Presently, as though ordained by God himself, the land witnessed the complete fall from grace of two of its prominent personages even as one of its lesser citizens emerged from a life of insignificance as though rising from a disused well with the brilliance of the morning sun. The first prominent personage was the leader of the Farmers’ Party, a man who presented himself in all crises as a problem-solver. When people went to his house to ask for his help in solving the problem of the buffaloes, he refused to come out and meet them, and sent his wife to the front door to run them off. The second was a retired colonel, a quiet man who caused no harm to anyone. People had long believed, although he had never once made such a claim himself, that he was in possession of a gun. Even burglars left his house alone. In this moment of grave crisis, he, too, let them down, and declared once and for all that retired soldiers were not legally allowed to take their guns home. He promised them a bottle of alcohol from the monthly quota he received from the army as an ex-serviceman, but his fellow countrymen booed in his face.

The man who rose into eminence was an erstwhile small-time rowdy, a man people called ‘Peshakan’ Shanku—Shanku the Quarrelsome. A few altercations and knife fights had earned him a reputation around thirty years ago. At one point, he began boasting about a murder he had committed. The police picked him up and worked him over, and he had been resting and recuperating ever since. Everyone hated him, especially women, as it was said that he peeped into bathrooms and grabbed their gold ornaments in the cover of darkness. But now, entirely unexpectedly, Peshakan Shanku rose to the occasion, and took over the leadership of the hunt for the escaped animals. Selecting a few of the bravest men, he organized the unruly crowd into two groups, setting one group after each animal, and sent a third group, led by Anthony, in a different direction.

Soon, the groups, under the leadership of Peshakan Shanku and Anthony, closed off all the lanes leading to the forest. Frustrated, one of the animals which had headed east ran back into the junction. Maddened by the shower of stones, he destroyed two paan shops. At the market in the middle of the junction, the crowd had him surrounded. A Tamilian moneylender who arrived once a week to collect the interest from the women in the shops and households he had lent money to, a man known locally as Saturday Man, suddenly found himself in the middle of the melee. He was, by nature, uninterested in anything other than his moneylending business, and had only peeped out to see what was happening, but some conniving person made good use of the occasion and pushed him in front of the enraged buffalo. In the ensuing confusion, the buffalo rammed through the human wall surrounding him and escaped. On the way, he trampled over the martyr’s memorial that had been recently erected by the Communist Party, built in the traditional communist style with wooden planks, a red cloth and a pike that pointed sharply towards the sky.