One day, when the game ended and the players began to disperse, it so happened that the two of them were the last to leave. Suddenly, there was a loud noise, and when those who had already stepped out of the lean-to turned back, they saw a fascinating sight. The two old men stood facing each other like gamecocks ready for the attack. It was clear that one of them had broken the unspoken rule of complete silence between them. Others watched as the calamity, always anticipated but never truly expected to materialize, unfolded. It was the end of the day, and a few women on their way back from work and a handful of young people who had come to buy paan were also among the audience. What ensued was a war of words that lasted at least an hour and a half.

The people assembled there, between them, would have had eight or ten swear words in their vocabulary. Perhaps three or four of these words would truly enrage people, the others being mildly objectionable ones bandied about jovially between friends. The performance that the old men put up was beyond anything they could have collectively imagined. They began with a few choice but ordinary words, but the sparks from these spread until a forest fire of larger and meatier words blazed as the enemies turned into wizards who conjured up new and imaginative obscenities, slicing and splicing existing ones. Assaulted by constructions beyond their wildest imagination, the women in the vicinity ran away. Young men enjoyed the performance for a while, but soon they too scrambled on to their motorbikes and fled, unable to withstand the intensity of the battering and scared that the filth pouring out would affect even their manhood.

The smut was all-encompassing. New words with mind-boggling meanings took birth, involving fathers, mothers, sisters, wives, sons, daughters, brothers-in-law, uncles, aunties, ancestors, animals, birds, fish, trees, arthropods such as the cockroach and the centipede, ants, snakes, food items, domestic appliances, diseases, places, days of the week, years, ocean, sky, earth, stars, the sun and the moon, the rain and the wind. Even ordinary words transformed into skin-curling abuse. They did not spare ghosts, saints, gods, priests, caste names, film stars or politicians. Not even universally respected personages such as Gandhi and Nehru were left out. Roiled by revulsion, a young woman, on her way back from college, vomited. Those who were still listening to the barrage of blight felt that all the words they had spoken, or would ever speak, in their entire lives were forever filthy.

In the end, gesturing dramatically with his hands, Sankunniyaasan uttered a phrase that annihilated all moral values in the collective mind of the audience. It pushed them to thoughts of suicide. There was, they felt, nothing more that could be said.

Madhavan ran into the shop, grabbed the knife used to chop tobacco, and came back out. Murder, they thought, the only possible response to Sankunniyaasan’s final utterance. But Madhavan walked into the yard behind the shop, and came back with the tapered half of a njalipoovan banana leaf. He placed it ceremoniously in front of Sankunniyaasan, and as though serving a feast for a special occasion, he delivered a response that could not have been possible even in the farthest reaches of a nightmare. The paan shop owner pulled down the shutters of the shop, and the remaining onlookers dispersed. It was a simple phrase, yet one so intricate that it defied interpretation, and so imaginative that it would have put epic poets to shame. The more one thought about it, the more it insinuated itself in one’s mind and ate away, like a tapeworm, at one’s essence until only death could come to the rescue. Rendered, finally, speechless, Sankunniyaasan walked away hanging his head in shame.