Back at the shop, Anthony’s weekly exertions would end only when he had dropped the moon-white bones stripped of meat into the waterhole to decay, buried the innards and other useless bits, thoroughly scrubbed the floor of the shop with coconut husk and soap as though getting rid of evidence of a murder, and sprinkled it with lemongrass oil. By then, sitting on a plastic chair out in the yard in front of the shop, Kaalan Varky would be halfway through a bottle of arrack. Cursing out Anthony’s long-dead mother and the pigs he reared lovingly on special feed, rooting around near the septic tanks, he would occasionally share a glass with Anthony.

No one knew which animal had run east and which to the south. By the time Varky organized a bunch of people, a terrible accident had taken place at the junction. The bundles of newspapers that should have reached homes in the early morning and two cylinders of milk that should, by then, have been at the milk society, lay strewn and spilled on the road. The confused milkman and the newspaper man, their bicycles broken and blood trickling from their elbows, described what had happened to the assembled crowd. At the sight of the charging buffalo, they had lost control of their bicycles and run headlong into each other, but they declared, in a unified voice, that he had tossed them aside with his horns.

‘We were standing over there, see, out of the way, but he came right at us and gored us,’ the milkman said.

‘It wasn’t the bull, it was the cow,’ the other man disagreed. ‘A rampaging bull-buffalo is more dangerous than an elephant.’

The crowd’s combined accusatory look generated another volley of obscenities from Varky, and he ran in the direction the buffalo had taken off. Raman, an erstwhile footballer whose job now was to bring the post from the nearby town, joined the chasers armed with a sickle.

‘Don’t you have to go get the post?’ Prabhakaran asked, panting.

‘How can I go when these two are loose? I’ll go tomorrow.’

‘Oh, what a remarkable buffalo!’ Prabhakaran exclaimed. ‘Ten minutes untethered and he has put paid to milk, newspaper and the post!’

They stopped at a house and looked suspiciously at the broken fence posts in front of it. The house belonged to Paul, a former Congress party activist who was now a farmer. Ignoring his lungs, overused and damaged by years of smoking, Kaalan Varky ran up the steps and knocked loudly on the front door. Paul opened the door immediately as though he had been waiting behind it. With his desiccated body that remained fatless even in advanced age, he looked like M.A. John, the veteran Congress leader.

‘Which way did he go, Paul?’ Varky asked him.

‘Why are you running after him, Varkicha? Let him go live in a forest,’ Paul said philosophically, folding his lungi up and stepping out. ‘Leave him in peace. He’ll live somewhere without troubling anyone.’