By the middle of the night, I picked up an umbrella and set out, alone, to fetch the veterinarian, Krishnan Namboothiri. I had to cross a few small canals that filled with water only in the rainy season, and cut across a deserted banana plantation to reach his quarters which were a couple of kilometres away. I shone my torch into the canal to see whether fingerlings of fish were coming up with the rising water.

I knocked at the doctor’s front door for a long time, and when it opened finally, it was not the doctor but a beautiful woman with thick, curly hair. Even her shadow seemed to be sparkling. I told her the reason for my visit so late in the night.

‘Thirumeni is in bed,’ she said, referring to the doctor with the honorific title reserved for his caste. ‘Drank until he vomited. Won’t get up now till it’s time to go to the temple in the morning.’

‘You must be his daughter,’ I said, lying shamelessly.

She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. ‘No,’ she said coyly. ‘I am his wife.’

‘Thirumeni was the one who gave the injection to impregnate the cow,’ I said, pulling the umbrella shut and climbing the step on to the veranda. ‘So much easier than in the old days when one had to search for a herd bull to do the deed.’

She laughed and went back inside the house, leaving the door partially open.

Human beings are strange creatures, I thought, as I walked home in the rain that had lost its vigour and become a faint drizzle, like chalk dust in a classroom. It was obvious that I was interested in her, and she in me. Then why didn’t she invite me in? Why didn’t I walk in through the door that she had suggestively left open? Oh, if only I had been born an animal! Never had a male buffalo been attacked by the brothers of a female of the species for showing sexual interest in her!

Lost in thought about how human beings had unnecessarily complicated the performance of a simple, basic human need, I came across what looked like a hunk of rock moving by the wayside. A turtle, a good-sized one, was swimming up from the rainwater spill. I had seen many floods and gone fishing several times but had never seen such a big turtle in my life. I picked him up, turned him over and held him in my right hand, lighting my way with the torch in my left. Like a newborn baby, he looked up at the lone star in the night sky and wiggled his arms, legs and head. My thoughts went back to the beautiful woman who was destined to live with a man who put his arm up the backsides of cattle for a living.

By the time I got back home, the cow was in dire straits.

‘Nothing we can do now, Devakiyamme,’ our neighbour Neelandan, who was an expert when it came to domestic animals, told my amma, carefully looking over the cow which was lying on her side with swollen udders.