He had barely finished speaking when they saw an amazing sight. The bull-buffalo jumped off the low stone stile of the adjacent compound, and ran, in a cloud of dust, into the yard right below where they stood. As soon as he saw them, he turned back and ran into a compound farther away next to a quarry. Confused, he trampled back and forth a couple of times. In less than a minute, almost fifty banana trees of the etha variety and around ten trellises of beans and paaval—crop that Paul had nurtured without even a touch of chemicals or pesticides, feeding them only cow dung, wood ash and jeevamrutham, a liquid fertilizer involving cow urine—lay destroyed on the trodden earth. Calling out an obscene word that put Kaalan Varky to shame, Paul grabbed whatever he could to use as a weapon and ran after the animal with murderous intent. Despite the grey hair on his chest, he had the energy of an eighteen-year-old from a disciplined lifestyle and nature-friendly food habits.

They pelted the buffalo with stones and tried to beat it with sticks, but Kaalan Varky had no idea how to catch and tether it. His anxiety increased when someone mentioned that if the buffaloes ran east for another two kilometres, they would enter the forest and be lost forever. Prabhakaran began reminiscing about the death of Varky’s father—who was also known as Kaalan—almost twenty years ago, and Varky listened with a deep sense of shock. It was on the day after one of his buffaloes had escaped into the forest. There was talk that his father’s father—Kaalan, as he, too, was known—had also died heartbroken over an escaped animal. What use was Kaalan, the God of Death, if an animal escaped his clutches?

As far back as anyone could remember, Kaalan Varky’s ancestors had been butchers. When, over eighty years ago, people from Pala travelled east to clear the forest and claim the land to farm, Varky’s grandfather had joined them. In those days, people liked to eat meat but they did not like to associate with the butchers who did the slaughter. At church, they were expected to stand, unobtrusively, in the back row. No one wanted to marry a butcher. Even Varky’s dead wife, Eli, had confessed to the priest that their first night together had made her want to vomit.

Varky’s grandfather did not join in with the other migrants to clear the forest or to cultivate the land. Instead, he built a roofless enclosure with wooden planks for walls, and slaughtered a buffalo or a pig on alternate fortnights. It was hard to make a living in the early days. When the forest was full of wild boar, wild buffalo and mouse deer, who wanted to eat the meat of domesticated animals! But Varky’s grandfather knew no other work, so he persevered. He personally delivered the meat, cut, cleaned and ready for the pot, to his fellow migrants’ houses, and accepted whatever they gave as payment—money, rice, root vegetables . . .