‘Why is he not planting tapioca? Is he going to live on rubber milk instead?’ they asked, laughing scornfully at him.

But when, over the following fifteen years, Kuriachan tapped the rubber, bought another couple of pieces of land with the proceeds, expanded his cultivation, and became the owner of a big house and a car, they began to think otherwise. By then, Kuriachan had become more prominent a personage than the heads of households with proud lineages, and although he knew nothing at all about matters other than agriculture, people began to pay heed to his opinions.

Kuriachan’s daughter’s engagement ceremony was fixed for the next day, a Sunday. She insisted she was not ready to get married, and spent hours talking secretly about higher studies to someone on her mobile phone. But Kuriachan’s bullish brain told him that she would change her mind once the engagement was over, even ask him why he had delayed getting her married for this long. Some fifteen guests were expected from the prospective bridegroom’s side from Kottayam. Kuriachan had invited only five or six people, including the parish priest, locally. Why give his hillbilly neighbours a chance to display their ignorance in front of the sophisticated Kottayam folk, he had thought. He would make up for it by inviting all and sundry to the wedding and give them a big feast, he told himself. The preparations for the engagement feast were well under way. His wife had already made a curry with motha, a type of kingfish. Two varieties of pickles had been maturing for the last week. The pulisseri would be made in the evening, and the thoran and the challas could be made quickly on the day itself. Kaalan Varky had promised to deliver the best cuts of a freshly slaughtered buffalo to be roasted with turmeric, chilli, coriander and market spices on a slow-burning wood fire, adding ground black pepper and slices of coconut towards the end. Cooked in a bit of pig fat to enhance the flavour until it developed a deep brown hue, the buffalo roast would grace the dining table, making all other curries and accompaniments irrelevant. The news of the runaway buffalo was worrying but he tried to console himself thinking that no four-legged animal had escaped forever from the two-legged one. Checking that the gate was securely bolted, he went back to his work.

It was almost noon, and yet the collective effort to capture the buffaloes had come to nothing. Anthony managed to lasso the bull twice but failed to bring him under control. Varky lost his footing trying to hold on to the rope, cut his forehead open and bruised his knees, and ended up on the veranda of a house where the womenfolk cooled him down with hand fans and gave him water.

Minute by minute, the list of property damaged by the animals became longer. Two autorickshaws, a number of bicycles, three or four hen houses, several vegetable patches, a car shed, countless containers of rubber milk . . . Watching the animals and the crowd running amok through the freshly planted rubber in the church compound, the parish priest rang the bells and made several phone calls to destinations unknown.