Punchi Menika had been present at the inquiry of the magistrate in the
village, but she had not spoken to Silindu after her meeting with him
when he was being brought to Beddagama by the police sergeant. The
magistrate and the headman and the prisoner had left for Kamburupitiya
very early in the morning following the day of the inquiry. She and the
other villagers woke up to find that the village had already been left
to its usual sleepy life. There was nothing for her to do but to obey
Silindu's instructions, to wait for Babun's release, living as best she
might in the hut with Karlinahami. Her present misfortunes, the
imprisonment of Babun, the loss of her father, and the fate (and the
uncertainty of it) which hung over him, weighed numbly upon her. And the
future filled her with vague fears; she did not, could not plan about
it, or calculate about it, or visualise it, or anything in it. She did
not even think definitely of how she was going to live for six months,
until Babun should return. There was scarcely food in the house for her
and Karlinahami to exist in semi-starvation through those six months.
Yet the future loomed somehow upon her, filling her with a horrible
sense of uneasiness, uncertainty. It was a new feeling. She sat in the
hut silent and frightened the greater part of the day. She thought of
Silindu stories of hunters who had lost their way in the jungle. Their
terror must have been very like hers; she was alone, terribly alone and
deserted; she too had lost her way, and like them one path was as good
or as bad to her as another.
Karlinahami was nearly fifty years old now, and in a jungle village a
woman--and especially a woman without a husband--is very old, very near
the grave at fifty. The sun and the wind, the toil, the hunger, and the
disease sap the strength of body and mind, bring folds and lines into
the skin, and dry up the breasts. A woman is old at forty or even
thirty. No one, man or woman, in the jungle, lives to the term of years
allotted to man. It would have been difficult to say whether Karlinahami
looked nearer eighty than ninety, nearer ninety than a hundred. The
jungle had left its mark on her. Her body was bent and twisted, like the
stunted trees, which the south-west wind had tortured into grotesque
shapes. The skin, too, on her face and thin limbs reminded one of the
bark of the jungle trees; it was shrunken against the bones, and
wrinkled, and here and there flaking off into whitish brown scales, as
the bark flakes off the kumbuk-trees. The flesh of the cheeks had dried
and shrunk; the lips seemed to have sunk into the toothless mouth,
leaving a long line damp with saliva under the nose. And under the lined
forehead were the eyes, lifeless and filmy, peering out of innumerable
wrinkles. The eyes were not blind, but they seemed to be sightless--the
pupil, the iris, and even the white had merged--because the mind was
dying. It is what usually happens in the jungle--to women
especially--the mind dies before the body. Imperceptibly the power of
initiative, of thought, of feeling, dies out before the monotony of
life, the monotony of the tearing hot wind, the monotony of endless
trees, the monotony of perpetual hardship. It will happen at an age when
in other climates a man is in his prime, and a woman still bears
children. The man will still help at the work in the chena, cutting down
the undergrowth and sowing the crop; but he will do so unthinking,
without feeling, like a machine or an animal; and when it is done he
will sit hour after hour in his compound staring with his filmy eyes
into nothing, motionless, except when he winds one long thin arm round
himself, like a grey monkey, and scratches himself on the back. And the
woman still carries the waterpot to the muddy pool to fetch water; still
cooks the meal in the house. While they still stand upright, they must
do their work; they eat and they sleep; they mutter frequently to
themselves; but they do not speak to others, and no one speaks to them.
They live in a twilight, where even pain is scarcely felt.
Karlinahami was sinking rapidly into this twilight. In the jungle decay
and growth are equally swift. The trial of Silindu and Babun, the murder
of the Arachchi and Fernando, and now the loss of Silindu had meant very
little to her. She had felt vaguely that many evils were happening, but
facts no longer had meaning for her clouded mind. She fetched the water
as usual for the cooking, muttering to herself; but she did not speak to
Punchi Menika, and Punchi Menika knew that to talk to her or consult
with her would be useless.
A month after the conviction of Silindu the life of the village would at
first sight have appeared to have regained its ordinary course. But in
reality a great change had come over it. It had been a small village, a
dwindling village before; one of those villages doomed to slow decay, to
fade out at last into the surrounding jungle. Now at a blow, in a day,
it lost one out of its six houses, and seven out of its twenty-five
inhabitants. For after the death of the Arachchi, Nanchohami, his wife,
decided to leave the village. Her children were too young to do chena
work; so that it was not possible any longer to support herself in
Beddagama. In Kotegoda, where the Arachchi's relations lived, there was
paddy land and cocoanuts, and rain fell in plenty every year. They would
give her a hut, and a little land; she would marry her children there;
she had always said that Beddagama was an unholy place, full of evil and
evil omens. She packed up her few possessions in a bullock hackery,
which she borrowed from the Korala, and set out for Kotegoda. The
Arachchi's house was abandoned to the jungle. There was no one to
inhabit it; and indeed no one would have been foolhardy enough to go and
live in it. It was ill-omened, accursed, and very soon came to be known
as the haunt of devils. It seemed to make a long fight against the
jungle. The fence itself merged into the low scrub which surrounded it,
growing into a thick line of small trees. The wara bushes, with their
pale grey thick leaves and purple flowers the rank grass, the great
spined slabs of prickly pear, crawled out from under the shadow of the
fence over the compound up to the walls and the very door. But the walls
were thicker and better made than those of most huts: the roof was of
tiles; there was no cadjan thatch to be torn and scattered by the
south-west wind. The rains of the north-east monsoon beat against the
mud walls for two years in vain; they washed out great holes in them,
through which you could see the jungle sticks upon which the mud had
been plastered. The sticks exposed to the damp air took root and burst
into leaf. Great weeds, and even bushes, began to grow up between the
tiles, from seeds dropped by birds or scattered by the wind. An immense
twisted cactus towered over the roof. The tiles were dislodged and
pushed aside by the roots. The jungle was bursting through the walls,
overwhelming the house from above. The jungle moved within the walls: at
last they crumbled; the tiled roof fell in. The grass and the weeds grew
up over the little mound of broken red pottery; the jungle sticks of the
walls spread out into thick bushes. Tall saplings of larger trees began
to show themselves. By the end of the third rains the compound and the
house had been blotted out.
It was as if the jungle had broken into the village. Other huts had been
abandoned, overwhelmed, blotted out before, but they had always lain on
the outside of the village. The jungle had only drawn its ring closer
round the remaining huts; it had not broken into the village--the
village had remained a whole, intact. But now the jungle cut across the
village, separating Silindu's and Bastian Appu's hut from the rest. The
villagers themselves noted it: they felt that they were living in a
doomed place. 'The village is dying,' Nanchohami had said before she
left. 'An evil place, devil-haunted. It is dying, as its young die with
the old. No children are born in it now. An evil place. In ten years it
will have gone, trampled by the elephants.'
It was, however, only very gradually that this feeling of doom came to
be felt by the village and the villagers. At first, after the excitement
of the trials and the murder, they seemed to have settled down to the
old monotonous life, as it had been before. The vederala was appointed
Arachchi. Punchi Menika waited for Babun. She did not and could not
count the passing of time: a week was only some days to her, and six
months only many months; but she waited, watching the passage of time,
vaguely but continuously, for the day when Babun should return. She
heard the rumour which eventually reached the village that after all
Silindu was not to be hanged; he was to be kept in prison, they said,
for ever, for the remainder of his life. It brought no comfort to her;
he had been taken out of her life, she would never see him again; did it
matter whether he was dead or in prison?
She waited month after month. Her first feelings of fear were lost in
the perpetual sense of expectancy as the time slipped away. And she had
to work, to labour hard in order to keep herself and Karlinahami alive.
The little store of kurakkan in the house dwindled rapidly. She had to
search the jungle for edible leaves and wild fruit and roots, like the
wild onions which the pig feed upon. When the chena season came she
worked in the others' chenas, Balappu's and Bastian Appu's, and even
Punchirala's. She worked hard like a man for a few handfuls of kurakkan,
given to her as a charity. The others liked her, and were in their way
kind to her; they liked her quietness, her gentleness and submission.
Even Punchirala said of her: 'She goes about like a doe. They used to
call the mad vedda a leopard. The leopard's cub has turned into a deer.'
As the months passed, she gradually began to feel as if each day might
be the one on which Babun would return. And as each day passed without
bringing him, she tried to reckon whether the six months had really
gone. She talked it over with the other villagers. Some said it was five
months, others seven months since the conviction. They discussed it for
hours, wrangling, quarrelling, shouting at one another. He had been
convicted two months--about two months--before the Sinhalese New Year.
'No, it was one month before the New Year. It couldn't be one month
before, because the chena crop was not reaped yet. Reaped? Why it had
only just been sown. It must have been three months before. Three
months, you fool? Isa chena crop like ninety days' rice? Fool? Who is a
fool? Hold your tongue! Hold your tongue! At any rate, it was before the
New Year, and it's already six months since the New Year. Aiyo! Six
months since the New Year. It is only a month since I sowed my chena.
Who ever heard of sowing a chena five months after the New Year? It is
not three months since the New Year.'
Punchi Menika would stand listening to them going over it again and
again, hour after hour. She listened in silence, and would then slip
quietly away to wander in the evening down the track towards
Kamburupitiya. It was on the track that she hoped, that she was certain
that she would meet him. Then all would be well; the evil would end, as
Silindu had said. But as the days went by, the certainty left her; even
hope began to tremble, to give place to forebodings, fears. The time
came when all were agreed that the six months had passed; something must
have happened to him; he was ill, perhaps, or he had just been forgotten
there; one can never tell, anything may happen when a man gets into
prison; 'they' simply have forgotten to let him out.
Punchirala, the new headman, was consulted.
'The man,' he said, 'is probably dead.' Punchi Menika shuddered. Her
great eyes, in which the look of suffering had already grown profound
and steady, did not leave the vederala's face. 'Yes, I expect the man's
dead. They die quickly over there in prison. Especially strong men like
Babun. They lie down in a corner and die. There is medicine for
diseases, but is there any medicine for fate? So they say, and lie down
in the corner and die. There is nothing for you to do. No. I can give
you no medicine for fate either. You must sit down here in the village
and marry a young man--if you can find one, and if not, perhaps, an old
one. Eh? Why not? Though the jackals are picking the bones of the
elephant on the river bank, there are other elephants bathing in the
river. Nor are they all cows. Well, well.'
'Ralahami, do you really know anything? Have you heard that he is
dead?'
'I have heard nothing. From whom could I hear? If you want to hear
anything you must go to the prison. It will take you many days--first to
Kamburupitiya, and then west along the great road, three days to
Tangalla, where the prison is. You must ask at the prison. They can tell
you.'
Punchi Menika left the vederala in silence. She walked away very slowly
to the hut; the conviction had come to her at once that she must go to
the prison. The thought of the journey alone into an unknown world
frightened her; but she felt that she must go, that she could not bear
any longer this waiting in doubt in the village. She made some cakes of
kurakkan, tied them up in a handkerchief, together with some uncooked
grain which the villagers gave her when they heard of her intended
journey, and started next day for Kamburupitiya.
The first part of her journey, the track to Kamburupitiya, she knew
well. She had, too, no fear, as other women have, of being alone in the
jungle. It was when she turned west along the main road to Tangalla that
her real troubles began. She felt lost and terribly alone on the
straight, white, dusty road. The great clumsy bullock carts, laden with
salt or paddy, perpetually rumbled by her; the carters she knew were bad
men, terrible tales were told about them in the villages. The life of
the road frightened her far more than the silence and solitude of the
jungle. That she understood: she belonged to it. But the stream of
passers-by upon the road, the unknown faces and the eyes that always
stared strangely, inquiringly at her for a moment, and had then passed
on for ever, made her feel vaguely how utterly alone she was in the
world. And nowhere was this feeling so strong for her as in the villages
which she slunk through like a frightened jackal. Everywhere it was the
same; the crowd of villagers and travellers staring at her from in front
of the village boutique, the group of women gossiping and laughing round
the well in the paddy field--not a known face among them all. She had
not the courage even to ask to be allowed to sleep at night in a
boutique or hut. She preferred to creep into some small piece of jungle
by the roadside, when darkness found her tired and hungry.
She was very tired and very hungry before she reached Tangalla. Her
bewilderment was increased by the network of narrow streets. She
wandered about until she suddenly found herself in the market. It was
market-day, and a crowd of four or five hundred people were packed
together into the narrow space, which was littered with the goods and
produce which they were buying and selling: fruit and vegetables and
grain and salt and clothes and pots. Every one was talking, shouting,
gesticulating at the same time. The noise terrified her, and she fled
away. She hurried down another narrow street, and found herself at the
foot of a hill which rose from the middle of the town. There were no
houses upon its sides, but there was an immense building on the top of
it. There was no crowd there, only an old man sitting on the bare
hillside watching five lean cows which were trying to find some stray
blades of parched brown grass on the stony soil.
She squatted down, happy in the silence and solitude of the place after
the noise of the streets and market. Nothing was to be heard except the
cough of one of the cows from time to time, and from far off the faint,
confused murmur from the market-place. She looked up at the great white
building; it was very glaring and dazzling in the blaze of the sun. She
wondered whether it was the prison in which Babun lay. She looked at the
old man sitting among the five starved cows. He reminded her a little of
Silindu; he sat so motionless, staring at a group of cocoanut-trees that
lay around the bottom of the hill. He was as thin as the cattle which he
watched: as their flanks heaved in the heat you saw the ribs sticking
out under their mangy coats, and you could see, too, every bone of his
chest and sides panting up and down under his dry, wrinkled skin. The
insolent noisy towns-people had terrified her; this withered old man
seemed familiar to her, like a friend. He might very easily have come
out of the jungle.
She went over to where he sat, and stood in front of him. For a moment
he turned on her his eyes, which were covered with a film the colour of
the film which forms on stagnant water; then he began again to stare at
the palms in silence.
'Father,' she said, 'is that the prison?'
The old man looked up slowly at the great glaring building as if he had
seen it for the first time, and then looked from it to Punchi Menika.
'Yes,' he said in a dry husky voice. 'Why?'
'My man must be there,' said Punchi Menika gazing at the white walls.
'He was sent there many months ago. They sent him there for six months.
It was a false case. The six months have passed now, but he has not
returned to the village. I have come to ask about him here--a long way.
I am tired, father, tired of all this. But he must be there.'
The old man's eyes remained fixed upon the cocoanut-palms; he did not
move.
'What is your village, woman?' he asked.
'I come from Beddagama.'
'Beddagama, I know it. I knew it long ago. I, too, come from over there,
from Mahawelagama, beyond Beddagama. You should go back to your village,
woman.'
'But my man, father, what about my man?'
The old man turned his head very slowly and looked up at the prison. The
sun beat down upon his face, which seemed to have been battered and
pinched and folded and lined by age and misery. His eyes wandered from
the prison to one of the cows. She stood still, stretching out her head
in front of her, her great eyes bulging; she coughed in great spasms
which strained her flanks. He waited until the coughing had stopped, and
she began again to search the earth for something to eat. Then he said,
speaking as if to himself:
'They never come out from there--not if they are from the jungle. How
can they live in there, always shut in between walls? These town
people--they do not mind, but we----Surely I should know--I am from
Mahawelagama, a village in the jungle over there. I would go back now,
but I am too old. When one is old, it is useless; but you----Go back to
your village, woman. It is folly to leave the village. There is hunger
there, I know, I remember that; but there is the hut and the compound
all by themselves, and the jungle beyond. Here there is nothing but
noise and trouble, and one house upon the other.'
'But I must ask at the prison first for my man. Why are they keeping him
there?'
'They never come out. Surely I should know. My son was sent there. He
never came out. The case was in this town, and I came here and spent all
I had for him. Then I thought I will wait here until they let him out;
but he never came. It will be the same with your man. Go back to the
village.'
Punchi Menika wept quietly from weariness and hunger and misery at the
old man's words:
'It is no good crying,' he said; 'I am old, and who should know better
than I? They never come out. It is better to go back to the village.'
Punchi Menika got up and walked slowly up the hill, and then round the
prison. There was only one entrance to it, an immense solid wooden gate
studded with iron nails. She knocked timidly, so timidly that the sound
was not heard within. Then she sat down against the wall and waited.
Hours passed, and nothing happened; the gate remained closed; no sound
could be heard from within the prison; the hill was deserted except for
the five cows whose coughing she could hear from time to time below her.
But she waited patiently for something to happen, only moving now and
again into the shadow of the wall, when the sun in its course beat down
upon her.
At last the door opened, and a man in a khaki uniform and helmet,
carrying a club in his hand, came out. He looked at Punchi Menika, and
said sharply:
'What do you want here?'
'I have come about my man, aiya. A long time ago he was sent here for
six months. The time has passed, but he has not returned to the village.
They say he is dead. Is it true, aiya?'
'What was his name and village?'
'He was from Beddagama.'
'His name?'
'Aiya, how can I tell his name?'
'What was his name, fool?'
'They called him Babun.'
'What was he convicted for?'
'It was a false case. They said he had robbed the Arachchi.'
'Oh, that man, yes. The Arachchi was killed afterwards, wasn't he?'
'Yes, yes, my father did that.'
'Well, he was here, too. Have you any money, woman?'
'No, aiya, none; we are very poor.'
'Ah! well. We can't tell you anything here. You must go to
Kamburupitiya, and send a petition to the Agent Hamadoru.'
'But you know my man, aiya; you said you did. What harm to tell me? Is
he here now? What has happened to him? I have come many days' journey to
ask about him, and now you send me away to more trouble.'
The jail guard looked at Punchi Menika for a minute or two.
'Well,' he said, 'charity they say is like rain to a parched crop. You
are asking for drought in a parched field. I knew the man; he was here,
but he is dead. He died two months back.'
The jail guard expected to hear the shrill cry and the beating of the
breast, the signs of a woman's mourning. Punchi Menika astonished him by
walking slowly away to the shade, and sitting down again by the prison
wall. The blow was too heavy for the conventional signs of grief. She
sat dry-eyed; she felt little, but the intense desire to get away to the
village, to get away out of this world, where she was lost and alone, to
the compound, where she could sit and watch the sun set behind the
jungle. She did not wait long; she set out at once down the hill. The
old man still sat among his cows looking at the cocoanut-trees.
'Ah,' he said, as she passed him, 'they never come out. I told you so.'
'He is dead, father.'
'Yes, they never come out. Go back to the village, child.'
'I am going, father.'