yalpanam is a very large town in the north of ceylon; but nobody who suddenly found himself in it would believe this. only in two or three streets is there any bustle or stir of people. it is like a gigantic village that for centuries has slept and grown, and sleeps and grows, under a forest of cocoanut trees and the fierce sun. all the streets are the same, dazzling dusty roads between high fences made of the dried leaves of the cocoanut palms. behind the fences, and completely hidden by them, are the compounds; and in the compounds still more hidden under the palms and orange and lime trees are the huts and houses of the tamils who live there.
the north of the town lies, as it has lain for centuries, sleeping by the side of the blue lagoon, and there is a hut standing now in a compound by the the side of the lagoon, where it has stood for centuries. in this hut there lived a man called chellaya who was by caste a brahman, and in the compound next to chellaya's lived another brahman, called chittampalam; and in all the other 50 or 60 compounds around them lived other brahmans. they belonged to the highest of all castes in yalpanam: and they could not eat food with or touch or marry into any other caste, nor could they carry earth on their heads or work at any trade, without being defiled or losing caste. therefore all the brahmans live together in this quarter of the town, so that they may not be defiled but may marry off their sons and daughters to daughters and sons of other brahmans. chellaya and chittampalam and all the brahmans knew that they and their fathers and their fathers' fathers had lived in the same way by the side of the blue lagoon under the palm trees for many thousands of years. they did no work, for there was no need to work. the dhobi or washer caste man, who washed the clothes of brahmans and of no other caste, washed their white cloths and in return was given rice and allowed to be present at weddings and funerals. and there was the barber caste man who shaved the brahmans and no other caste. and half a mile from their compounds were their brahman rice fields in which chellaya and each of the other brahmans had shares; some shares had descended to them from their fathers and their grandfathers and great-grandfathers and so on from the first brahmans, and other shares had been brought to them as dowry with their wives. these fields were sown twice a year, and the work of cultivation was done by mukkuwa caste men. this is a custom, that mukkuwa caste men cultivate the rice fields of brahmans, and it had been a custom for many thousands of years.
chellaya was forty five and chittampalam was forty two, and they had lived, as all brahmans lived, in the houses in which they had been born. there can be no doubt that quite suddenly one of the gods, or rather devils, laid a spell upon these two compounds. and this is how it happened.
chellaya had married, when he was 14, a plump brahman girl of 12 who had borne him three sons and two daughters. he had married off both his daughters without giving very large dowries and his sons had all married girls who had brought them large dowries. no man ought to have been happier, though his wife was too talkative and had a sharp tongue. and for 45 years chellaya lived happily the life which all good brahmans should live. every morning he ate his rice cakes and took his bath at the well in his compound and went to the temple of siva. there he talked until midday to his wife's brother and his daughter's husband's father about nallatampi, their neighbour, who was on bad terms with them, about the price of rice, and about a piece of land which he had been thinking of buying for the last five years. after the midday meal of rice and curry, cooked by his wife, he dozed through the afternoon; and then, when the sun began to lose its power, he went down to the shore of the blue lagoon and sat there until nightfall.
this was chellaya's passion, to sit by the side of the still, shining, blue waters and look over them at the far-off islands which flickered and quivered in the mirage of heat. the wind, dying down at evening, just murmured in the palms behind him. the heat lay like something tangible and soothing upon the earth. and chellaya waited eagerly for the hour when the fishermen come out with their cast-nets and wade out into the shallow water after the fish. how eagerly he waited all day for that moment: even in the temple when talking about nallatampi, whom he hated, the vision of those unruffled waters would continually rise up before him, and of the lean men lifting their feet so gently, first one and then the other, in order not to make a splash or a ripple, and bending forward with the nets in their hands ready to cast. and then the joy of the capture, the great leaping twisting silver fish in the net at last. he began to hate his compound and his fat wife and the interminable talk in the temple, and those long dreary evenings when he stood under his umbrella at the side of his rice field and watched the mukkuwas ploughing or sowing or reaping.
as chellaya grew older he became more and more convinced that the only pleasure in life was to be a fisher and to catch fish. this troubled him not a little, for the fisher caste is a low caste and no brahman had ever caught a fish. it would be utter pollution and losing of caste to him. one day however when he went down to sit in his accustomed place by the side of the lagoon, he found a fisherman sitting on the sand there mending his net.
"fisher," said chellaya, "could one who has never had a net in his hand and was no longer young learn how to cast it?"
chellaya was a small round fat man, but he had spoken with great dignity. the fisher knew at once that he was a brahman and salaamed, touching the ground with his forehead.
"lord," he said, "the boy learns to cast the net when he is still at his mother's breast."
"o foolish dog of a fisher," said chellaya pretending to be very angry, "can you not understand? suppose one who was not a fisher and was well on in years wished to fish—for a vow or even for play—could such a one learn to cast the net?"
the old fisherman screwed up his wrinkled face and looked up at chellaya doubtfully.
"lord," he said, "i cannot tell. for how could such a thing be? to the fisher his net, as the saying is. such things are learnt when one is young, as one learns to walk."
chellaya looked out over the old man's head to the lagoon. another fisherman was stealing along in the water ready for the cast. ah, swish out flew the net. no, nothing—yes, o joy, a gleam of silver in the meshes. chellaya made up his mind suddenly.
"now, look here, fellow,—tell me this; could you teach me to cast a net?"
the old man covered his mouth with his hand, for it is not seemly that a fisher should smile in the presence of a brahman.
"the lord is laughing at me," he said respectfully.
"i am not laughing, fellow. i have made a vow to muniyappa that if he would take away the curse which he laid upon my son's child i would cast a net nightly in the lagoon. now my son's child is well. therefore if you will take me tomorrow night to a spot where no one will see us and bring me a net and teach me to cast it, i will give you five measures of rice. and if you speak a word of this to anyone, i will call down upon your head and your child's head ten thousand curses of muniyappa."
it is dangerous to risk being cursed by a brahman, so the fisherman agreed and next evening took chellaya to a bay in the lagoon and showed him how to cast the net. for an hour chellaya waded about in the shallow water experiencing a dreadful pleasure. every moment he glanced over his shoulder to the land to make sure that nobody was in sight; every moment came the pang that he was the first brahman to pollute his caste by fishing; and every moment came the keen joy of hope that this time the net would swish out and fall in a gentle circle upon a silver fish.
chellaya caught nothing that night, but he had gone too far to turn back. he gave the fisherman two rupees for the net, and hid it under a rock, and every night he went away to the solitary creek, made a little pile of his white brahman clothes on the sand, and stepped into the shallow water with his net. there he fished until the sun sank. and sometimes now he caught fish which very reluctantly he had to throw back into the water, for he was afraid to carry them back to his wife.
very soon a strange rumour began to spread in the town that the brahman chellaya had polluted his caste by fishing. at first people would not believe it; such a thing could not happen, for it had never happened before. but at last so many people told the story,—and one man had seen chellaya carrying a net and another had seen him wading in the lagoon—that everyone began to believe it, the lower castes with great pleasure and the brahmans with great shame and anger.
hardly had people begun to believe this rumour than an almost stranger thing began to be talked of. the brahman chittampalam, who was chellaya's neighbour, had polluted his caste, it was said, by carrying earth on his head. and this rumour also was true and it happened in this way.
chittampalam was a taciturn man and a miser. if his thin scraggy wife used three chillies, where she might have done with two for the curry, he beat her soundly. about the time that chellaya began to fish in secret, the water in chittampalam's well began to grow brackish. it became necessary to dig a new well in the compound, but to dig a well means paying a lower caste man to do the work; for the earth that is taken out has to be carried away on thehead, and it is pollution for a brahman to carry earth on his head. so chittampalam sat in his compound thinking for many days how to avoid paying a man to dig a new well: and meanwhile the taste of the water from the old well became more and more unpleasant. at last it became impossible even for chittampalam's wife to drink the water; there was only one way out of it; a new well must be dug and he could not bring himself to pay for the digging: he must dig the well himself. so every night for a week chittampalam went down to the darkest corner of his compound and dug a well and carried earth on his head and thereby polluted his caste.
the other brahmans were enraged with chellaya and chittampalam and, after abusing them and calling them pariahs, they cast them out for ever from the brahman caste and refused to eat or drink with them or to talk to them; and they took an oath that their children's children should never marry with the grandsons and granddaughters of chellaya and chittampalam. but if people of other castes talked to them of the matter, they denied all knowledge of it and swore that no brahman had ever caught fish or carried earth on his head. chittampalam was not much concerned at the anger of the brahmans, for he had saved the hire of a well-digger and he had never taken pleasure in the conversation of other brahmans and, besides, he shortly after died.
chellaya, being a small fat man and of a more pleasant and therefore more sensitive nature, felt his sin and the disapproval of his friends deeply. for some days he gave up his fishing, but they were weary days to him and he gained nothing, for the brahmans still refused to talk to him. all day long in the temple and in his compound he sat and thought of his evenings when he waded in the blue waters of the lagoon, and of the little islands resting like plumes of smoke or feathers upon the sky, and of the line of pink flamingoes like thin posts at regular intervals set to mark a channel, and of the silver gleam of darting fish. in the evening, when he knew the fishermen were taking out their nets, his longing became intolerable: he dared not go down to the lagoon for he knew that his desire would master him. so for five nights he sat in his compound, and, as the saying is, his fat went off in desire. on the sixth night he could stand it no longer; once more he polluted his caste by catching fish.
after this chellaya no longer tried to struggle against himself but continued to fish until at the age of fifty he died. then, as time went on, the people who had known chellaya and chittampalam died too, and the story of how each had polluted his caste began to be forgotten. only it was known in yalpanam that no brahman could marry into those two families, because there was something wrong with their caste. some said that chellaya had carried earth on his head and that chittampalam had caught fish; in any case the descendants of chellaya and chittampalam had to go to distant villages to find brahman wives and husbands for their sons and daughters.
chellaya's hut and chittampalam's hut still stand where they stood under the cocoanut trees by the side of the lagoon, and in one lives chellaya, the great-great-great-grandson of chellaya who caught fish, and in the other chittampalam, the great-great-great-grandson of chittampalam who carried earth on his head. chittampalam has a very beautiful daughter and chellaya has one son unmarried. now this son saw chittampalam's daughter by accident through the fence of the compound, and he went to his father and said:
"they say that our neighbour's daughter will have a big dowry; should we not make a proposal of marriage?"
the father had often thought of marrying his son to chittampalam's daughter, not because he had seen her through the compound fence but because he had reason to believe that her dowry would be large. but he had never mentioned it to his wife or to his son, because he knew that it was said that an ancestor of chittampalam had once dug a well and carried earth on his head. now however that his son himself suggested the marriage, he approved of the idea, and, as the custom is, told his wife to go to chittampalam's house and look at the girl. so his wife went formally to chittampalam's house for the visit preparatory to an offer of marriage, and she came back and reported that the girl was beautiful and fit for even her son to marry.
chittampalam had himself often thought of proposing to chellaya that chellaya's son should marry his daughter, but he had been ashamed to do this because he knew that chellaya's ancestor had caught fish and thereby polluted his caste. otherwise the match was desirable, for he would be saved from all the trouble of finding a husband for her in some distant village. however, if chellaya himself proposed it, he made up his mind not to put any difficulties in the way. the next time that the two met, chellaya made the proposal and chittampalam accepted it and then they went back to chellaya's compound to discuss the question of dowry. as is usual in such cases the father of the girl wants the dowry to be small and the father of the boy wants it to be large, and all sorts of reasons are given on both sides why it should be small or large, and the argument begins to grow warm. the argument became so warm that at last chittampalam lost his temper and said:
"one thousand rupees! is that what you want? why, a fisher should take the girl with no dowry at all!"
"fisher!" shouted chellaya. "who would marry into the pariah caste, that defiles itself by digging wells and carrying earth on its head? you had better give two thousand rupees to a pariah to take your daughter out of your house."
"fisher! low caste dog!" shouted chittampalam.
"pariah!" screamed chellaya.
chittampalam rushed from the compound and for many days the two brahmans refused to talk a word to one another. at last chellaya's son, who had again seen the daughter of chittampalam through the fence of the compound, talked to his father and then to chittampalam, and the quarrel was healed and they began to discuss again the question of dowry. but the old words rankled and they were still sore, and as soon as the discussion began to grow warm it ended once more by their calling each other "fisher" and "pariah." the same thing has happened now several times, and chittampalam is beginning to think of going to distant villages to find a husband for his daughter. chellaya's son is very unhappy; he goes down every evening and sits by the waters of the blue lagoon on the very spot where his great-great-great-grandfather chellaya used to sit and watch the fishermen cast their nets.
