The Straight Drive

The straight drive is the only shot in cricket with no margin in it.

In November 1989, in a house on Solaiyappan Street in Kumbakonam with no television and a radio kept under a cloth, a retired mathematics teacher told his eight-year-old grandson that the boy batting in Karachi was the same age as the man who delivered the milk.

That was the whole of it. For the next eleven years Sundar Natarajan sat on the third step of that house with an old man and a transistor, and after the old man died there was a Bata shoebox on top of the almirah with a hundred and ninety newspaper cuttings in it that nobody had ever mentioned — and a one-rupee coin worn almost flat.

Sundar could not bat. He knew exactly what a good shot looked like from the age of eleven and his hands would never produce one, and he stopped playing at sixteen without anybody noticing he had gone. What he could do was want, at a distance of several thousand kilometres, about a man he never met, for twenty-four years.

His grandfather warned him at fifteen that a person who can only want must be very careful where the wanting goes, because it goes somewhere whether or not you choose. Four hundred men in a stadium in 1996 did not choose.

A tender, unhurried novel about devotion: a wife who never cared about cricket and understood it completely, twenty-one thousand four hundred rupees spent to stand in a street in Bombay in November 2013, a valve radio repaired four times in fourteen years by a man who never said why, and the thing a grandson worked out at forty-one that reorganises the whole of it.

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

Contents

• PART ONE — THE VOICE ON THE RADIO
• 1. The Straight Drive
• 2. The Fifteenth of November
• 3. Sialkot
• 4. Old Trafford
• 5. The One-Rupee Coin
• 6. The House with the Colour Set
• 7. Eden Gardens
• 8. The Boy Who Could Not Bat
• PART TWO — THE DESERT
• 9. Sharjah
• 10. The Twenty-First of May
• 11. Bristol
• 12. The Shoebox
• 13. Centurion
• 14. The Man Who Stopped Driving
• 15. Chennai
• PART THREE — THE MAN WHO LOOKED AT THE SKY
• 16. Bhuvana
• 17. The Twenty-Third of March
• 18. The Woman Who Did Not Care
• 19. Two Hundred
• 20. The Second of April
• 21. The Hundredth Hundred
• PART FOUR — TWENTY-FOUR SUMMERS
• 22. The Sixteenth of November
• 23. Outside the Ground
• 24. The Radio
• 25. The Years After
• 26. The Straight Drive
• Epilogue