‘Something significant must have happened for him to change like this,’ said the second man, sounding uncertain. ‘He seems to have been able to live two entirely different lives.’

Stories abounded about Thambi, the subject of their discussion, especially about the man he was thirty years ago. At present, Thambi lived a more or less monotonous life like everyone else. But thirty years ago, he was known around Kaliyaar town by the name ‘Maadan’, the same name that was given to a solitary tusker in the forest around. Just as the elephant would come out of the forest every two months or so to rampage through the fields and destroy shops and cattle barns, Thambi too would come into town, on foot or in a bullock cart, to wreak havoc. The moment they heard ‘Maadan is about’, people quickly shut their shops and disappeared without waiting to find out whether it was the elephant or the man.

One time, the Tamilian workers in the estate got together with a newly arrived labourer, a man who looked like a karimbhootham, a dark-skinned ogre, and set upon Thambi, attacking him from all sides like an army of ants.

‘This will be the end of Maadan,’ said those who watched the attack. ‘He can’t fight back. Look, he can barely get a foothold!’

Thambi had arms that reached well below his knees, with palms thick with calluses. He managed to free one of them and swing it like a spade. The Tamilians had to carry the karimbhootham, first hoisted on a bamboo pole and then loaded into a bullock cart, all the way to Thodupuzha, from where he was taken to a hospital in Kottayam.

The doctor, a native of Pooppara, examined the karimbhootham’s shattered face. ‘Don’t lie to me,’ he said to the karimbhootham’s friends. ‘I too am from the High Range. There’s no way this was done by a human being. He must have gone into the forest and encountered a bear.’

It was this Maadan Thambi who had changed, overnight and for no discernible reason, and become an entirely different man. He was a loan shark but he stopped enforcing the pay back of interest. When some of his borrowers returned the money without being asked, he took back only the original loan. He gave up his goonda activities, and stopped beating people up and demanding protection money from businesses. His cruel face, adorned with an unruly moustache and stinking of stale tobacco, rearranged itself into one as tranquil as that of a bunny rabbit, and he began speaking in a low, mild voice. Instead of bothering people, he took to working on the three–four acre piece of land that he had inherited. He would wake up early in the morning to clear it to plant tapioca and sprout the rubber seeds he had collected from the estate in polythene bags. He also contained his drinking habit, and now indulged in only a couple of pegs in the evenings.

Big-time rowdies usually changed their ways only if something calamitous happened to them. Nothing of the sort had happened to Thambi, and people were suspicious of his apparent transformation. So, for quite some time, they continued to avoid him and shuttered their shops if they saw him in town. As with things they could not understand, they began spreading several stories about Thambi’s transformation. One story was that, like his dead father, Thambi too had lost his mental balance. Another unbelievable story suggested that someone had castrated him as he lay unconscious after a long bout of drinking, and this story began to gain traction, at least among some people, when he continued to remain unmarried. It would be another two or three years before someone, a new rowdy coming up through the ranks, would be brave enough to confront Thambi. The younger man was said to have beaten him at a place near Thodupuzha, and people said that Thambi’s reaction was to offer him his other cheek, which the newcomer slapped obligingly.