‘Dileepan sir?’ the clean-shaven man asked in a respectful voice.

Dileepan lunged forward and grabbed the plastic bag.

‘Two parcels of two kilo each, sir,’ the man continued. ‘Twelve hundred rupees, altogether.’

Dileepan carried the plastic bag into the room set aside for the staff to eat their lunch and read their newspapers. He called two of his friends, people he looked upon with a great deal of respect, on the phone.

‘I have wild game, about a kilo,’ he said. ‘Do you want some?’

It was evident from his breathing that, for the first time in their relationship, he had the upper hand.

‘Tell you what. I’ll cook it myself and bring it over. You organize a bottle of something to drink.’

He then went to Gracykutty, the most attractive of all the clerks at the bank, and brought her quietly into the room. Wrapping up some meat, he put it in a separate bag and gave it to her.

‘Oh, you shouldn’t have bothered,’ she said politely.

‘No, no, take it,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to pay for it.’

Just then, Ramachandra Hedgan entered the room. ‘Dileepan, aren’t you an assistant manager?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Look at all these flies in your room!’

It was only when he was speeding home on his scooter, having taken the rest of the day off, that Dileepan remembered he had forgotten to wash the bloodstains off his hand. And there in front of him, near the traffic lights, right in the middle of a sea of vehicles, was a blue Maruti car. The moustached man sat in the back seat. The clean-shaven one was driving the car, and beside him sat a suspicious-looking young woman. Dileepan waved at them but they did not see him. Suddenly, two incidents that could happen in the next few days came to him.

One: Lunch hour at the bank where everyone sat together with their overfilled lunch boxes bursting forth like excited children.

‘These days you always have wild game meat,’ Minimol, who was famous for her fried clams, says. ‘What happened to your usual drumsticks and beans and aubergines?’

‘Come on, madam, you say that because you don’t know the value of drumsticks,’ Babukuttan’s innuendo makes everyone laugh.

Two: A headline in the next day’s newspaper. ‘Bank employee arrested for possession of illegal sambar deer meat.’ Accompanying the headline is his photograph in which he is dressed only in his underpants and is standing next to a plastic bag with his arms crossed.

Dileepan imagined surrendering to the police. It occurred to him that there was something honourable in such a picture, like a magician burning to death while completing a fire-escape trick, something people marvelled at, that set them wondering jealously why he had attempted such a feat.

Dr Prasannan sampled the meat. ‘Eating wild game is like the doctor having an affair with one of the nurses,’ he said, chewing on a piece. ‘It’s forbidden, and so you don’t want anyone knowing about it, but really you want the whole world to find out.’