Friends to Love

Everybody knew. That was the problem.

Anandhi Sekar was born eleven days before Kathiravan Subramani, in the same railway hospital, to two men who worked in the same workshop and had never spoken to each other. They were allotted quarters in the same row of the Golden Rock colony at Tiruchirappalli, with one wall between them — and in 1998 a tennis ball knocked a brick out of that wall, and for the next twenty-two years the hole in it carried a comb, a wrong answer, a strip of paracetamol at two in the morning, and one envelope that was never delivered.

When they were twelve, a woman with a tray of flowers said something in a wedding hall that made eleven women laugh for four seconds. It took three years to become a fact and sixteen to become a cage.

Anu goes on to become a station master — a woman with absolute authority inside a defined space, whose yes is a yes and whose no stops four thousand tonnes. Kathir stays in the workshop and repairs things, because a hinge cannot say no to you.

And at twenty-seven, with two fathers on a telephone choosing a month for her wedding, Anu discovers that she cannot find a single memory of having decided anything — and asks for a transfer four hundred kilometres away, to a branch line in Kerala where nobody has ever heard of her, to find out whether she misses him or misses being told about him.

A slow, funny, stubborn novel about being guessed instead of asked; about a man who could carry a girl nine hundred metres but could not tell a nurse what had happened to her; and about eleven seconds on a wet platform at two minutes past six in the morning, which is the first time in twenty-eight years that anybody waited.

Set in Tiruchirappalli. Twenty-six chapters and an epilogue.

Contents

• PART ONE — THE SAME ROW
• 1. Eleven Days Apart
• 2. The Brick That Came Out in 1998
• 3. Seven-Thirty and Four O'Clock
• 4. What He Did About the Water Tank
• 5. A Joke Made by Somebody's Mother
• 6. The Year Everybody Decided
• 7. The Letter He Did Not Give Her
• PART TWO — TRANSFER ORDER
• 8. Two Hundred and Six Kilometres
• 9. Things That Fit in an Envelope
• 10. The Terrace, and Her Mother Calling
• 11. Apprentice
• 12. Assistant Station Master, Grade Two
• 13. The Trains She Was Allowed to Stop
• 14. What He Was Going to Say in December
• PART THREE — EVERYBODY ALREADY KNOWS
• 15. Ward Four, Bed Eleven
• 16. Congratulations
• 17. The Saree She Did Not Order
• 18. A Feeling You Were Issued
• 19. The Transfer She Asked For
• 20. Nothing Left to Fix
• 21. Eleven Months of Working Properly
• PART FOUR — HANDING OVER CHARGE
• 22. Twelve Years Late
• 23. A Date and a Train Number
• 24. Night Shift
• 25. Four Minutes Between Trains
• 26. Handing Over Charge
• Epilogue