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 the head, 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.