It took a few minutes before Chellathayi could find her voice. People sleeping in the casuarina grove heard her screams and ran to the pond as the stranger got up slowly, waded into the pond, swam to the other side, and emerged on the eastern shore. “Catch him! Catch him!” they yelled as they ran after him. When they got closer, he still did not start running. All he did was walk faster. Yet, incredibly, all their running could not match the speed of his strides.

I, Damodara Asan, was one of the people chasing him. I happened to be chatting with someone in the casuarina grove when the commotion started. So I ran after him too. If I had gotten my hands on him, I would have pounded him into dust! But even though he only walked, and we all ran, we still couldn’t catch him. Can you believe this? How fast he walked!

Finally, once he reached the woods, he just vanished, leaping with great ease over a waist-high anthill as if he were jumping over a mere grinding stone. In all my life, I have never seen a man who walked with such agility and speed. And what a man! He was like a sculpture carved out of gold. His arms seemed to extend all the way down to touch the earth . . .

But what was truly perplexing was the change that came over Chellathayi. From that day on, she grew utterly infatuated with the stranger. She only had thoughts for him. She was tormented at night. At dusk, every single day, she came to the tamarind pond, swam across, and sat beneath the tamarind tree dripping wet, waiting for him. Later, she even started looking for him near the anthill now occupied by snakes.

The townspeople did everything they could to stop her. But she didn’t listen to anyone. In fact, she acted as if what they said didn’t concern her—as if they were talking about someone else. It got so bad that farmers would not let her work in the fields. They believed she was bad luck, that she would ruin the crops. But it did not bother her in the least. She simply stayed home. She did not care.