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; ev............