Excerpt from the chapter The Lone Man at the Table
When the Kairali Club team stood around Punnoose’s table and waited for him to lift his head and recognize them, the nearby customers also noticed an unusual scene unfolding there. Roughing people up by strongmen in the town and the occasional fight between drunken patrons were not uncommon in that seedy bar, but a group like the Kairali Club team—now middle-aged, clean-cut, well dressed, and somewhat out of place—circling a desolate man sitting there looked like a scene out of a Malayalam crime thriller movie from the 90’s, and that drew attention. The waiter who had served the Kairali Club team, genuinely believing they were there to meet Punnoose as some long-lost friend, came near them and stood silently and uneasily offering himself to diffuse the tension in the air. It didn’t look like a reunion, a casual meeting, or a meeting to close some local real estate deal, as the waiter had wrongly gauged, based on his earlier conversation with PK.
When Punnoose finally raised his head, he saw Hari and PK standing in front of him. He addressed Hari first.
“So, you’ve come back?” he said. “I thought you settled the score at the funeral.”
There was sarcasm in his voice, a clear reference to Hari roughing him up at Abbas’s funeral. Punnoose continued, “Happy to see everyone here. Sorry, I don’t have enough space to offer you all to sit around.”