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] 

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