‘What happened?’ the doctor asked him, wiping his wounds with a ball of cotton dipped in a colourful medicine. ‘Did you have a tumble?’

‘No,’ Sankunniyaasan replied. ‘I was set upon and beaten.’

He then went to the police station. ‘I don’t understand why Madhavan would come all the way to Alappuzha to attack you,’ the inspector remarked disbelievingly.

‘The Ambalapuzha temple festival is going on, no? He must have come for that,’ Sankunniyaasan replied without even an inkling of embarrassment. ‘He didn’t just attack me. He also stole my towel, a madhurakkavini neryathu that I had over my shoulder. Ask her, she saw him do it,’ he said, pointing to his wife.

That night, his wife asked him angrily: ‘Why did you make up such a thing?’

‘Last week, he got an injunction barring me from using the road to our own house. Now let him suffer going in and out of courts for the next five or six years.’

As Sankunniyaasan stepped out of the room where the deceased lay, the assembled mourners felt that a rare energy was emanating from his body. Normally, he was not the type of person who looked to attract attention in such situations. But now, catching sight of the local newspaper agent Raju, his face shone brighter.

‘Vijayan,’ he looked into the room through the window and called softly. ‘Find a photograph of your father. Hurry up. If you give it now, they’ll put it in the newspaper tomorrow.’

He led Raju to a table and helped him compose an obituary, consulting Vijayan on the details of Madhavan’s children and their spouses. Then, making sure that no one stood close enough to overhear him, he touched Raju’s arm.

‘He was an absolute scoundrel, you know,’ he said as though revealing a secret. ‘The trouble he caused me . . .’

‘Well, that’s not something I can put in the newspaper,’ Raju said, laughing.

A law clerk, a comparatively younger man among the mourners who had arrived, came up to Raju when Sankunniyaasan moved away. ‘Their case is in the syllabus for the students at the law college,’ he said. ‘They are a rare breed these days.’

He told Raju that some people found court cases and the law itself as addictive as alcohol and women. Sankunniyaasan had been so involved in legal matters that he was felicitated at the ninetieth birthday celebrations of an important lawyer.

Presently, funeral preparations began as the deceased had no close relatives to arrive from far away except for a sister who lived abroad. But she was unable to come as she had only gone back a month or so ago. Woodcutters arrived and walked around the compound looking for a suitable tree to cut down for the funeral pyre. Sankunniyaasan led the way, torch in hand, with great enthusiasm.

‘We’ll need plenty of firewood,’ he said, aiming his torch at the canopy of a large mango tree. ‘His heart was hard as stone. Won’t burn easily.’