It is always a surprise, leaving the main road for the interior. How rapidly the scale alters. An Indian village will cling to the side of any highway. In most cases the village was there first, but when the highway arrives, dissecting it, the village remains in this amputated fashion, growing any which way, adjusting itself within the new parameters. There is no discernible centre except for a large banyan tree, under which meetings with village elders supposedly happen. Kavitha parks near a temple because the road has become too narrow and muddy. We step out and walk behind a group of children – boys and girls who are fixing to play some kind of game.

‘Where’s the dog doctor?’ Kavitha asks. ‘Do you know?’

The smell is something awful. Burnt hair, burnt flesh. As we approach the crowd, the noise escalates. A man in a golf shirt, jeans and trainers stands in the middle of the crowd. He has white hair and glasses, and he is speaking in a patient, measured tone to the men around him. The majority are village men, barefoot, in shirts and lungis. They are thumping their chests extravagantly. Kavitha unsheathes her massive SLR camera and starts photographing the scene.

Burnt corpses of dogs lie in heaps. There are hundreds of them. The earth has been turned over in ridges, and volunteers continue to dig with shovels. When they find another one, the digging stops. Someone goes into the crater and pulls out a charred rigid thing. ‘Okay,’ or ‘Got it,’ they shout, and the digging begins again.

The man from the Blue Cross, Kavitha’s friend, with whom I’ve spoken a few times on the telephone, gives us masks and gloves to wear. ‘It’s cyclical,’ he says. ‘The dogs multiply because of all the rubbish, there are packs of them, and so of course there are accidents. People are scared to walk around, some children get bitten, people complain and so the panchayat just decides to do a mass culling.’

Was it easy for these men to corner the dogs one by one and inject them with cyanide? Did they wait to set them alight or did they burn them immediately? I have to walk to a corner and vomit to feel steady again. One of the village women is crying. ‘They killed my Tikku. He was like my son. What right did they have to kill him?’

She’s dragged away by family members and there is more shouting. I can’t understand everything that’s going on, but there is a sense of fear. Everyone knows the police are on the way so there’s a scattering, but a few tenacious ones remain. The man from the Blue Cross is on his mobile giving directions to a journalist.