The Late Cut

There is exactly one shot in cricket that you play after the ball has already gone past you.

Gopalakrishnan Subramani was born in Tirunelveli at eleven minutes past three in the morning, to a government clerk who left the house at eight-eleven for thirty-four years and who has described this, in public, on more than one occasion, as "late, even then."

Gopi was the best young batsman in his part of the district and was selected for precisely nothing. He missed a trial because his uncle had a batch on. He missed a team sheet by twenty minutes. He ran out eleven people, including a man of thirty-four in a final who never spoke to him again. And on the night India won a World Cup he stood at the bottom of somebody else's stairway for two hours and eleven minutes, because he had been dropped and was not invited up.

What he could do — and it took him until he was thirty-one to find out it was worth anything — was stand over a brass vessel of halwa for forty minutes and ignore the voice that arrives at thirty-four to tell you, in the tone of a reasonable friend, that this one is never going to come.

A warm, very funny, quietly devastating novel about being the talented one: a brother who rang every Sunday for seventeen years, an accountant who is early to everything and who put down her laptop at one in the morning to mention that there was a second job, four seconds in a hospital corridor, and two notebooks in which two different men wrote the single word Gopi and considered the matter fully explained.

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

Contents

• PART ONE — THE LIST
• 1. The Late Cut
• 2. Nine Minutes
• 3. The Halwa Shop
• 4. The First Entry
• 5. The Twenty-Fourth of September
• 6. The Best Player in Tirunelveli
• 7. Ravi
• 8. Not in the Fifteen
• PART TWO — TWELFTH MAN
• 9. The Terrace
• 10. Third Class
• 11. Deepa, Who Is Early
• 12. The Interview
• 13. Somebody Moved Him
• 14. The Room at Choolaimedu
• 15. Two Hundred and Sixty-Four
• PART THREE — OPENING THE BATTING
• 16. Four Hours Early
• 17. Two Hundred and Eight
• 18. Five
• 19. The Corridor
• 20. The Kindest Thing Anybody Has Said to Me
• 21. Thirty
• PART FOUR — THE LATE CUT
• 22. The Forty Minutes
• 23. The Twenty-Ninth of June
• 24. Tuesday Evenings
• 25. The Team Sheet
• 26. The Late Cut
• Epilogue