The Village in the Jungle E-Book

Leonard Woolf

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

This novel set in Ceylon follows the lives of a handful of villagers hacking out a fragile existence in a jungle where indiscriminate growth, indifferent fate and malevolent neighbours constantly threaten to overwhelm them. It is as if Thomas Hardy were immersed in the heat, scent, sensuality and pungent mystery of the tropi. Seven years as a colonial administrator gave Woolf first-hand knowledge of the injustice of colonial rule, and an acute psychological sympathy with the villagers. He skilfully incorporates local story-telling traditions and beliefs into his chilling narrative, to create a book which remains one of the best-loved in Sri Lanka to this day.

Leseprobe

The Village in the Jungle

A Novel

LEONARD WOOLF

With an afterword by Christopher Ondaatje

To V. W.

I’ve given you all the little, that I’ve to give; You’ve given me all, that for me is all there is; So now I just give back what you have given – If there is anything to give in this.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

A Village in the Jungle

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Pearls and Swine

Pearls and Swine

Afterword

About the Author

Copyright

A Village in the Jungle

Chapter 2

SO PUNCHI MENIKA and Hinnihami grew up to be somewhat different from the other village children, who crawl and play about the compounds, always with the women and always listening to women’s gossip. Long before they had grown strong and big enough to go down in the morning and evening with Karlinahami to the tank, and to carry back on their heads the red earthenware waterpots, they had learnt from Silindu to sit by his side for hour upon hour through the hot afternoons, very still and very silent, while he stared silently before him, or droned out his interminable tales. They grew up to be strange and silent children, sitting one on either side of him in a long, thoughtless trance. And they learnt to believe all he told them about the strange world of jungle which surrounded them, the world of devils, animals, and trees. But above all they learnt to love him, blindly, as a dog loves his master.

When they grew old enough to trot along by his side, Silindu used to take them out with him into the jungle. The villagers were astonished and shocked, but Silindu went his own way. He showed them the water-holes upon the rocks; the thick jungle where the elephant hides himself from the heat of the day, strolling leisurely among the trees and break ing off great branches to feed upon the leaves as he strolls; the wallow of the buffalo, and the caves where the bear and the leopard make their lairs. He showed them the sambur lying during the day in the other great caves; they dashed out, tens and tens of them, like enormous bats from the shadow of the overhanging rocks, to disappear with a crash into the jungle below. He taught them to walk so that no leaf rustled or twig snapped under their feet, to creep up close to the deer and the sambur and the pig. They were surprised at first that the animals in the jungle did not speak to them as they always did to Silindu when he was alone. But Silindu explained it to them. ‘You are very young,’ he said. ‘You do not know the tracks. You are strange to the beasts. But they know me. I have grown old among the tracks. A man must live many years in the jungle before the beasts speak to him, or he can understand what they say.’

Punchi Menika and Hinnihami were also unlike the other village children in appearance. They, like Silindu, never had fever, and even in the days of greatest scarcity Karlinahami had seen that they got food. Karlinahami was far more careful to wash them than most mothers are: she used to quote the saying, ‘Dirt is bad and children are trouble, but a dirty child is the worst of troubles.’ The result was that they never got parangi, or the swollen belly and pale skin of fever. Their skin was smooth and blooming; it shone with a golden colour, like the coat of a fawn when the sun shines on it. Their eyes were large and melancholy; like the eyes of Buddha in the Jataka, ‘they were like two windows made of sapphire shining in a golden palace.’ Their limbs were strong and straight, for their wanderings with Silindu had made their muscles firm as a man’s, not soft like the women’s who sit about in the compound, cooking and gossiping and sleeping all day.

There was therefore considerable jealousy among the women, and ill-feeling against Karlinahami, when they saw how her foster children were growing up. When they were ten or eleven years old, it often burst out against her in angry taunts at the tank.

‘O Karlinahami! Nanchohami, the headman’s wife, would say, ‘you are growing an old woman and, alas, childless! But you have done much for your brother’s children. Shameless they must be to leave it to you to fetch the water from the tank and not to help you. This is the fourth chatty full you are carrying today. I have seen it with these eyes. The lot of the childless woman is a hard one. See how my little one of eight years helps me!’

‘Nanchohami, your tongue is still as sharp as chillies. Punchi Menika has gone with my brother, and Hinnihami is busy in the house.’

‘Punchi Menika wants but three things to make her a man. I pity you, Karlinahami, to live in the house of a madman, and to bring up his children shameless, having no children of your own. They are vedda1 children, and will be vedda women, wandering in the jungle like men.’

The other women laughed, and Angohami, a dirty shrivelled woman, with thin shrivelled breasts, called out in a shrill voice: ‘Why should we suffer these veddas in the village? Their compound smells of their own droppings, and of the offal and rotten meat on which they feed. I have borne six children, and the last died but yesterday. In the morning he was well: then Silindu cast the evil eye upon him as he passed our door, and in the evening he was dead. They wither our children that their own may thrive.’

‘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,2 “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 kurunies3 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 he4 lend your man last year twenty kurunies of kurakkan, 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.