These fields were sown twice a year, and the work of cultivation was done by Mukkuwa caste men. This is a custom, that Mukkuwa caste men cultivate the rice fields of Brahmans, and it had been a custom for many thousands of years. Chellaya was forty five and Chittampalam was forty two, and they had lived, as all Brahmans lived, in the houses in which they had been born. There can be no doubt that quite suddenly one of the gods, or rather devils, laid a spell upon these two compounds. And this is how it happened. Chellaya had married, when he was 14, a plump Brahman girl of 12 who had borne him three sons and two daughters. He had married off both his daughters without giving very large dowries and his sons had all married girls who had brought them large dowries. No man ought to have been happier, though his wife was too talkative and had a sharp tongue. And for 45 years Chellaya lived happily the life which all good Brahmans should live. Every morning he ate his rice cakes and took his bath at the well in his compound and went to the temple of Siva. There he talked until midday to his wife's brother and his daughter's husband's father about Nallatampi, their neighbour, who was on bad terms with them, about the price of rice, and about a piece of land which he had been thinking of buying for the last five years. After the midday meal of rice and curry, cooked by his wife, he dozed through the afternoon; and then, when the sun began to lose its power, he went down to the shore of the blue lagoon and sat there until nightfall. This was Chellaya's passion, to sit by the side of the still, shining, blue waters and look over them at the far-off islands which flickered and quivered in the mirage of heat. The wind, dying down at evening, just murmured in the palms behind him. The heat lay like something tangible and soothing upon the earth. And Chellaya waited eagerly for the hour when the fishermen come out with their cast-nets and wade out into the shallow water after the fish. How eagerly he waited all day for that moment: even in the temple when talking about Nallatampi, whom he hated, the vision of those unruffled waters would continually rise up before him, and of the lean men lifting their feet so gently, first one and then the other, in order not to make a splash or a ripple, and bending forward with the nets in their hands ready to cast. And then the joy of the capture, the great leaping twisting silver fish in the net at last. He began to hate his compound and his fat wife and the interminable talk in the temple, and those long dreary evenings when he stood under his umbrella at the side of his rice field and watched the Mukkuwas ploughing or sowing or reaping.