilate both in one gesture. During the pre-match warm up, Pillai went to retrieve a ball from Pakistani territory, glared at the Pakistani bench, waved his stick menacingly, said a few words, waited for moment and then broke out into a laugh.

Sitting in the stands, Asif Bajwa, the Pakistani assistant coach, had a blueprint of the game plan for India. On a map of the world that is their field, he had designated two figures next to the name of Pillai. But still they couldn't stop him scoring two goals. For once, a young team responded to the genius of their ageing lion. "I have never seen a goal like this in my 14 years of playing. Never seen one, never scored one like that ever," Pillai said of Gagan Ajit's Singh's match-winner-one of those he had accused of not passing the ball to him in the previous match versus Pakistan. Once the old enemy was vanquished, all was forgotten and forgiven.

As long as the wins kept coming, all was sunny. But questions must be asked of those who returned empty-handed. After the euphoric Commonwealth Games in July, pistol-shooter Jaspal Rana had bluntly ruled out chances of a medal in Busan. He did not disappoint, but that is not a reason. More will be asked of the shooters in Athens and their response must be more convincing. The heavy-handed discipline of weightlifting continued to churn out rumour and innuendo. A member of the ad-hoc body that runs Indian weightlifting had allegedly written a letter to the Sports Ministry, asking for permission not to field a team in Busan. In the face of two positive dope tests at the Commonwealth Games, it was believed the Indian weightlifters didn't quite have the "confidence" to take their best shot in Busan. After all, Leo Tolstoy did say that while all happy families were the same, all unhappy families were unhappy in their own way.

The Asian Games usually bring good news. Now if only someone figured out how to do the same at the Olympics.

(Siddharth Saxena is correspondent of The Hindustan Times, Delhi)