Two Kinds of Brave

One of them is loud. The other one says sorry to a chair.

Tara Rajendran is right about almost everything and has never apologised for anything in her life. Arjun Krishnan is the boy nobody notices — the one who knows which water cooler is cold, and remembers your mother was unwell, and makes himself slightly smaller so everybody else has more room.

On a Tuesday morning a seventeen-year-old is stopped at an exam hall door because her fees are four thousand rupees short. Tara storms the office and is suspended for a week. Arjun quietly collects the money from forty-one students in a corridor — and arrives four minutes too late, because he stopped to count it twice.

Both of them were brave. Both of them failed. What follows is a year of buses, library steps, one ruined notebook held over somebody's head in the rain, and two people slowly learning the half of courage they were each missing.

Written in deliberately simple English. Short sentences, ordinary words, forty-two short chapters. Meant for anyone who wants a love story they can finish in two evenings — including readers for whom English is a second or third language.

Four parts, forty-one chapters and an epilogue.

Contents

• PART ONE — THE DOOR
• 1. The Girl Who Never Said Sorry
• 2. The Boy Who Said Sorry to a Chair
• 3. Four Thousand Rupees
• 4. Four Minutes
• 5. Forty-One People
• 6. Ninety Seconds
• 7. The Week She Was Suspended
• PART TWO — THE WRONG WAY AND THE SLOW WAY
• 8. The Notice Board
• 9. He Counts Twice
• 10. The Kind of Question She Did Not Like
• 11. The List of People Who Owe Him Nothing
• 12. Her Mother's Phone Call
• 13. What His Father Did
• 14. The First Time She Was Quiet
• 15. The Bus
• 16. Kathir
• 17. She Tries It His Way
• 18. He Tries It Her Way
• 19. The Beach
• PART THREE — LOUD AND SOFT
• 20. The Second Wrong
• 21. She Asks Him for Help
• 22. Two Plans
• 23. Nine Days
• 24. The Man With the Son
• 25. The Night Before
• 26. The Room With Twelve Chairs
• 27. What He Said to the Principal
• 28. The Sound of Her Not Shouting
• 29. Rain, and No Umbrella
• 30. The Thing She Would Not Say
• 31. He Waits
• PART FOUR — TWO KINDS OF BRAVE
• 32. Results Day
• 33. Ponni
• 34. What Her Father Said
• 35. The Apology
• 36. Sudhakar's Envelope
• 37. His Mother
• 38. The Day Before She Left
• 39. The Letter She Did Not Send
• 40. Four Hours Twenty
• 41. Two Kinds of Brave
• Epilogue