The Cafeday Incident

He was ten rupees short. She lied to his face to save him.

Every weekday at eight-forty, Aravind Selvan lifts the sticking glass door of a failing café on the wrong end of Kamaraj Road, sits at the fourth table by the window, and pretends to have a job. He has been doing it for eleven weeks. His mother watches him leave the house at a quarter past eight in an ironed shirt and does not know that the firm closed in June.

Meera Rajan works the morning shift. She has catalogued every regular in the place and given them names, and she worked out what was wrong with Aravind in his third week, because employed people do not check the price board.

Then on the first of September, in the rain, in front of a queue, the price of a filter coffee goes up by ten rupees — and Meera invents an entire public institution in four seconds flat to keep one man from having to say out loud that he cannot pay.

What follows is a slow, funny, stubborn love story about two people who are magnificent at giving help and completely incapable of taking it: a jar with a slot cut in the lid, a rejection letter holding up a table leg, a steel box under a cot with a degree inside it, and one very important argument on a footpath about the difference between charity and partnership.

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

Contents

• PART ONE — THE REGULAR
• 1. The Arithmetic of Eight-Forty
• 2. Names for the Regulars
• 3. The Threshold
• 4. Nineteen Days
• 5. The Steel Box
• 6. Ten Rupees
• 7. Four Hundred and Ten Men
• 8. Credit, Which Is Respectable
• PART TWO — THE ARRANGEMENT
• 9. The Door Has a Vote
• 10. Eleven Hundred Hands
• 11. Square Tables
• 12. One Umbrella
• 13. A Collar Is a Collar
• 14. The Thirty-First
• 15. Library Dust on His Cuffs
• PART THREE — THE BREAK
• 16. The Letter Comes Out
• 17. Eighty-Two Thousand
• 18. Well Wisher
• 19. A Slip in a Jar
• 20. The 6:15
• 21. Thirty-Eight Years
• PART FOUR — THE RETURN
• 22. The Escalator Faces a Wall
• 23. Pass
• 24. The Ask
• 25. The Eleventh of July
• 26. Four Hundred Metres North
• Epilogue