Early the next morning, Dileepan took the bus, almost empty because it was a holiday, and travelled east. He placed the long package in his hand on the luggage rack above, and sat a few seats away, watching whether his fellow passengers were showing signs of curiosity. He had used up more than a month’s salary to secretly procure the locally made gun. By the time the sun was warm, the bus stopped at a junction—a depression where three hillsides met—with only a couple of shops. From there, he took a jeep, and after a couple of hours of travel, it left him at a footpath where he began his ascent into the forest.

He walked steadily on, stopping to pick a leaf and smell it, and listen to the call of the giant forest squirrel. As he climbed up a steep incline effortlessly, a little girl playing in the yard of a small house below a rocky outcrop looked up and smiled at him. In the old days, the only person that the woman of the house entertained was the hunter Uppayi. He wondered how the little girl was related to them.

Farther up, he came to the one-room house made of cement blocks. An elderly woman sat in the yard searching for something.

‘Thalle . . .’ He called her ‘old woman’ in his usual unsympathetic, leathery voice.

‘Did you bring anything?’ she asked, spitting out the chewing tobacco in her mouth. Happily, she grabbed the half bottle of cheap rum he had brought.

‘You’ve become fat!’ she said. ‘Like an ash gourd.’

He lifted the lids of a couple of pots in the room and peered in. ‘Haven’t you been catching and eating rats, thalle?’

‘Didn’t you say your whore of a wife was ashamed of it? So I stopped.’

After eating the kanji and mashed colocasia, he went eagerly to the back of the house. In the scant space behind the house stood a lonely murikku tree with fire-red flowers, and beyond that, the barrier put up by forest guards. He raised his gun and fired two shots into the forest beyond. A family of mongoose scampered away in the undergrowth. He imagined he was posing for a photograph with a smoking gun after having shot down a fearsome tiger, and that, after his death, his children would frame the photograph and hang it reverentially on the wall of his house.

maoist

Early in the morning of the day after the police knocked on Prabhakaran’s door asking questions about a bloodied poster that had appeared on the library wall and about a couple of stick-thin strangers from the forest who had turned up at a nearby house begging for rice, there was another knock.

‘Aiyo! Told you yesterday itself, didn’t I?’ Prabhakaran said, trembling. The lingering buzz of the alcohol he had imbibed the previous night escaped through the open window like the last breath from a dying body. ‘I’m not a Naxalite, never been one. I swear I don’t know Ajitha or Venu.’