'You lie,'said Karlinahami, roused for the moment by this abuse; 'you lie, mother of dirt. Yesterday at this hour I saw your Podi Sinho here in the tank, pale and shivering with fever, and pouring the cold tank water over himself. How should such a mother keep her children? All know that you have borne six, and that all are dead. What did you ever give them but foul words?'
'Go and lie with your brother, the madman, the vedda, the pariah,' shrieked Angohami as Karlinahami turned to go. 'Go to your brother of the evil eye. You blighter of others' children, eater of offal, vesi, vesige mau! Go to him of the evil eye, belli, bellige duwa; go to your brother. Aiyo! aiyo! My little Podi Sinho! I am a mother only of the dead, a mother of six dead children. Look at my breasts, shrivelled and milkless. I say to the father of my child,[6] "Father of Podi Sinho," I say, "there is no kurakkan in the house, there is no millet and no pumpkin, not even a pinch of salt. Three days now I have eaten nothing but jungle leaves. There is no milk in my breasts for the child." Then I get foul words and blows. "Does the rain come in August?" he says. "Can I make the kurakkan flower in July? Hold your tongue, you fool. August is the month in which the children die. What can I do?" Then comes fever and Silindu's evil eye, curse him, and the little ones die. Aiyo! aiyo!'
'Your man is right,' said Nanchohami. 'This is the month when the children die. Last year in this month I buried one and my brother's wife another. Good rain never falls now, and there is always hunger and fever. The old die and the little ones with them. The father of my children has but nine houses under him, and makes but five shillings a year from his headmanship. His father's father, who was headman before him, had thirty houses in his headmanship, and twenty shillings were paid him by the Government every year, besides twenty-four kurunies of paddy from the fields below the tank. I have not seen rice these five years. The headman now gives all and receives nothing.' Here one of the women laughed. 'You may well laugh, Podi Nona,' she continued. 'Did not he[7] lend your man last year twenty kurunies[8] of kurakkan,[9] and has a grain of it come back to our house? And Silindu owes another thirty, and came but yesterday for more. And Angohami there, who whines about her Podi Sinho, her man has had twenty-five kurunies since the reaping of the last crop.'
These words of Nanchohami were not without effect. An uneasy movement began among the little group of women at the mention of debts: clothes were gathered up, the chatties of water placed on their heads, and they began to move away out of reach of the sharp tongue of the headman's wife. And as they moved away up the small path, which led from the tank to the compounds, they murmured together that Nanchohami did not seem to remember that they had to repay two kurunies of kurakkan for every kuruni lent to them.
Nanchohami had touched the mainspring upon which the life of the village worked—debt. The villagers lived upon debt, and their debts were the main topic of their conversation. A good kurakkan crop, from two to four acres of chena, would be sufficient to support a family for a year. But no one, not even the headman, ever enjoyed the full crop which he had reaped. At the time of reaping a band of strangers from the little town of Kamburupitiya, thirty miles away, would come into the village. Mohamadu Lebbe Ahamadu Cassim, the Moorman boutique-keeper, had supplied clothes to be paid for in grain, with a hundred per cent, interest, at the time of reaping; the fat Sinhalese Mudalali,[10] Kodikarage Allis Appu, had supplied grain and curry stuffs on the same terms; and among a crowd of smaller men the sly-faced low-caste man, who called himself Achchige Don Andris (his real name Andrissa would have revealed his caste), who, dressed in dirty white European trousers and a coat, was the agent of the tavern-keeper in Kamburupitiya, from whom the villagers had taken on credit the native spirit, made from the juice of the cocoanut flowers, to be drunk at the time of marriages. The villagers neither obtained nor expected any pity from this horde. With the reaping of the chenas came the settlement of debts. With their little greasy notebooks, full of unintelligible letters and figures, they descended upon the chenas; and after calculations, wranglings, and abuse, which lasted for hour after hour, the accounts were settled, and the strangers left the village, their carts loaded with pumpkins, sacks of grain, and not infrequently the stalks of Indian hemp,[11] which by Government order no man may grow or possess, for the man that smokes it becomes mad. And when the strangers had gone, the settlement with the headman began; for the headman, on a small scale, lent grain on the same terms in times of scarcity, or when seed was wanted to sow the chenas.
In the end the villager carried but little grain from his chena to his hut. Very soon after the reaping of the crop he was again at the headman's door, begging for a little kurakkan to be repaid at the next harvest, or tramping the thirty miles to Kamburupitiya to hang about the bazaar, until the Mudalali agreed once more to enter his name in the greasy notebook.
With the traders in Kamburupitiya the transactions were purely matters of business, but with the headman the whole village recognised that they were something more. It was a very good thing for Babehami, the Arachchi, to feel that Silindu owed him many kurunies of kurakkan which he could not repay. When Babehami wanted some one to clear a chena for him, he asked Silindu to do it; and Silindu, remembering the debt, dared not refuse. When Silindu shot a deer—for which offence the Arachchi should have brought him before the police court at Kamburupitiya—he remembered his debt, and the first thing he did was to carry the best piece of meat as an offering to the headman's house. And Babehami was a quiet, cunning man in the village: he never threatened, and rarely talked of his loans to his debtors, but there were few in the village who dared to cross him, and who did not feel hanging over them the power of the little man.
The power which they felt hanging over them was by no means imaginary; it could make the life of the man who offended the headman extremely unpleasant. It was not only by his loans that Babehami had his hand upon the villagers; their daily life could be made smooth or difficult by him at every turn.
The life of the village and of every man in it depended upon the cultivation of chenas. A chena is merely a piece of jungle, which every ten years is cleared of trees and undergrowth and sown with grain broadcast and with vegetables. The villagers owned no jungle themselves; it belonged to the Crown, and no one might fell a tree or clear a chena in it without a permit from the Government. It was through these permits that the headman had his hold upon the villagers. Application for one had to be made through him; it was he who reported if a clearing had been made without one, or if a man, having been given one, cleared more jungle than it allowed him to clear. Every one in the village knew well that Babehami's friends would find no difficulty in obtaining the authority to clear a chena, and that the Agent Hamadoru[12] would never hear from Babehami whether they had cleared four acres or eight. But the life of the unfortunate man, who had offended the headman, would be full of dangers and difficulties. The permit applied for by him would be very slow in reaching his hands: when it did reach his hands, if he cleared half an acre more than it allowed him to clear, his fine would be heavy; and woe betide him if he rashly cleared a chena without a permit at all.
Babehami had never liked Silindu, who was a bad debtor. Silindu was too lazy even to cultivate a chena properly, and even in a good year his crop was always the smallest in the village. He was always in want, and always borrowing; and Babehami found it no easy task to gather in principal and interest after the boutique-keepers from Kamburupitiya had taken their dues. And he was not an easy man to argue with: if he wanted a loan he would, unheeding of any excuse or refusal, hang about the headman's door for a whole day. But if it were a case of repayment, he would sit staring over his creditor's head, listening, without a sign or a word, to the quiet persuasive arguments of the headman.