Take It Deep

The asking rate is the only honest number in cricket. Almost nobody writes down the other half of the page.

Vetrivel Selvam grew up in the railway quarters at Villupuram Junction, ninety metres from a shunting yard, the son of a keyman who walked four and a half kilometres out and four and a half kilometres back every day looking for a fault the size of his thumb. He learned two things from his father: how to keep wicket, and how to write down what you owe on one side of a page and everything you still have on the other.

He had the best hands anybody in that town had seen. At seventeen a length of rail came down on his father's ankle, and Vetri worked out the number, and sat the Railway Recruitment Board examination, and became a travelling ticket examiner — the job everybody in his street privately called a failure.

What follows is twenty-six years of the work nobody sees: a black coat in thirty-nine degrees, a marriage that began badly and was repaired by arithmetic, a promotion that went to somebody else, a recurring deposit that nobody knew existed, an offer on a railway platform that would have solved everything, and three hundred and eleven days sitting at a desk in an office while a department decided whether he was a thief.

A quiet, exact novel about calm — and about the difference between being calm and being certain, which is that anybody can be calm while being calm is working.

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

Contents

• PART ONE — THE ASKING RATE
• 1. The Asking Rate
• 2. The Boy Behind the Stumps
• 3. Run Out for Nothing
• 4. One Hundred and Forty-Eight
• 5. One Hundred and Eighty-Three
• 6. The Last Over at Johannesburg
• 7. Kilometre Four Point One
• PART TWO — WICKETS IN HAND
• 8. The Examination
• 9. The Black Coat
• 10. The Second of April
• 11. What the Coat Is For
• 12. The Arithmetic of a Marriage
• 13. Passed Over
• 14. Thenmozhi
• PART THREE — THE PENULTIMATE OVER
• 15. Fifteen Centimetres
• 16. What Fifteen Centimetres Is
• 17. Nineteen Twenty-Nine
• 18. Four Hundred and Eighty Thousand
• 19. The Easiest Money in the World
• 20. The Recurring Deposit
• PART FOUR — TAKE IT DEEP
• 21. The Complaint
• 22. Three Hundred and Eleven Days
• 23. The Statement
• 24. Eighty-Four
• 25. Senior
• 26. Stand Where You Will Be
• Epilogue