On a rainy day, a rich young man picks up a hapless college girl in his car, seduces her and drops her in her street. On realising her daughter's plight, the girl's mother pours a bucketful of water on her head saying that she has been purified by this acti as if she had taken the test by fire. The mother asks her daughter to forget the incident and get on with life. The story challenged the dominant cultural norms of woman's chastity, and many culturally acceptable closures to the story were suggested. In response to the suggestions, Jayakanthan wrote the same story with a different ending and expanded it into a novel, Sila Nerangalil Sila Manithargal.