On the day Jogayya was getting ready to kill the bull calf, his son Bhanu was home from college on a week’s break. As his father approached the calf, Bhanu looked up from the book he was reading. ‘Let him be, Appa,’ he said. ‘Don’t kill him.’

Jogayya looked at his son. Twenty years old and of no particular use to anyone, and always with his head in a book. He muttered something lovingly and walked away. The day after the young man went back to college, Jogayya returned from the field, and forgetting that his son had already left, called out: ‘Bhanu . . .’ The bull calf came bounding up to him. Jogayya looked at him curiously, scratched his head and petted him. From then on, Jogayya and his wife called him ‘Bhanu’ and fed him lovingly and lavishly. Even after the mother buffalo’s udders dried up and eventually she died, the fattened bull calf frolicked unfettered across the fields and the farmyard.

Exactly two years later, a green-painted jeep rode around the village asking for Jogayya and finally arrived in his compound. Assuming they were people from the bank come to demand the repayment of the loan, Jogayya’s wife began wailing while he stood bowing apologetically.

‘Where’s your son?’ asked a stocky man in a black shirt and dark sunglasses.

‘He’s studying, sir. In Delhi. Not working yet . . .’

‘He’ll make work for us,’ the man said. He caught Jogayya by the fastening of his lower garments and squeezed his loins. ‘Tell that scoundrel to come to the police station.’

The next market day, Jogayya tied a rope around Bhanu’s neck and took him to the auction.

‘Don’t sell him to butchers,’ he whispered in the auctioneer’s ear. ‘There might be someone who would want to raise him?’

It was 4 a.m. The market was buzzing with people with banknotes stuffed in their waistbands, vendors selling black tea, lorry drivers and cattle. Money exchanged hands in the faint light, and people held the notes up to the dim bulbs and flickering lamps, examining them suspiciously.

‘For sure . . .’ said the auctioneer.

Cattle buyers stood around the plump and gleaming Bhanu, enthusiastically making bids. As the sun rose, Bhanu walked up a ramp into a large truck along with tired, old cart oxen and elderly buffaloes. Two or three hours later, the truck stopped at another market and loaded up another bunch of animals. Among them was a female buffalo, younger and with a more supple and gleaming body than Bhanu.

‘You have your work cut out,’ the driver told Bhanu, smirking suggestively as he poked a stick up the cow-buffalo’s anus and manhandled her into the truck. ‘The two of you can make out until you get there.’

Kaalan Varky walked hurriedly with Prabhakaran to the spot from where the buffaloes had broken free. ‘Ran off just now, the two of them!’ he said. ‘One to the east and the other to the south.’ They had no specific plan in mind to catch the beasts. Prabhakaran had, for no particular reason, brought the cane he used to scare his children. And as is ubiquitous in crisis situations, he had wrapped a cotton towel around his head.