The Indian writer Upamanyu Chatterjee, whose debut novel English, August, published in 1988, examined the coming of age of Agastya Sen, a disenchanted junior civil servant in a moffusil Indian town, returns to examine bureaucratic power in his recent novella titled The Revenge of the Non-Vegetarian. Published in 2018, the novella features Agastya's father, Madhusudan Sen, as a budding officer of the Indian Civil Services posted in the fictional north Indian state of Narmada Pradesh in newly independent India. Sen's proclivity for beef and his difficulty in sourcing meat in a predominantly Hindu town serve as a fertile ground for debates around the politics of food choices – who gets to choose, who bears the burden to service that choice, the cost of consuming meat in a geographically ‘vegetarian’ region and the larger ethics of a non-vegetarian diet. While Sen clandestinely ropes in a Muslim subordinate, Nadeem Dahlvi, to replenish his appetite for beef, in particular, this secret contract is sundered when Dahlvi and his family are murdered. This crime echoes the escalating violence of ‘gau rakshaks’, or self-styled cow protectors, mostly male and always Hindu, who assault and sometimes lynch those who belong to historically marginalised religious and caste communities, especially Muslims and Dalits, for consuming or simply possessing beef. The lynching of Mohammed Akhlaq by upper-caste Hindu Thakurs in Dadri, a village in Uttar Pradesh, in 2015 is one of the few cases of lynching that has garnered attention, with the perpetrators still left free. The novella exposes the slow judicial process in postcolonial India, the impossibility of an equitable punishment for crime, and the idea of revenge as a stand-in and an instantaneous substitute for justice.