Dehugaon: For this writer from Mumbai, meat ban has been a distant problem. Barring friends, who’ve told us about how certain housing societies in the city discourage the cooking and consumption of non-vegetarian food on their premises, the issue has never seemed close to home. Perhaps just a little, when the BJP government imposed a beef ban in Maharashtra back in 2015. But that was it. Recent events, though, have been alarming enough to rattle this confidence.

First, came the bugle call against halal meat in Karnataka, followed by the demand for shutting meat shops in the national capital during nine days of Navratri—all in the span of a few days. Around the same time, a blink-and-miss report mentioned that Dehu, a village in Maharashtra, had banned the sale of raw and fresh meat fish, starting this month. And that was enough to have us make the three-and-a-half hour journey from Mumbai to the heartland.