When prohibition came into effect, it became nearly impossible to buy high-quality liquor in our town, so many had to travel weekly to Kollam. When he didn’t have the time to make the trip himself, Khader sent coolie Ayyappan on this errand. Once, Dhamu caught Ayyappan red-handed right in front of Khader’s store and reported him to the police, bottles of liquor and all. Khader started telling people that Dhamu bought alcohol from him regularly for his wife, and that this attempt to incriminate him was because Khader had failed to procure bottles for him a couple of times. Khader described it with an air of factuality, as if Dhamu had begged him for alcohol and told him that his wife would only open the door for him at night if he held up a bottle at her window. “It’s my fault,” Khader said to Dhamu’s friends. “How many nights can our big brother spend on the porch?”

As for Dhamu, he grew agitated whenever anyone brought up Khader’s name. “I swear, I will not die until I see him back again on the porch with a pan full of tobacco, rolling beedis!” he bellowed, thumping his chest. “His father used to sweep the courtyard at the mosque. But the son now travels in the comfort of a car. No wonder he is so full of himself.”

How long can such festering hostilities keep smoldering and expressing themselves in small conflicts and confrontations?

One day, everything exploded.

A week or so before the parliamentary budget session was about to begin, there was a sudden undersupply of cigarettes in the market. Prices began to skyrocket. Shopkeepers started gathering at the tamarind-tree junction and in front of Khader’s store before he opened in the mornings, hoping to buy cigarette stocks for their shops. But Khader dropped the supply. He saw this as the perfect chance to collect on outstanding accounts. “I am going to supply only to those who have fully settled their accounts,” he said. Everybody owed a hundred or two hundred rupees. Where would they find that much cash so quickly?

One day, when hundreds of shopkeepers were waiting outside Khader’s store, Dhamu ran down the stairs from his shop. “I will get you the stuff. Follow me,” he said to them, and rushed up the stairs into Khader’s shop. All the merchants climbed up after him, their feet stomping loudly against the rungs of the wooden ladder. Khader called the police on Dhamu. A few bigwigs intervened and kept Dhamu from retaliating. By the time the police arrived, the crowd had dispersed. The inspector was a friend of Khader’s. After driving away the remaining loafers and the coolies still lingering, he whispered to Khader, “If you want to be smart about this, move your stock elsewhere. Don’t be a fool.”