Proof Copy

A thing you have not said cannot be refused.

Chandran Sivagnanam is the best pair of eyes in Tamil publishing. He is a proofreader at a small house above a brass-lamp shop in Triplicane, and he can find the one wrong letter in three hundred pages. He is twenty-eight. He has been in love three times and has never once said so.

He calls it shyness, and so does everybody else, because shyness is a comfortable word. It is not shyness. Chandran has never been refused by anybody in his entire life — and he achieved that unbeaten record by never taking the field.

Then Aruvi Pathippagam commissions a bilingual edition, and the translator comes in one Thursday to argue about the forty-one queries he has put on her manuscript, and stays seven hours, and makes him say out loud — forty-one times — what he would have written instead. Nobody has ever made him do that.

What he does not know, because in nine weeks he has not asked her a single question about her life, is that Arundhathi Venkataraman leaves for a two-year fellowship in Delhi on the eleventh of March.

He finds out on the ninth of January, which leaves sixty-one days — and his very first act, within four hours, is to draw up an excellent and considerate plan explaining why fifty-five of them are unsuitable.

A dry, funny, exact novel about the difference between two outcomes that look identical on paper; about eleven seconds on a Tuesday afternoon that did for fourteen months of being nearby; about a mother who said it first, in 1988, on a step; and about the proofreader's mark that means I corrected this, and I was wrong to, and it stands.

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

Contents

• PART ONE — FIRST PROOF
• 1. A Man Who Notices Everything
• 2. Kalaivani, Second Row
• 3. The Thing About Never Being Refused
• 4. Five Months, As It Turned Out
• 5. What He Told Himself Instead
• PART TWO — SECOND PROOF
• 6. Aruvi Pathippagam, First Floor
• 7. Fourteen Months of Being Nearby
• 8. The Terrace at Six
• 9. Vasanth Asked Her on a Tuesday
• 10. He Was Extremely Gracious About It
• 11. Deleatur
• PART THREE — THE MARGIN
• 12. The Translator
• 13. Three Kinds of L
• 14. What a Sentence Is For
• 15. The Marina, Which He Hates
• 16. His Mother Asks Him Something
• 17. The Eleventh of March
• 18. Sixty-One
• 19. The Arithmetic of Saying Nothing
• PART FOUR — STET
• 20. Hari's Advice, Which Was Terrible
• 21. Two Outcomes That Look Identical
• 22. Kalaivani, Nine Years On
• 23. The Caret
• 24. In Daylight, Asking for Nothing
• 25. The Question Nobody Had Asked Him
• 26. Stet
• Epilogue