Varky unleashed a chain of swear words and declared that the two animals were in heat. ‘Not one buffalo has escaped from me till today. Now see, two of them together! The bull got loose first. As he was running away, the cow-buffalo bayed, and he came right back and got her off her tether with his horns.’

Amazed, Prabhakaran gaped at him.

‘You could have stopped him, Varkicha, couldn’t you?’ he asked stupidly, and was rewarded with another obscene word from Varky.

‘Who can stop a raging buffalo? Your father? I thrashed him good on his hump but he hooked me with his horns and tossed me aside. See . . .’ Varky showed Prabhakaran the scrapes on his legs and arms.

‘Where was Anthony?’

‘Don’t talk to me about that darling son of a bitch. One rain and he disappears for two days. Must be on some canal bank with his fishing net.’

Varky had barely finished when Anthony ran up a short, steep lane, and stood before them. Two lengths of tether ropes were coiled around his arm. Varky gave him an earful as though Anthony had personally untied the buffaloes and let them loose. Anthony’s shins and feet were covered in gloopy mud as though he had just stepped out of a canal. Blood trickled from a small wound below a knee, caused perhaps by a sharp stone or a thorn, but he seemed unconcerned about it. Another bellow from Varky sent him running eastwards looking for signs of the buffalo. Producing a strange siren-like sound from deep within their throats, Varky and Prabhakaran ran southwards.

Having been expelled from home by his father, Anthony had grown up eating jackfruits and mangoes that were plentiful from the month of Kumbham, and doing odd jobs here and there when the season was over. He had started working as a helper in Kaalan Varky’s butcher shop five or six years ago. One busy Sunday, when Anthony came to buy the potti—bones and knuckles for the toddy shop—Varky put him to work chopping the meat. After that, Anthony presented himself at the butcher shop at 3 a.m. every morning to help with the day’s slaughter. When the sun rose and the man from the chai shop brought them their breakfast—kallappam and egg curry—he ate it without wiping the blood off his fingers. When the cook from the vicarage or other local dignitaries came to the shop, Varky would cut a large chunk of prime meat, trim off the fat and sinew, and chuck it towards Anthony, who would dice it with a sharp knife into neat little pieces that could almost be eaten raw, pack it in plastic bags and deliver it to their vehicles. The portions sent to the convent and the toddy shop were ‘seconds’ mixed with fat, tongue and other offal. Anthony set upon them somewhat cruelly, hacking them mercilessly on the wooden chopping block, careless about the shape or the size of the bits. By 11 a.m., when the work quietened somewhat, he would set out on a bicycle with several portions of meat wrapped in teak leaves. These were to be delivered to the houses of a few Nairs and Ambalavasis who, for some unknowable reason, considered going to the butcher shop to buy their own meat beneath their dignity. Varky routinely took advantage of their lack of experience in telling good-quality meat from the inferior. Mindful of their wishes, Anthony would avoid the front entrance of their properties, and go in through the back to the pot placed on the kitchen step, and deposit the meat parcels surreptitiously in them. At that moment, long, lustful sighs would escape from the houses in anticipation of the fragrance that would emanate as the meat cooked in a watery gravy of onions, coconut milk and spices.