Clad only in a pair of shorts, Sudheer was on the terraced roof enjoying the mild westering sun when he heard a racket and looked down. In a rising cloud of dust, two buffaloes raced through the compound in which he had never set foot, and a large crowd chased after them. The scene looked like something out of a foreign-language film. Sudheer filmed it on his mobile phone and immediately posted it on Facebook. In a matter of seconds, the post was ‘liked’ by many people and ‘shared’ several times all over the world. A girlfriend of his from France commented on the extraordinary things that happened only in India. Lonely, elderly parents marvelled at the phone calls that suddenly began to pour in every half hour from their offspring who were in Australia and Europe working as nurses, asking whether the buffaloes had been captured.

By sundown, there were some positive outcomes, at least for some people, from the havoc wreaked by the buffaloes. The bull-buffalo, ousted by Anthony and his gang from an abandoned coffee plantation, ran down the lane leading away from the white saheb’s old estate, and towards Co-operative Bank. The bank was only a small, ugly, shuttered room but it sat inside a compound with a strong boundary wall. Within it were wooden racks stacked with files and ledgers, evidencing the different ways in which local people were in debt of an economic institution. There was also a cupboard that contained money and pawned objects and a couple of computers.

‘Let’s get the buffalo inside the compound,’ Prabhakaran called out. Only the day before, the secretary of the bank had put up a notice for repossession in front of his house and had a couple of people sign it as witnesses.

Pelted with stones from all sides, the buffalo ran into the compound. The sweeper was about to pull the shutter down for the day, and he and the young woman who was the accountant scrambled over the wall and escaped. The animal broke the computers and upturned the furniture. As though to smoke the animal out, some people set fire to brush torches and threw them into the building, and when the wooden racks housing the files and ledgers caught fire, the crowd started shouting in excitement. Watching the unbelievable unfold before their eyes, some of them danced in happiness, and one man among them declared that the heroic buffalo should be left alone and that he was going to contact the politician and animal rights activist Maneka Gandhi.

Just before the day began to darken, the animals disappeared from the sight of the two hunting gangs. It was eerily quiet, not even the flutter of a leaf. Either the animals had collapsed somewhere foaming at the mouths, or they were laying low, hiding in a bush or a hillside. But it was the thought that they had finally entered the forest that worried Anthony. If that was the case, he would not be able to face Varky again. There was no point in searching the forest in the dark. Suddenly, a summer holiday gang of urchins aged twelve years and under ran past the grown-ups wielding small sticks and green twigs.