Hard Hands

Hard hands is the only fault in cricket caused entirely by wanting.

Arivazhagan Pandian grew up on the floor of his father's welding shop at Arasaradi in Madurai, doing his homework on a steel bench, learning before he was twelve that too much current puts a hole through the job and too little will not hold at all.

He was one of the best young batsmen in the district and one that nobody wanted to pick, because he could find the one true thing you were most afraid of in about a second and a half, and say it pleasantly, from twelve metres away, and then bat. It worked. That was the problem. Afterwards, every time, something in him went quiet for four hours.

At nineteen his father died at twenty past four in the morning, and Arivu — who had spent six years treating one famous innings as scripture — played the next day to prove that nothing could touch him, and made eleven, and discovered that grief is not transferable.

What follows is a workshop inherited too young, one sentence in a hardware shop that cost fifty-eight per cent of a business, a woman who said I cannot be the reason, an evening at a table with a ledger on it that cannot be repaired, and twenty-three Sunday mornings in a concrete yard catching a tennis ball until it stopped making a sound.

A hard, funny, unsparing novel about anger — and about the man who kept saying that the heat was never the problem, and died before anybody found out he was right.

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

Contents

• PART ONE — THE BOY WHO PUSHED
• 1. Hard Hands
• 2. Fourteen Amperes
• 3. Nagu Sir's Notebook
• 4. The Nose
• 5. Hobart
• 6. Coming Back
• 7. The Man Who Batted the Next Day
• PART TWO — TOO MUCH CURRENT
• 8. A Hundred and Thirty-Four Runs
• 9. The Boy Who Was Good
• 10. Arc Eye
• 11. Nine Hundred and Seventy-Three
• 12. The Trial
• 13. The Eleventh of November
• 14. Eleven
• PART THREE — THE HOLE BURNED THROUGH
• 15. The Shop
• 16. The Nineteenth of March
• 17. Undercut
• 18. Sudha
• 19. The Twelfth of June
• 20. Faking Intensity
• PART FOUR — SOFT HANDS
• 21. Twenty-Three Sessions
• 22. The Melur Road
• 23. Vasanth
• 24. The Boy Who Pushes
• 25. The Twenty-Ninth of June
• 26. Soft Hands
• Epilogue