‘Da, what are you doing here? Go home, get!’ Anthony shouted.

‘The buffalo is in that compound over there,’ said one of the children who had fallen behind as he had to hoist up his half pants sliding down his waist as he ran. ‘He’s hiding.’

Anthony and his gang took off in that direction. The animal must be exhausted, they thought, and decided to bring it down by its legs and kill it on the spot.

‘Where is it?’ Anthony asked the noisy bunch of children.

‘There, look!’

They pointed to the base of a tree. A ten-year-old, dressed only in a pair of knickers, stood on all fours, swinging his tail made of a length of jute string. He was the buffalo, the rest were the hunters. Anthony broke off a twig from a coffee bush, thrashed the children and chased them away.

As darkness descended, the junction and its surroundings turned into festival grounds. Hillsides sparkled with the flickering flames of gas lamps and torches as the search for the animals continued. With the buffaloes as their excuse, young men left their homes, bottles of alcohol in hand, for a quiet evening with their friends. A few young men with extraordinarily shiny faces hung around the houses of their sweethearts in the hope that their fathers and brothers would be out searching for the buffaloes, leaving the young women unattended. Some of them were lucky enough to have their wishes come true. Meanwhile, the ongoing search made some others extremely anxious. It was detrimental to their usual night-time adventures. Wanting to fish in troubled waters, valiant young men from neighbouring villages arrived in jeeps, and ran amok through yards and compounds. The locals who had given up the day’s work to join the cause—carpenters, toddy tappers and government employees alike—watched them with trepidation, wondering whether things were getting out of hand. The issue led to a fight between two drunkards at the junction. Several others made use of the occasion to settle months-old scores. But the night was still young, and more eventful and scarier things were yet to happen.

First, there was the death of an old man, a vaidyar who was well known among the older generation for his healing powers and prowess with herbal potions and concoctions. A deeply devout and virtuous man, he had been on his deathbed for over a year. Perhaps it was the disciplined life he had lived, or the prayers of his grateful patients, that even after his body, paralysed on one side, had developed bedsores, his soul refused to leave it.

His children took turns to look after him. In his half-asleep state, he heard one of them say to himself: ‘If he had been the type to have a tipple every now and then, he would have gone by now.’

Hearing the uproar of the buffalo hunt, they stepped out to investigate, while he lay alone in his bed on the veranda. In a moment of clear consciousness, he opened his eyes and looked into the yard, and saw a black-hued animal standing there looking straight at him. On the animal’s back sat someone splendid, considering him with merciful eyes. Who else could it be on the back of a buffalo other than Kaalan, the God of Death himself? Astoundingly, Vaidyar’s emaciated body sat itself up and his palms closed in prayer. ‘Bhagavane . . .’ he said, and his soul departed for the next world.