I was blown away by his ignorance. ‘Those are not fantasies,’ I said. ‘Those are true stories.’

Joppan chettan nodded in agreement, and told us about the varaal fish he had met as a young man that had been almost as intelligent as a human being.

‘So now I’m the crazy person!’ spluttered Peter sir. ‘What do you boys know about life? Have you even been outside of Kerala?’

‘I’ve been to Kanyakumari and to Mysore . . .’

‘You’re almost thirty, aren’t you?’ Peter sir asked, pointing his walking stick with the gold-plated grip at my nose. ‘Have you even been with a woman yet?’

He caught me winking at Joppan chettan who had come over with a plate of the fried turtle meat. Furious, he began pacing, his chappals making a squeaky noise followed by a clap as they hit against his heels.

A crow, bearer of ancestral souls, sat on the pomelo tree in the yard. ‘See, he’s waiting for you,’ I said, pointing to it. ‘He doesn’t know that you are a Christian.’

The fight put me in a joyful mood because, when provoked, he would untie his bundle of old stories and place more bottles of alcohol on the table. He was the hero of many salacious stories that travelled from mouth to ear all across our village. We even had a saying—‘like a house where Peter sir has been’—to describe disrepute. In people’s reminiscences of their schooldays, he was either a monster from a nightmare or the object of extreme devotion. People above the age of fifty did not walk past his nutmeg orchard and front gate without deferentially lowering the second fold of their mundu. Like children peering into the tent of the snake charmer, they would turn their reverential gaze at Joppan chettan working in the yard and, sometimes, at me as I sat on the wall of the well, eating nutmeg skins dipped in salt.

Acting timid, I asked him the usual question that brought him out of his anger. ‘Your students called you “Tiger”, didn’t they?’

Patting his grey moustache into shape, he sat down on the chair with a slight smile on his lips. He stroked his chest, the hair sparse and muscles sagging, and opened his mouth and took a puff from his inhaler. I had heard the story of how Muttan Sunny—a rowdy in Pala known for knife fights—had given him that name at least fifty times.

‘Kids in schools were much older in those days, and there were strikes and agitations often. I didn’t usually get involved because as soon as they saw me, they would disperse and go back to class. But one day, everyone ran away except for Sunny who stood there and continued to call out the slogans.’

Peter sir bent forward, and with the same force from forty years ago, he roared into my ear: ‘Poda! Get to your class, now!’

A glass tumbler on top of the fridge jingled. In the few moments of silence that followed, only Joppan moved and continued stirring things in the kitchen.