Kuruppu went to visit Victor once. The puppy had grown and put on weight from the steady diet of meat at the police camp, and was being sent to the Tekanpur BSF Academy in Gwalior for training. Victor barked at Kuruppu as though he was a complete stranger. His gleaming body and long, sharp fangs terrified Kuruppu, and he concluded that the dog had not recognized him. But Victor was not the type to forget anyone he had seen once.

By then, Kuruppu had lost his beloved Arthur. A man named Kuttayi, a haystack builder by occupation, had kidnapped him. On that fateful day, Arthur, only a month old, had been busy attacking an immature coconut that had fallen on the paved lane in front of the gate. He had grown up faster than the rest of the three puppies, and had even started to bark at things.

‘I’m taking him, you son of a . . .’ Kuttayi had said, picking up the puppy by the scruff of his neck and stuffing him into a bag, while aiming a string of obscenities at Kuruppu and his mansion. ‘I’ll give him yours and my father’s name—Adam.’

With a thin birthmark on the left side of his neck and a gait with arms swinging, Kuruppu’s father Sankarappillah—locally known as Adam Sankarappillah—had resembled Kuttayi more than Kuruppu. Adam Sankarappillah and Kuttayi were proof of the fact that children born out of wedlock inherited more genetic material from their fathers than those born legitimately within the marriage bond. Sankarappillah had acquired the nickname ‘Adam’ after being caught running out of the back door of the convent, as naked as the day he was born. Adam Sankarappillah was said to have kicked his father to death. Like him, Kuttayi, too, had, in a moment of uncontrollable rage, dragged his on-the-record father, Avaraan, off his bed and stamped him to death. And although he did not emulate his birth father’s proclivity for night-time shenanigans, he had abandoned his wife and now lived alone in a shack in some unclaimed land beyond the fields. He went to church only during the annual festival. Harvest time was the only time he was visibly happy. As though to establish his undocumented paternity, he cut down coconuts and the best bunches of banana from Kuruppu’s groves in broad daylight. And whenever his heart brimmed over with sorrow, he got drunk, went to the gate of Kuruppu’s mansion and hurled obscenities at the house.

Kuttayi tied Arthur—who was now Adam—to a poovarash tree by the side of the canal next to his house. When, unable to recognize it as food, Adam refused to eat the dried bits of tapioca he was given, Kuttayi yanked him up by the rope around his neck, held him dangling in the air, broke off a stick from the tree and beat him thoroughly, and then starved him for two days. By the third day, having endured the relentless night rain, Adam caught a fever, and half a dozen forward-planning blowflies arrived to buzz hopefully around him.